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In this episode of So What? The Trust Insights weekly livestream, you’ll learn about vibe marketing and what it really means. You’ll discover why the hype around vibe marketing may be misleading, and uncover the importance of preparation and structured processes for successful marketing. You’ll also learn practical applications of AI tools and automation in marketing and explore how tools like N8N can support vibe marketing. This episode clarifies the realities of data-driven marketing and AI.
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In this episode you’ll learn:
- No. Really. What is vibe marketing?!
- Where did vibe marketing come from?
- How to get started with vibe marketing
Transcript:
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Katie Robbert – 00:34
Well, hey everyone! Happy Thursday, and welcome to so what, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. I’m Katie, joined by Chris and John. Hey, fellas.
Christopher Penn – 00:43
Hello.
Katie Robbert – 00:44
There it is.
Christopher Penn – 00:45
There it is.
Katie Robbert – 00:45
I did not get the polo shirt memo, so apologies that I am not looking like a part of the team today. Today, we’re talking about what is vibe marketing? The term—it’s just—I don’t like it. I just don’t like the term. So, before we get into what it actually is, John, what do you think vibe marketing is? Or, when you hear vibe marketing, what kind of things does it evoke in your brain?
Christopher Penn – 01:24
Right.
John Wall – 01:24
Well, the first one is I’m old because that means that nobody recognizes R. Kelly and the problem that vibe marketing creates. He’s got that vibe. Yeah, I have a problem with the name. I’m totally with you there. The name is ridiculous. There is some interesting stuff beneath the surface, though. As we look, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on with marketing automation. And, as with all of this stuff, too, the definitions are all over the board. Because I got—the best thing I found on this is a Forbes article. And, of course, the rest of the week I’m like, “Forbes, yeah, that’s a raging trash fire of paid content and ads and stuff”. But, I don’t know.
John Wall – 02:07
And we should get on the definitions at least. Let’s try and start where we’re going. The understanding that I have is that it is using AI to write code and to put together workflows. Then, you’re also using it—using generative AI—to create marketing campaigns and all the copy for it, and even running the campaigns, using stuff like Zapier to actually make these things run. What the VCs are all drooling over is that, for 50 bucks, one startup person could do 8,000 marketing campaigns in a month and challenge Procter & Gamble for domination of the laundry soap segment. I don’t know how true any of that is, but that’s the story that I’ve been sold.
Katie Robbert – 02:50
Okay. It’s my limited understanding because, I’ll be honest, once I saw the term vibe, I was like, “I don’t even want to know what this is. I really don’t”. And so, I saw—Chris posted a definition of vibe coding, which was basically, you let the AI do the thing, and you just kind of…yeah. That was the one. “There’s a new kind of coding I call vibe coding, where you fully give in to the vibes and that’s what is”. That’s where I stopped. I was like, “I don’t want to know anything more”. It’s like, “I just see stuff, I say stuff, run stuff, copy and paste stuff. And it mostly works”. That sounds so irresponsible. No, you don’t. No, you don’t. Don’t do that. That is a terrible idea.
Katie Robbert – 03:47
So that was my bit of a ranty pants moment on vibe marketing. I don’t care for the term, I don’t care for this definition. So Chris, why don’t you set John and us straight and tell us what we’re really talking about?
Christopher Penn – 04:01
It is derived from Andrej Karpathy, who’s shown on screen here. For those folks who don’t know, he is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, and is one of the most technical people in this space. He’s on his YouTube channel, for example—he’s like, “Hey, let’s build GPT-2 from scratch.” And has walked through and stuff. I find his content from a technical perspective very interesting because, of all the people that could be doing this style of coding, he has enough domain expertise to probably know what’s going wrong behind the scenes. So this concept of vibe coding is when you do exactly what was said, where you essentially outline what you want the system to do, and then generative AI fills it in.
Christopher Penn – 04:52
And this is not terribly different than a lot of the way that we’ve been approaching coding now for over a year, which is you invest all your time and effort and focus on building really good requirements. You build out strict requirements, functional requirements, domain requirements, user stories, personas, and all the things that can go right or wrong with the piece of software. Then, you use generative AI to say, “Let’s build a file-by-file work plan”. And then, generative AI tool, you go and follow the recipe—which is what the work plan is—to actually build the software, which includes things like unit tests, test-driven development, and stuff to get to working software. And from that approach—that part—not the just work around or ask for random changes, but actually build requirements, and then have code execute the requirements.
Christopher Penn – 05:48
Works very well.
