Episode 3: Should All Marketers Code?
Host: Joe Zappa
Guest: Adam Remson
Length: 25 minutes
Published: July 27, 2026
Joe Zappa and Adam Remson discuss a provocative Marketecture guest column by Brett Wilson for which the email subject line was “Only Hire Marketers Who Can Code.” Nice clickbait, Ari — game recognize game. Joe and Adam explore the gap between CEO and VC prognostications about AI and what it looks like in practice, how AI really is helping marketers become builders, and why you want to be like Josh Hart.
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Full Transcript
Joe: Welcome to the AdTech Marketing Podcast, the only podcast exclusively about the very niche topic of adtech marketing. I have somehow lured Adam Remson on my team here to do this with me once again, and he is wearing his hat.
Adam: Happily here, happily wearing my hat.
Joe: Adam's here because he's the only member of my team who will respond to my emails. I'm like...
Adam: To do with my charm or my wit. Nothing else is willingness. It's just willingness.
Joe: And there's really a lesson there. You know, what do they say? It's like 90% of success is just showing up.
Adam: That's exactly right. And not being afraid of public ridicule, as we covered last time, which you and I, it so happens, are not.
Joe: We're bulletproof there. It just bounces right off us. Adam, have you... I spent the weekend finishing my rewatch of The Last Dance. Have you seen that, the Jordan documentary on Netflix? It came out like six years ago.
Adam: I did see it a while ago. And then I also saw the SNL send-up on it, which was really hilarious, actually, where he was like betting on anything—like just anything—and just like looping in security guards who have no money and betting like, you know, $3 million.
And they were like, "I don't know, that seems like a lot of money." And it was like, yeah, that was kind of scary.
Joe: There were—there were many spoofable parts. I mean, he's a huge personality. So with any huge personality, there's always like—it's like their greatest strengths are their greatest weaknesses and they're easy to make fun of.
But I also—so I laugh a ton when I watch that thing. But then also, it is just genuinely like he's such a psycho in like the most inspiring way. There's this famous clip at the end of episode seven where he's like just talking about sort of how he was as a teammate and never asking anyone to do anything he wasn't willing to do.
And I sent it to Jess on our team, who sort of helps me out with operations. And I was like, "This is what I'm trying to turn you into within the next five years." And I'm sure she loved that.
So we are on the pod to discuss a newsletter that Marketecture sent out this morning that I thought was super interesting. It's written by Brett Wilson, co-founder and general partner of Swift Ventures, which is a venture capital firm. He's also a board member of Viant and sort of former founder of TubeMogul and longtime figure in the adtech space.
And he wrote this piece for Marketecture called "Only Hire Marketers Who Can Code." Obviously, a provocative title. The piece doesn't actually argue that. So thank you, Ari and Jeremy, for the clickbait. We, as content purveyors ourselves, like—we see your game and we salute you.
But then what the piece actually says is the next great marketer is a builder. And so that doesn't mean you necessarily have to code as such, but it basically means that in this AI era, you should have what Brett calls "technical agency," which means you should be using AI tools.
You should be looking at data, evaluating the efficacy of your various tactics, and iterating. And I think that, for the most part, I think there's a lot of wisdom there. And I think I do actually agree with the core thesis in that I think, whether this is about an individual person or multiple people—and we'll get to that—like, absolutely part of what marketers should be doing is using data and the tools at their disposal to see like, if we're creating a bunch of content on different channels, okay, obviously we should be looking at which of these channels is actually resonating with our audience. And like, are we tracking people across the channels?
Are they actually coming to the site? Is there any low-hanging fruit we haven't like seized? All of that, I think, is good. And I think it's easier than ever for, you know, writers like you and me. We're not, you know, historically technical people.
It's easier for us to do those things. I think, however, there's also a lot of complications with that we can get into. What do you think of that core argument?
Adam: It's great. I see it as in the context of a bigger picture of most people that are in marketing didn't necessarily go to college to study marketing. And, you know, they maybe studied writing or they, you know, or something like that, but they tend to land there. I mean, I usually—I think a lot of the ad industry in the past has been filled with really smart people who didn't know what they wanted to do in college.
