My LinkedIn feed was noisier than usual this week.
Every other post was about the Marketing Engineer — a new role Profound announced at Zero Click SF, complete with a certification program, a university, and a manifesto. Their pitch: every company will need one. The job? Build agents. Connect APIs. Automate battlecards. Think in “systems.”
Meanwhile, Miranda Shanahan's TikTok asking why marketing jobs are being rebranded with technical-coded titles hit 1M+ views. Fast Company ran a piece on it. Forbes listed marketing as the #2 degree AI is making redundant.
The discourse has become: what do we call the marketer of the future?
I'd argue we're asking the wrong question. The skills that win in AI right now are the ones marketing has always had. The title is being rebranded because those skills were never valued until you could make them sound technical.
Here's the data.
THE SIGNAL
Over 10,000 scored brand profiles in our AI Brand Directory tell a clear story about who's winning in AI and who isn't:
Fashion and beauty brands — average Brand Authority 77.3, near-zero Phantom rate.
Food and beverage — 73.5.
Professional services firms — the ones advising companies on AI transformation — 54% are Phantoms. Completely invisible to AI. Average Brand Authority 44.6. Their Phantom rate is 3x the directory average.
Read that again. The consultants selling AI transformation can't make themselves legible to AI.
The categories crushing it aren't the ones building automated workflows and hiring Marketing Engineers. They're the ones where marketers obsess over product pages, customer reviews, structured data, and brand storytelling. The work the industry has always called "soft skills."
Forbes says marketing degrees are redundant. Profound says hire a Marketing Engineer. The data says the categories where traditional marketing fundamentals are strongest are the ones AI rewards most.
The skill was never the problem. The attribution was.
THE NOISE
I ran the billion-dollar company defining this new discipline through our directory.
Category: "Marketing Technology." Generic martech — same bucket as an email platform.
Archetype: Challenger. Not the first name AI recommends in their own category.
Competitors listed: BrightEdge (a legacy SEO platform) and Vero AI.
Headquarters: "Unknown (USA)." They're in Union Square.
Profile status: Unclaimed. Which means they aren’t actively monitoring all the new places that AI is learning about them.
The company telling you how to show up in AI can't show up in AI half the time.
This isn't a dunk. Profound has built real technology that real brands use. The point is that if a $1B company with a dedicated AI visibility platform has a miscategorized, competitor-confused, unclaimed profile — the ~60% miscategorization problem is happening to everyone. Including the people selling you the fix.
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
The AI Brand Directory has 27,390 brand profiles. AI crawlers — Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity — pull this data at a 119:1 ratio to Google clicks. For every 1 human who clicked through from Google last week, 119 AI agents retrieved our data to answer a buyer's question.
Your profile exists whether you've claimed it or not. It shows your BAI score, your archetype, what AI thinks your category is, who AI thinks you compete with, and what buyers are asking about you. If any of that is wrong — and for 60% of brands, something is — that's what AI is telling your buyers right now.
Claim your profile. See what AI actually knows about you.
Profound hasn't claimed theirs yet. You can be ahead of a unicorn before lunch.
QUICK HITS
Only 94 out of 27,390 brands (0.3%) are Incumbents — the first name AI suggests when a buyer asks about their category. The gap between Challenger and Incumbent is 6.2 BAI points. The most expensive 6 points in B2B.
82% of competitive relationships in the directory are one-way. Brand A sees Brand B as a competitor; Brand B doesn't know Brand A exists. Your competitive map is probably wrong. AI's version of it is definitely wrong.
1,634 buyer intent clusters — 75% of all intents — have only 1-2 brands in them. That's 1,634 buyer questions where one brand could own the entire AI narrative. Unclaimed territory. No Marketing Engineer required.
WHY THIS MATTERS
AFAIK I'm the only female founder who's raised VC in the AI brand intelligence space. Every other company building here is led by men. And the role they just invented — the Marketing Engineer — takes the strategic judgment work that women in marketing have done for decades (empathy, positioning, translation, storytelling) and repackages it with a title that sounds like engineering.
The skills aren't new. The title is. And the title exists because the skills were never valued until you could call them something that sounds more technical.
The surface changed. The work didn't.
Until next week ✌️
—Apurva
P.S. I wrote a guest post for Forum Ventures' Midnight Text Substack this week about how I almost quit before I even started because a competitor raised $15M Series A. I was crying in my kitchen wondering why I was even bothering. Eight months later, I'm realizing those same competitors still don’t have things figured out.
ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
Hi! 👋 My name is Apurva. I’m a brand strategist, data nerd, recovering big-tech marketer, accidental founder, reluctant React debugger, mom of two, and the kind of person who blows past her screen time limits doomscrolling parenting reels while stress-searching LinkedIn for anything that feels human. I started this newsletter because I think marketers are drowning and nobody's talking about it.
You're getting this because we've crossed paths recently — a project, a conversation, a demo, a conference, or you signed up to learn more about Optimly. If this isn't for you, no hard feelings — unsubscribe anytime. But if you're a marketer trying to make sense of AI right now (without going crazy), stick around.