Katie Robbert – 05:49
But what you’re describing is not what this says. What you’re describing is very methodical and responsible. This is saying, “I don’t know, man, whatever”. Listen, if this person has the domain expertise to let this happen, great. He is one of one. If I opened up ChatGPT and said, “Hey, let’s write some code, whatever. I don’t care what it does”, it’s going to go really wrong because I don’t have the domain expertise. And so that’s my point is that this feels irresponsible because this person knows what they’re doing. And then, sharing that this is how they approach it, they’re like, “Oh, well, if that’s how he does it, that’s how I’m going to do it, too”. Even though I have no business doing it that way. The other thing is we’re talking about vibe coding. What is vibe marketing?
Christopher Penn – 06:44
So vibe marketing is the logical—I don’t want to call it extension—but it’s the logical thought process for building that style of marketing content, or the marketing planning from your data from using generative AI, where you say, “I’m not going to do the actual strategy and planning. I’m going to just say to AI, ‘you do it’. I’m going to provide you with what I kind of as given to the vibes and see what happens”.
Katie Robbert – 07:24
I hate this episode. I’m going on record. I hate this episode. So let’s keep going. All right, so vibe marketing, vibe coding, you just kind of go with it. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not chill. I have zero chill. This is why I hate this episode, because it is the antithesis. It is the exact opposite of everything I find comfort in. Okay, so anyway, that’s enough about me. So where do we start, Chris? With vibe marketing, we first start by…
Christopher Penn – 08:04
Saying the way that you do vibe coding from a tech tool perspective is the way that you do it for vibe marketing, which is you use some sort of coding environment because those coding environments have automatic prompts and agents built into them that allow them to run autonomously.
Katie Robbert – 08:25
So, yes, first question. If I’m doing vibe marketing, why am I vibe coding? Do you have to have one without—are they intertwined?
Christopher Penn – 08:37
They are intertwined. The infrastructure that you use to do either one is the same. So, for example, the best current best type of tooling is some kind of code editor that has generative AI built into it. So, I’m using—I’ll be using today—a tool called VS Codium. It’s an open-source version of Microsoft Visual Studio Code. You can use Cursor, Kite, or Tabnine. There’s so many tools, and then within there is a tool called Kite, which is part of VS Codium. This is the secret sauce of both vibe coding and vibe marketing. It has baked-in prompts and baked-in AI agents that talk to the AI of your choice and feed data back and forth from, as long as you’re clear about what you’re doing with, is able to essentially autonomously perform tasks to a very high degree of success.
Christopher Penn – 09:36
Which is pretty cool. However, that brings us to the prep work. Unlike vibe coding, with vibe marketing you can’t follow the same procedures. Here’s why. In coding, there’s a right and wrong answer. The wrong answer is your code doesn’t run, and you get immediate feedback through error messages. Things that just doesn’t work. Your indentation is wrong, you forgot a semicolon, and so on and so forth. When you’re doing something like marketing, you don’t have that instant feedback loop. It could create a SWOT analysis, and that doesn’t throw an error. You just look at it and go, “Huh, okay.”
Christopher Penn – 10:14
And so, you have to approach vibe marketing very differently, saying, “Okay, we need to do a lot of prep work to have the pieces in place so that we reduce the likelihood of those errors because, unlike code, we won’t catch them immediately”.
Katie Robbert – 10:32
I mean, that doesn’t sound very vibey to me. It sounds like you have to do a lot of planning.
Christopher Penn – 10:38
You do. And that’s—here’s the thing—is, if you want vibe marketing, which is the autonomous use of these tools for your marketing, you have to do a lot of prep work. There’s a lot of mise en place, if you will, from the cooking world, to get it ready.
Katie Robbert – 10:56
So I feel like the term vibe marketing is just being used incorrectly.
Christopher Penn – 11:04
It is, yes. There are people who are saying, “Hey, you can build—you can build software that will automatically connect your CRM to your generative AI to your ad system”. And yes, you absolutely can do that. We’ll talk about the—there’s a martech side that’s different than vibe marketing. The hype bros on LinkedIn kind of conflate everything together.
Katie Robbert – 11:28
First of all, I’m shocked by that. I’m shocked by that. Second, I’m just trying to imagine a snare, and I will get off my rant in just a second and let you move forward in a productive way. But, if you came to me with some kind of an idea for what we’re going to do with the company, and I ask, “Where did this come from?”—”I don’t—I just went off the vibes”—I would go to your house and throw you out the door. The problem with this overhype of the terminology is that I think people are going to get it incorrect. And then to me, my first instinct is, well, it’s not measurable if you’re just going on the vibes. If you’re just seeing what happens, how do you measure success? It speaks to…
Katie Robbert – 12:16
This is how people always do their marketing. They just kind of throw things against the wall, see what happens, see what the vibes are. And then, money is wasted, time is wasted, resources are wasted, and you can’t measure anything. This is why I have such a problem with it. And I am going to stop ranting and let you keep moving forward. I’m sorry. I’m not sorry.