And so they kind of take a bunch of courses and they spill out into the world. They still don't know what they want to do. And then they kind of end up with this marketing world where you don't have to prove your work that much.
Joe: Right.
Adam: But the last, whatever it is, five years, I don't know, or so, there's a lot more proving of the work going on. And that's made everyone have to scramble a little bit to learn how to do that and prove their worth and to realize what metrics make sense.
I think it's great because, I mean, ultimately marketers won't be the first people to be fired then whenever there's an economic downturn or any of those kinds of things that go along with the marketing... sort of the joy of marketing comes with some backside of that when really the shit hits the fan.
So I think it's—it's great. Yeah, I think the clickbait was silly because, I mean, to make a statement like that... because, you know, yes, I salute them for the clickbait because we clicked on it. But at the same time, like—you know, at the same time, like AI, you know, I thought that was supposed to be killing all the coders' jobs, right?
Like, we just—all you got to do is just ask them to make a web page for you and it can do it. But I do like what ultimately is said, which is the can-do spirit of, "Okay, let's just make it. Let's not wait around for some other coder who's going to do us a favor in the company to make this thing for us. Let's just do it".
Joe: Yeah. Because there's a—there's a self... So exactly to your point, you're—you're right, of course. Most marketers, we didn't go to school for marketing and we're usually one of two sides.
We're either like the quantitative marketers or we're like the words marketers, right? And so like you and I are words marketers. We're, you know, journalists, storytellers, writers, and we learned how to do these things—you know, communications, content marketing, what all that involves.
But we're not historically like—we're not data people or comfortable with these tools and whatever. And I think something huge that AI has changed is it's not just that the tools are easier to use and you can talk to a tool and then it'll create something and all this, you know, the vibe coding phenomenon.
It's also that it's never been easier to learn, right? Like it used to be like, you would either have to go to school for this shit or you'd have to just like sit down on the job and someone who knew how to do it would have to explain it to you.
Now you can go to AI and say like, "Look, I'm a marketer and I have to like set up all these systems. What should I even be setting up? Where do I start? Tell me step-by-step how to, like, whatever, create a landing page or run an SEO program".
Like I'm pretty confident if I were the director of marketing at one of our clients, you know, at an adtech company, and I needed to like—not like deep technical SEO, like whatever, but if I just need to be competent in SEO as a director of marketing, I could probably get up to speed in that in like a few days and like take care of the low-hanging fruit just by talking to AI.
So I think all of that is valuable. However, and here's where we get into sort of the complexities on the ground... you know, what Brett's piece says is that this silo between like the words marketers and the growth marketers—or he says the brand people on the left-hand side, the product marketers in the middle, and then the pipeline people—all these silos are collapsing and these are like melting into one. I don't really see that at all in terms of how our clients... and I get to see sort of the marketing setups of like 15 to 20 different companies.
I don't see that happening. I see it is actually very hard to knock down those silos. And that goes all the way from little startups with five people to public enterprise companies worth billions of dollars.
And there are a number of reasons that that's difficult. Like there are sort of cultural enterprise challenges, right? In terms of people being like, "Well, we have this team and that team can't just do what this team does".
And like, "We have budgets," and whatever. And then even with startups, it's difficult just because I think the person Brett is describing, and he acknowledges this in his own writing, is like a bit of a unicorn.
And frankly, if you are that person out there who is very good at writing and like understands all the human-driven like content stuff and can like create a great message and is a strategic thinker—if you could do all of that, but then also you're really... you're a vibe coder and you're great with tools and data and whatever, goddamn, you should compete with me.
You know, you should create an agency because you could probably like sell your services for like 10, 20 grand a month to a bunch of different people.
Adam: It's all feeling closer and closer to that moment in The Matrix when Neo, like in about 15 seconds, learns kung fu. You know, like that's...
Joe: Right,
Adam: AI is right now. It's just like, "Oh, now I know how to be an SEO marketer." I agree. We can all be competent. I think even in the last pod I did with you, it was, you know, we could all be mediocre at it, you know, very quickly.
Joe: Yes.
Adam: Achieve mediocrity very quickly.
You know, I think there's many things keeping those things separate. I would agree with you. I think even culturally, marketers don't want to be responsible for pipeline that much.