John Wall – 12:36
Yeah, I’m feeling bad. We just are getting further and further away from Florida Man blowing up lawnmower as we go here.
Christopher Penn – 12:44
I think we just need to have this image on screen.
Katie Robbert – 12:48
So for context, if you don’t follow me on LinkedIn, please follow me on LinkedIn. I’m @KatieRobbert. I write posts called Ranty Pants because, clearly, I have a lot to rant about. I have a lot of strong opinions about things. I’ll probably do a vibe marketing one soon. But I went to ChatGPT’s image generator this morning just to see what a pair of ranty pants would look like. And we can’t show the other images because they are very unhinged and not safe for work. But you can imagine how off the rails a talking pair of pants could get. So this is version one of Ranty Pants. It will evolve, I would assume. But the posts are all trying to poke holes in things that are just silly.
John Wall – 13:40
Well, this totally changes it for me because I was just told that it was you ranting. This morning, I missed the Ranty Pants chapter, so I didn’t realize that the pants…that’s why the pants are there.
Katie Robbert – 13:51
Because, yeah, that’s why the pants are there, John.
John Wall – 13:53
It was more unhinged for me. I was like, “Why is it talking pants? Where did that come from?”
Katie Robbert – 14:01
Okay. Chris, please proceed.
Christopher Penn – 14:06
So I’m going to show you the finished product first, or at least get the finished product working first. Then, we’re going to talk about everything that would need to happen just to make this somewhat magical-seeming thing. I said, “Hey, let’s give into the vibes. Read my vibe marketing plan and go and do stuff”. What you can see here is that we’re working with Gemini 2.5, and the tool is currently going through and reading a—reading and summarizing some stuff. What it’s doing is it’s then going to write this set of summaries to my local hard drive of all the documents and all the background information that I provided. Once the summaries are written, then it’s going to go on and start doing things like a gap analysis.
Christopher Penn – 15:04
In this case, I’m using Trust Insights to say, “Okay, well, Trust Insights, what gaps do we have compared to the competitive marketplace for consulting firms?” So, we can see now it’s doing the gap analysis. And so all I have to do as the marketer is sit back, sip my coffee and give into the vibes. Now, here’s the problem: no one can see the six hours of prep time to make this happen. Once you have the process in place, and you can just refresh the data, it really is just sit back and let it do its thing. But to get to that point, six hours of my time, plus 25 years of experience, plus content and things that you, Katie, made, in order for it to be able to pull this off. This is the vibe part.
Christopher Penn – 16:02
You can see that it’s using a coding tool to just autonomously do stuff.
Katie Robbert – 16:09
And I think taking the word vibe out of it, there’s this misunderstanding that this stuff is easy. We look at professionals—pick an industry—and they’re like, “Oh, they make it look so easy”. Because what you don’t see are all of the hours of hard work and expertise that go into making things look easy. I was talking in our Analytics for Marketers Slack group yesterday about the 25-hour speech that Senator Cory Booker gave. Not talking about politics, just the sheer human endurance to give a speech for 25 hours. Now granted, people were jumping in, giving him 10-minute breaks, that kind of thing, but he still had to be standing and endure for 25 hours. And to his credit, he made it look easy.
Katie Robbert – 17:06
And obviously there was a lot that went into it. He had binders and research and preparation and physical toll and all of those things. And when I look at something like this, and I know what goes on behind the scenes…but the goal, Chris, is that for the purpose of the live stream, you’re making it look easy. So I appreciate that you acknowledge how much actual work goes into making something look like it’s just a vibe.
Christopher Penn – 17:32
Exactly. And that—and this is the part that someone like Andrej Karpathy doesn’t talk about—having the 30 years of domain expertise and coding means you know what the vibes are. You can say, “Here’s what I want”. If we were to compare you and I, Katie, sitting down and saying to a tool, “Let’s code a script in Python”, you would probably say, “Yeah, let’s code a script in Python. And I want to kind of want to do this”.
Christopher Penn – 17:58
Whereas mine would be more like, “And you have to use TQDM for progress, and if you’re logging, and you have to use exponential backoffs, and you have to do all these things that are just part of the vibes in my head, but not part of best practices, and certainly not part of what you would be able to successfully do as someone who’s a non-coder working with coding tools”. There’s a very famous meme that’s been floating around of this person on Friday—”Vibe coding is the future! I just made my first app!” and there’s a second follow-up post on Sunday saying, “Somebody hacked my app!” Because the person did not think about things like security that, of course, a true coder with experience would know about.
Katie Robbert – 18:39
And I think that’s really my point, is that you can follow the vibes, you can do the vibe marketing, vibe coding. But everything, Chris—to what you were saying—is the way that we approach it, the way we recommend people approach it, is to have that foundational knowledge to make sure you understand, and that you’re an expert in the thing you’re doing. I wouldn’t turn to John and go, “John, I don’t like the vibes of how you’re selling stuff. I think I’m just going to change everything you’re doing”. And John’s going to be like, “Woman, I have 30-plus years of sales experience. You’re killing my vibes”.
Christopher Penn – 19:17
So let’s take a look at just the outputs to see, first of all, is this even worth discussing? Let’s start with our strategic plan for Trust Insights. Let me make this a little bit easier to see here for 2026. So this is our 2026 strategic plan vibed together: overarching strategy, double down on thought leadership, community engagement, high-value content, AI framework blitz, solidifier position is the go-to source for practical marketing AI applications, development release of three new comprehensive AI marketing frameworks for things like content, ROI management, pretty lead scoring, implementation guide, AI ethics checklist (save some prep time), number two, “Ask the Experts AI” series to blast less-visible experts. Number three, community-sourced case studies, LinkedIn deep dive series, update and relaunch your core course, strategic partnership, content swaps, and so on and so forth.
Christopher Penn – 20:14
And this is a fairly detailed quarterly plan for next year. And then, if we move into the tactical plan that it vibes together based on that, we see strategic framework 1, strategic idea 5, state of AI and marketing client success spotlight for email marketing for our podcast, and so on and so forth. So just again, none of us had a chance to review this because the tool just made this. But Katie, just as a quick temperature check, does this look wildly inappropriate?
Katie Robbert – 20:52
It doesn’t. I thought you were to ask me if it passed the vibe. Missed opportunity, Chris.
John Wall – 20:58
No, feeling the vibe.
Katie Robbert – 21:00
I’m feeling—I’m feeling the vibe. What’s interesting is you couldn’t have just said, “Hey, here’s this company, Trust Insights. What is their 2026 strategy?” You had to put in all of that information: here’s what we do, here’s what we’ve done, here’s the expertise of the founders and the principals, and this and that and the other. So no, it’s not wildly off base. If anything, it’s like, “Oh, those are some interesting ideas”. And to again, sort of speak to the responsible vibe, is in order to execute this, we have to know what we’re doing. We have to still—anybody can put together a strategy, but if nobody’s there to execute it, when it falls in the forest, it doesn’t make a sound.
Christopher Penn – 21:48
Exactly.
Katie Robbert – 21:49
We don’t know.
Christopher Penn – 21:50
We don’t know. But there’s some things in here that I would actually consider doing now, like having “Ask the Experts AMA” hour in our Slack community, Analytics for Marketers, different ideas for gated and ungated content. So all this I think is good. Now let’s go behind the scenes to see how this happens. I will preface this by saying, with an extremely crass commercial plug, the techniques that we use for a lot of this are in our brand new course called Generative AI Use Cases course (I always screw that up), which preregistration is open now, and it goes live April 15th. Okay, so behind the scenes, here’s what is needed to make the vibes work. First, you need lots of information. What kind of information do you need? You need to know about your company. So what I did…
Christopher Penn – 22:45
One of the first things I did was I commissioned four different deep research reports: OpenAI, OpenAI’s GPT-4, Grok, Perplexity, and Google Gemini. I asked it about Trust Insights. I said—and it’s a nine-part prompt—”Tell me everything you know about this company. Tell me about its competitors. Do this, do that, all this stuff”. I had each of the four tools put together their own deep research reports, ranging from five pages to 30 pages. Then, using a deep research merge prompt, which is available, I believe we just posted last week or the week before, in Analytics for Marketers, I had it merge all four of those reports down into what I call sort of the roll-up report. It’s a consolidated market research report of who Trust Insights is.