I mean, they don't mind handing over the leads, right? But after that, they don't want to be responsible for actually driving sales, right? That's the sales team's department to do that. And also, as you were alluding to as well, there's just personality types, too.
Like some—usually people who are good at one thing aren't necessarily good at another.
Joe: I know.
Adam: I love it... it kind of scares me a little bit because it does seem to be taking away from the human element. You know, it's good to talk to other teammates and not just to AI. It's good to, you know, collaborate and stuff. So I'm a little freaked out by that, but you know, we'll get around that.
Joe: The mediocre thing I want to double-click on, Adam, because I think that you're saying something very important, which is like, if you're, you know, directors of marketing—and that's really the kind of person Brett is talking about here.
He's not really talking about, you know, agency hacks like you and me, where like we get hired to come in and do a particular job within the marketing universe. He's talking about the—like the person who has to be a bit of a jack of all trades, which is like the person who's overseeing marketing as a whole or their one-person marketing team or whatever.
And so I agree. I think AI is tremendously valuable for that person sort of becoming mediocre at stuff that historically they might have had no skill at, right? So, and that's important, right? To go from zero to five out of—on a scale of 10, that's really valuable.
But I also think that the person probably is mediocre. And that is something to think about, right? Like someone—let's put it this way, you know, the messaging stuff is a bit ineffable, right? It's hard to describe what makes one person really good at messaging and another person not, right?
But it's like, I've personally, you know, been able to hoodwink some companies into paying me large sums of money to come up with a story for them. Someone who does not do that, they could go to AI and they could be like, "Create a message for me," right?
Or, "Teach me how to do messaging," whatever. And they could probably become like passable, but they won't be great. And that is something really worth thinking about here is like, are you creating these marketers who are AI-enabled, who are like—you know, they're really good at one thing and then they're mediocre at like four other things and doing all of them?
Is that really better than what I would suggest as a bit of a rebuttal to Brett's piece, which is like... I think a duality—of the old duality of you have one sort of words-type person and you have one data person and these people collaborate.
I think that is really powerful and that AI can make that a more powerful combination. But I think if you put it all on one person and you imagine this sort of like—like you said, the Matrix thing of one person's going to do the job of 10 people and all this stuff, I think that is maybe a recipe for mediocrity.
Adam: Well, I'd love to double-tap on how to use AI to improve collaboration. Like that's an interesting thing that I'm curious about how you envision that. I mean, I think though, that just one point before we jump into that is that I think Brett's point might be more simply that marketing teams shouldn't wait for coders or anybody else, and they don't have to.
And if the only thing that's really holding them up is a can-do attitude and just to be able to jump in and say, "I'm going to use AI to build a website, and we should test, and we have to understand the metrics about how these things work a little bit better, understand what's successful and what's not".
He's right. Nobody should wait, right? Because his little graph in that article sort of showed: this is how it normally works. You know, think of an idea and then wait for three weeks for somebody to do you a favor, right?
And this was skipping all of that. I mean, yes, of course, right. But if that is true, then that would involve collaboration. So how do you... I mean, I'm just curious, when you take a numbers person and an idea person, you jam them together, what—and you use AI to translate?
Joe: Yeah, I have an exact example. So I collaborate with a growth marketer on our team. His name is Gestri, and that's—it's a classic example of like verbal brain, quantitative brain coming together. But I'm not an expert in the things he does.
In fact, historically, I know nothing about the things he does, right? So we're collaborating for a client and he's running LinkedIn ads. And so, you know, me and our team, we're doing the things I know how to do.
So messaging, content marketing, PR. And then he's, you know, running LinkedIn ads among other sort of more quantitative tactics. And historically, I would have no idea what he's doing. Like 10 years ago, I would either—I would have no idea or I would need to learn and it would—it would take a while, right?
I would need to like go read a bunch of different stuff and sort of piece it all together. Now I can take the report that Gestri is generating for a client and saying, "Here's what I did to run this LinkedIn ads program and here are the results it drove".
I can put that into AI and I can say... and this is what I did: like, you tell me, what are the benchmarks here? What might Gestri be missing? You know, if we were to make three tweaks to this, what could we be doing?
He has a certain analysis of these results. What would your analysis be? And I could tell it, which I think I did at the time, I was like, "Play the role of a third-party advertising expert. Imagine you were auditing our work, right?"