Christopher Penn – 23:32
So that was piece number one. Piece number two, with my handy-dandy voice memos and a good AI tool, I foamed at the mouth for about 30 minutes. Now granted, this is from last fall, but not a whole lot has changed. I foamed at the mouth about all the things that I know we do as a company: live streams and podcasts and newsletters and LinkedIn posts and stuff. Had AI cleaned up, and now I have “here’s how we’re doing our marketing”. That’s vibe component number two. Number three, of course, our ICP; you can’t do anything without the customer.
Christopher Penn – 24:08
So I took our 22-page ICP that we have that Katie put together, which is also available as a separate service that’s in here. Before, we have the about page from our website, which we covered two weeks ago, three weeks ago on our AI for SEO. Then, the last major input is I went to each of the deep research tools and commissioned another report, and said, “Tell me what the best practices is for management consulting firms marketing themselves using information from 2024 and 2025. How did the firms, small and large, from boutique to McKinsey, how do they market themselves?” Each one of these put out a decent-sized report. OpenAI’s report was obnoxiously long. It was like a 70-page book, which I did not read. I just did this at lunchtime, and I merged those down.
Christopher Penn – 25:05
And that is the fifth component to make this thing work, is to say, “Take this huge report and distill it and consolidate as we have what the best practices are”. The last component in here is the recipe, and the recipe is where the vibes happen. So you say, “Here’s your start; a prompt”. And this is just a prompt chain. But what is unique about these coding tools is that you can have them autonomously execute the recipe. You don’t need to copy and paste it in. You just say, “Execute the work plan as written”. So it goes through: step one, here’s who you are, write the summary; step two, do the gap analysis; step three, do the SWOT analysis; step four, do the strategic plan; step five, do the tactical plan.
Christopher Penn – 25:51
And what you saw on screen in under five minutes, was it executing the work plan with all of those pieces.
Katie Robbert – 26:03
So the vibe of this particular exercise is very thoroughly researched and structured. And again, this is where I have a problem with the word vibe, is that you’re not giving AI an opportunity to just kind of roll with it or do its thing. You’re saying, “This is the information that you have to use, and this is the kind of output I expect of you”. That to me is so much more useful than just sort of rolling with it. And again, to the original definition from the founder from OpenAI, it’s—”This is all the stuff that he wasn’t talking about in his post”. And that’s where I, personally, as an INFJ, take issue with the definition of it. Because—”Garbage in, garbage out”.
Katie Robbert – 26:55
Like, unless you’re putting in all of this research, what are you doing?
Christopher Penn – 27:02
Now, the logical extension from this—which I did not do before the show because I ran out of time and I was eating lunch—is to then start taking individual tactics and having it start to now write code. Because there is a system that is incredibly popular in the vibe marketing world, and for good reason because it actually does work. The system is called n8n. If you’re familiar with Zapier and how Zapier Zaps work, this is very similar. The difference is this system is engineered especially for AI. It’s very good at AI, and it also—you can run it locally within your company. So if you have proprietary methods and tactics and stuff, you would want to run this within the walls of your company so that your proprietary methods don’t leak out.
Katie Robbert – 27:59
So I think Zapier is a great example. This to me very much looks like a Visio flowchart of “if this, then that”, the process of: first you do this, then this happens, and then it’s the decision trees. Again, that’s not the vibe I was expecting. This is very process-oriented so that it doesn’t go off the rails.
Christopher Penn – 28:23
Exactly. Now where you can get a little bit into vibe territory is that this system has inputs and outputs in JSON, which is the JavaScript Object Notation, which means you can then take it into a system like Google Gemini or Anthropic Claude, and write a plain language vibe—if you will. Like, “I want a system that does this and this in n8n, and build me a JSON file I can import into n8n and that will do that”. You can get a system that has 150 different workflow pieces all tied together with all the proper settings, input and output, without you having to actually work in the system itself. This is a very powerful way to use this tool, particularly since it’s not the most intuitive, and it’s not the best documented, but it is very cool.
Christopher Penn – 29:14
So let me pull up a working workflow that I know works. This is one where I give it a—I tell it—”Hey, there’s a folder on my desktop that has the Trust Insights podcast transcripts stored. From there, I want you to do a first-pass clean of the transcript, clean up the transcript”. You can see here, in this case, it’s calling Deep Seek, just as an example, and then convert that back and save it on the desktop. The second pass here, it extracts the YouTube descriptions for YouTube, so it can very quickly assemble your YouTube captions and tags. Again, connect the AI model of your choice, and that passes it back to the system. So you could vibe together some n8n workflows in the coding environment of your choice and start building out really complex marketing automation systems.