What would you say? Doing that allowed me to have a much more educated conversation with Gestri, because then I could come in and say, like, "My interpretation is the story is actually this. That's a little different from your interpretation of the data.
What do you think?" And then we can have a conversation. So it's a perfect example of how it's not me replacing Gestri. It's not me being arrogant and thinking in two days, I'm going to learn how to be as good at LinkedIn ads as he is.
He's run millions of dollars in spend on LinkedIn, right? So he knows things I don't know, but it helps me be a more competent partner. And that's where I think sometimes you're going to have like a one-person marketing team by necessity if you're in a startup or whatever.
But generally what it can do is it can help marketers understand each other and sort of collaborate across disciplines, which I think is really valuable.
Adam: That's cool. The thing that I was alluding to before about why these things kind of freak me out sometimes is that I think that right now the industry is very focused on data and they think that data is the answer to everything.
And that if we just—all we have to do is quantify every little thing and feed it into AI and it'll spit back the answer at us. And to me, it feels more like the solution du jour or solution du jour.
I mean, to give you a little background, my dad was a smart guy, went to Bronx Science and then went to University of Chicago, was there for 12 years studying, got his doctorate in psychology, was studying schizophrenia in the hospitals, was absolutely sure he was going to come out and do research in this topic.
Two years later, he's working at an ad agency because he's doing—because that was when they were all about hiring the psychologist to come in and teach you how all the consumers were doing, you know, behavior.
And that was the thing of the time. That was—that was what we were using to measure and justify spend at the time because he had these reports and surveys and focus groups and all that stuff. And that was how you did it.
Now it's much more about data. And, you know, like the truth is when you're doing something like pipeline or lead gen and that becomes one of the important metrics for it, dude, there are three people who will raise their hands and say, "Oh, no, no, no, no. I called that client this month and I called that client". And metrics don't help that. They don't like... they won't cure that problem.
Joe: Right. Or metrics, to your point, metrics can point you in the right direction. They could tell you, for example, "This content is not resonating." Okay. That's really good data. But then how do we create content that does resonate? That's not a question that a purely quantitative process can lead you to an answer to.
And funnily enough, I've seen that with this collaboration with our growth marketer. Like there will be times he is able to tell us, "Okay, this landing page is resonating and that is not," which is extremely valuable.
And I think that's exactly what Brett was talking about in his piece. Like you should be able to see what is working and what is not. But knowing that something is not working does not mean that you then have a purely technological or data-driven answer to here is something else.
And that is where like the intuition of someone who is a great persuader, who understands the customer, who understands the industry and all that, that is where those skill sets come together.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, as Josh Hart said after they won the NBA championship on the Knicks, he said, "Analytics are like a lamppost to a drunk guy. They're great to lean on, but they won't get you home".
Joe: But you know what's funny, Adam? It's also—the psychology example, I think, is really relevant because that's true of psychology too. Like, so I went to complete grad school and in the humanities, people still read Freud.
And in the social sciences, people think, "Oh, Freud has been discredited". And when I read Freud as like a humanities guy, I'm like, well, it's not really about like discredited or not, because Freud wasn't really participating in like a purely falsifiable enterprise.
Like Freud was like a philosopher, you know, like he's like—he's sort of theorizing about like the nature of the unconscious and what motivates us and what troubles us and sort of, you know, philosophizing about the different categories of neuroses and all this stuff.
That's like—it's closer to philosophy than it is to like a science as such. So people read him through like the epistemology of like falsifiable science and they're like, "Okay, so now we have this data that indicates like Freud was wrong".
And it's like, it's not a binary of like Freud was discarded or not. And like qualitative marketing is a little bit like that too, right? Like it is... you're not going to arrive if you're thinking about, you know, what resonates most with an agency marketer, right?
To bring it back to our lowly land of adtech marketing, you can't boil it down purely to like this landing page over that landing page. It's a combination of using the data as the—as the lamppost while ultimately leveraging intuition to find the thing that will resonate most with that person at a time.
And then it'll stop resonating and you'll have to move on to something else.
Adam: Yeah. So, I mean, was this article really only just about like marketing teams taking more control and what they need to learn to do so?