Christopher Penn – 30:08
And this part does have very clear right and wrong answers because it’s code; either the JSON will or won’t load. But if you think about all of the different nodes that you could attach in here, let’s say I could send this to things like Airtable, I could send this actions to—we have Facebook’s graph, we have Google Ads—we could control and send data to lots of different places. I could, for example, write an n8n flow with HubSpot’s API. So I could sit here and just, one night, drunkenly yell into my phone, and then have it eventually update the CRM after it cleans my inputs and figures out where things are supposed to go. So this, on the marketing automation side, because this is true agentic stuff…
Christopher Penn – 30:58
We talked about AI agents versus workflows on the podcast not too long ago. This is how this would ultimately play out on the technology side: the vibe marketing—vibing together a system.
Katie Robbert – 31:10
I mean, this—I’m looking at this, and this is such a cool tool that I feel like we should probably sometime in the future do an episode just about this n8n system. Because in this episode, where we’re talking about where it fits into vibe marketing, vibe coding, we’re kind of glossing over it. But I’m looking at this as such a powerful way to do a lot of that automation that we’re all struggling to figure out. How do I get my data from A to B to C and make it make sense? This is a vibe.
Christopher Penn – 31:49
You can see here, in the AI agent node, I have my prompt. The prompts that you all know and love for cleaning up transcripts and things just get baked into those nodes. You can attach additional tools. For example, if you were doing SEO, and you had some page content, you could attach a tool here that could make an HTTP request to, say, Ahrefs, our SEO tool. Or it could go to a data store or go to any number of these other tools. You could tell it in the prompt, “Hey, use the SEO tool to validate the keywords that this blog post is optimized for, and see if it makes sense or not. If it doesn’t make sense, then alert me”. But it very much has all those different workflows.
Christopher Penn – 32:35
One of the things that I’m looking at in here for myself for the Trust Insights website is there’s a WordPress connector, so I want to see if I can connect it to our WordPress site to find posts that don’t have categories set properly, have an AI agent try to clean it, and then fix it within this. And I’m going to try and vibe that together, knowing what I know about the WordPress API, about n8n. And we have, of course, our API keys and all that.
Katie Robbert – 33:02
Stuff without going too far off and harshing the vibe. How do we know, as we are using tools like n8n, if we’re automating, doing the agentic AI that we talked about, where in here is the human intervention? So, let’s say you build the WordPress vibe, and it starts cleaning up posts. How do we know that those posts are correct? I think it was a few episodes ago that you were showing the AI text that had gotten posted on a bunch of our blog posts. And I said, “Oh, that’s interesting. That’s the first time I’m seeing it”. You’re like, “Oh, that’s been there for a few months”. But because of the way that we’ve delegated roles and responsibilities, I’m not in our WordPress site every day anymore.
Katie Robbert – 33:53
So I guess my question is, how do we know the vibe is correct?
Christopher Penn – 33:59
There’s a whole set of loops called “human-in-the-loop” that can notify you, like, “Hey, I’m about to make this change”, or, “Hey, approve this change”. Send you a message on Slack and say, “Approve this change”. If you send that API call, it gives a yes and no button, and you look at it going, “Oh, that looks terrible”. There’s an entire section for human-loop controls baked in.
Katie Robbert – 34:25
I like that vibe. I approve that vibe. But the whole—it goes back to again, sort of the original definition that we’re working with of vibe coding and vibe marketing, where you just kind of go with whatever happens. And I want to make sure that people are understanding that that’s good to a point, but you still need that human intervention to make sure AI is not going off the rails like it did this morning with images of pants ranting that went very much off the rails. And so, you still need that human intervention. If I had just said, “Hey, create an image and post it”, I would be in a lot of trouble.
Christopher Penn – 35:13
You’d have great engagement, though.
Katie Robbert – 35:15
I would, but not for the right reasons.
Christopher Penn – 35:21
Those folks who have experience also with things like Alteryx or Tableau Server, you’ll recognize even some of the basic data processing things. So, if there’s something that tool doesn’t do, you say, “Okay, I’ll write it in Python. I will vibe it together in Python and put that within the flow so that it is infinitely extensible”. You can choose to have custom code built within this system that would allow you to architect it very sensibly.
Katie Robbert – 35:54
What do you think, John? Would you vibe together a process for producing the Marketing over Coffee podcast? Do you like those vibes?
John Wall – 36:05
Yeah, I’m thinking we can take it a step further. We’ve got vibe, but I think we need more structure around it and more controls. So I think we should have Trust Insights Yacht Rock Marketing, which has the vibe, but moves forward in a controlled and predictable manner.
Katie Robbert – 36:21
So it’s the pragmatic version of vibe marketing, right?
John Wall – 36:25
It’s vibe marketing with less Florida Man blowing things up and more predictable process and documentation, which I like. And, that vibe—the vibe of not going off the rails and exploding—which is definitely where we want to go for MOC. There is some stuff there. I have to dive in and play with n8n. I had that on my list. It had showed up as one of the tools that everybody’s chattering about, so I’m really psyched to get to see this running. It could be like I have audio filters and I have stuff that we run the code through just every week as part of the process. If I could just drop the file somewhere and have that all run, that actually could save some time.
John Wall – 37:06
And then—it looks like there’s nothing to stop it from going all the way to automating some posts. So much of the stuff is through Libsyn, and it drops, and it just posts. But if you could have something that’s like, “Okay, repost about this every third day” and continue to drive traffic for it. So yeah, there’s a lot that can be done with that. But as usual, it’s not about vibe, it’s about, “Hey, n8n is a great tool that empowers your marketing”. The vibe’s a fun label, but as we get our hands dirty and play with this stuff, that’s when we’ll find out what helps and what doesn’t.
Christopher Penn – 37:41
Yeah, I think the way I would use this with Marketing over Coffee is I would have it go start pulling posts from the WordPress site, looking for the transcripts. For those posts that don’t have transcripts, grab the audio file, pass it through a tool like Whisper to get the transcript, pass it through a tool like Gemini to clean it up. Then, pass the edited transcript back to WordPress to say, “Okay, now just put the proper transcript on all the 700-some-odd episodes that don’t have transcripts”, and let it run semi-autonomously. If I was being cheap, I’d do it with Gemini 3 so that wouldn’t incur any API costs for cleaning it up, and use the local version of Whisper.
Christopher Penn – 38:19
So I don’t want to incur any transcription costs, but that is very, very far outside the experience most non-technical marketers are going to have. Because, for Whisper, you need to download and compile that yourself. For Gemini 3, you need to have a hosting system to host it locally on your computer. So it’s not something that someone’s going to pick up tomorrow. I think that’s a key part. Even with n8n, this is running locally on my computer. This uses NPX on my computer. For the average non-technical marketer, installing Node.js, NPM, and NPX is probably not in the cards for today. There obviously is a cloud-hosted solution, and certainly if this is something we want to deploy in production so that more than just me could use it, we would have to pursue that route.
Christopher Penn – 39:11
But the vibe marketing itself—this looks deceptively easy, and there’s a lot of mechanics in the background to make it work.
Katie Robbert – 39:21
So what else do we need to know about vibe marketing today?
Christopher Penn – 39:28
One, if you want to do it right, it’s a lot more difficult than it looks, and expect it to be more of a challenge. Two, for the love of everything holy, please just don’t talk to AI absent of context and wing it and hope that everything turns out because it’s not going to turn out well. Three, and this is the part that I think is the most important, the preparatory work for vibe marketing—to do all this research and put all the stuff together—these knowledge blocks are really important for you to do, no matter what. Whether you vibe, or yacht rock, or punk rock, or symphonic metal your marketing together.
Christopher Penn – 40:17
Actually, symphonic metal is a really good example—a good analogy—because it requires a lot of orchestration and a lot of moving pieces to create a great show. You need to do these pieces. You need to invest the time in building knowledge blocks, merging together data, thinking through the recipe. In the recipe, one of the things I want to point out is I didn’t just have AI do this. Each of these prompts I built and proofed myself first, individually, one by one, and only when I was confident they did what they were supposed to do did I then go and sew them together.
Katie Robbert – 41:00
And again, I keep going back to how important it is to understand that there’s a lot of work that goes into making it look easy because it’s not easy. There’s a really good reason, Chris, why people seek you out and seek out Trust Insights to help them put this stuff together. Because it’s a lot of work to make it—so once it gets to the customer, once it gets to the audience—they’re like, “Wow, that was a great experience. That was so seamless. That was so easy. That was great!” Not knowing all of the work that you put in behind the scenes in order to get to this place.
Katie Robbert – 41:39
And I will sort of do the shameless plug: if you want Trust Insights to help you put together these kinds of things for your marketing—to vibe your marketing, to vibe your coding (I’m never going to use the terminology correctly because I don’t believe in it)—if you want us to help you, contact us, please.