Joe: Yeah. Well, okay, let's land on that. Let's think about the salient points because I do think, again, I agree with the core of it. So I think one is iteration cycles. You highlighted that. I totally agree with you.
I think marketers can move faster. They can use AI tools and data both to create faster and to more quickly and independently measure the efficacy of what they do. So I think that is really good. I think the second thing we settled on is it makes you a much more competent collaborator, right?
So you might not be an expert in running LinkedIn ads, but you can more intelligently analyze the results driven by your agency or your teammate who did run the LinkedIn ads and then more effectively collaborate with them.
I think where we are pushing back a bit is, one, there's a huge gap between where the VC/CEO class thinks AI is in terms of its implementation in marketing and where it is on the ground. And on the ground, like there are a lot of bureaucratic and budgetary hurdles to this future of like knocking down all the silos and sort of one person becoming this like omnipotent AI-enabled marketer.
And also in many cases, it might not be advisable. The other part we're going to push back on is marketers should be very wary of becoming mediocre and thinking they are better than mediocre. That's something, which is like—it's great if it helps you understand something, but maybe don't presume that you are now like an expert writer or in messaging.
Adam: It's easy to be romanticized by AI.
Joe: Yes. So be wary. Yes. Don't think you're Neo. Don't think you're Neo. Think you're Josh Hart.
Adam: You don't know kung fu. Don't try it on. You will get your ass beat if you're out here thinking you're Neo.
Joe: You are, in fact, Josh Hart, merely following the lamppost.
Adam: Yeah.
Joe: You got to pass to Brunson. You're great, but you'll make a three once in a while. You're a great defensive player, but you still need the Brunsons.
Adam: But pass. Yes, pass to Brunson for sure.
Joe: Is that a good question?
Adam: Brunson is your analytical guy on their team. Yes, that's right. Yes, Brunson is your Gestri, right?
Joe: Right, right. You still need your Gestris, you know, and it's great to be able to understand what they're doing and sort of collaborate with them.
But I'm a huge believer in, again, this like duality. I still think the truth is very few people are wired to be great qualitative and quantitative thinkers, right? There are people out there who got the 1600 on the SAT, but most of us did better on either the verbal section or the math section.
And that's totally fine. And that's why we gravitate to one area or the other. And I think pairing these people can be very effective and that with AI, it can be even more effective. And that's a good thing.
Adam: Just like any time in the history of anything... like when I was working with actual paper magazines, I got to understand the circulation guy's job. I didn't feel like when I was running—I was running the team, mostly it was like, "Oh, sales, sales, sales, that's the most important thing. Let's make sure the editors are nice and comfortable and everything".
But when I went over to the circulation guy, I didn't understand his place in the world very well. And I got impatient with him sometimes. And, but the more that I learned about how difficult his job is, the better of a coworker I was.
Also, the better planning I could do leading up to give him enough time to do his job well, I guess is what I'm trying to say. And that's been true forever. That's been true forever. I think AI just accelerates that. You know, it took me months to figure out.
Joe: Right. And so I think to close, it's like our opening question as per the subject line of the Marketecture email was, "Should all marketers code?" Right? And I think the response is: no, not necessarily, but AI should help the marketers who don't code collaborate much more effectively with the marketers who do and vice versa.
And a team of two can now do a lot more than it used to be able to do. And it can collaborate more effectively so that you fully harness that 1 + 1 = 3 effect. And that's something to get the hunt.
Adam: And also, I liked what you said before. It's like, take your information, but then, you know, put on your metric hat, put on your messaging hat when needed, because you're going to need them both, you know, and whatever you're weaker on, you can use AI to supplement.
Joe: Wear all of the hats, but remember you don't look equally good in all of them. And trust your friends who wear different kinds of hats.
Adam: Should I mix it up for different hats? Now I feel like I got to go and buy a bunch of hats.
Joe: Well, it's the theme. Yeah. I mean, maybe a different day of the week. You know, you can assemble an inventory on Sharp Pen.
Adam: I'll work on it. I'll make sure to expense you for that. I'll send us in the bill.
Joe: That sounds great. Adam Remson, thank you very much. We'll see you next week.
Adam: All right. See you. Bye.
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