Christopher Penn – 41:59
The one other thing that I think is worth pointing out here also is if you do vibe marketing, as Karpathy described it, where you’re just kind of saying stuff out loud, which is fine, you may or may not capture the way you specifically do things. So in this example here, I have a definition of a SWOT analysis. Everyone’s, “Oh, SWOT analysis, that’s easy”. I have a very specific point of view on what a good SWOT analysis is. It’s something that you only do against one other competitor—never more than one other competitor—and is not for a landscape view or an industry view.
Christopher Penn – 42:36
I remember when we worked at the PR firm, Katie, we had some folks who were dumb as a bag of hammers, just kind of slapping everything into a SWOT analysis, hoping that the length of it would impress the client, and none of it was right. And so I, in here, because I know language models, said, “This is what SWOT analysis means to me. When you do this, you do it my way”. The more of this that you do where you specify, “This is my way, this is the Trust Insights way, this is the Katie Robbert way”, the more the results will reflect your point of view, and the less generic they’ll be. If you try to vibe it all together, you’re going to get a literal average of the models’ knowledge instead of your way.
Katie Robbert – 43:21
And that’s not a new challenge for people to overcome. We talk about this in prompt engineering, which is why people should take the Trust Insights prompt engineering course. Because the more specific you are with your prompts—the better the results, the more data you give AI to work from—versus saying, “What are the top five trends in SEO for 2025?” you’re going to get a really mediocre post versus, “Here’s everything I know about SEO, here’s everything that’s already been done, what’s new, what’s missing, what’s the gap?” You’re going to get very different results. I always think of how I did see someone do a SWOT analysis swat, and I could not for the life of me figure out what the A stood for versus an O.
Christopher Penn – 44:16
And I know exactly who did that. And I know what color her mouse was.
Katie Robbert – 44:24
She—I mean, she was a vibe.
Christopher Penn – 44:26
She. That was…
Katie Robbert – 44:28
That was a vibe.
Christopher Penn – 44:29
Yeah, that was a vibe.
Katie Robbert – 44:32
Can we just admit that vibe is the wrong word here? I’m saying it. It’s a word that I refuse to use. I’m not going to call it vibe marketing. It is just good, responsible, well-researched marketing strategy and planning, which is the opposite of a vibe, because I have zero chill.
Christopher Penn – 44:55
And I think as we showed it, the value is in building the pieces so that in subsequent runs—when we want to update our quarterly strategy—yes, we can put in just the changes and have the software rebuild the whole thing from scratch. Instead of maybe taking a two-day strategic retreat, it might just be Katie, putting five Post-it notes and saying, “Here’s what we’re doing this quarter”. “Oh, our budget is now this; rebuild the marketing plan”. Then, she can sit back and watch, drink her coffee and see AI reassemble the plan. That part is where the value is. The first time through, you want to take your time. You want to get it right. Subsequent runs, like all forms of automation, will be much easier.
Katie Robbert – 45:45
It’s funny as you describe that—you said so you don’t have to do those two-day strategic retreats—I’m picturing the uproar of executives who live for those retreats because they get to pontificate and navel-gaze for two whole days and get nothing done but feel very accomplished. And yet, there’s still no strategic plan, but they get to go someplace fun and exotic, and they do…
Christopher Penn – 46:15
Fill up walls with Post-it notes that are…
Katie Robbert – 46:17
They do that. And that’s a vibe. Basically a company-paid vacation.
Christopher Penn – 46:24
Exactly. What’s the discretionary budget for if not that?
Katie Robbert – 46:31
I don’t know. John, what’s your vibe?
John Wall – 46:33
I’m telling you, Yacht Rock Marketing, we got the vibe, but it’s encore: Smooth Sailing.
Katie Robbert – 46:38
Smooth. I like that. Smooth sailing.
John Wall – 46:41
We don’t need vibe.
Katie Robbert – 46:42
Chris, have we thoroughly harassed you out of using the term vibe yet?
Christopher Penn – 46:47
Absolutely not. In fact, I’ll use it more, but I’ll use it in ways that are inappropriate for work.
Katie Robbert – 46:53
Okay. And I will continue to wear my ranty pants and complain about vibe marketing.
Christopher Penn – 46:59
Exactly. After the show tonight, I’m going to feed the ranty pants image into Sora and see if I can animate it so we can have an animated clip over the ranty pants.
Katie Robbert – 47:10
I feel like we need a better image first. But I am excited to see that. I want to see it in action.
Christopher Penn – 47:19
And on that note, we will talk to you all on the next one. Thanks for watching today! Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights.ai/TIpodcast and our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai/newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai/analyticsformarketers. See you next time!
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Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.
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