What Most Marketers Get Wrong About AI with Jack Hardy, CMO of Jam 7
Foundational Work: Successful AI marketing requires thorough groundwork before launching campaigns, prioritizing clarity over speed.
Strategic Alignment: Hardy emphasizes the importance of unified brand messaging to avoid confusion in marketing efforts.
AI Risks: Using AI without a solid foundation can amplify mistakes, leading to miscommunications and brand inconsistency.
xEO Model: The shift to 'Everything Engine Optimization' highlights the need for visibility in both organic and AI search.
Slow First Campaign: Jam 7 waits 90 days to launch initial campaigns, ensuring all foundational elements are well established.
There is a tempting assumption rooted in nearly every conversation about AI and marketing where the tool is the transformation.
Let’s say your team decides on a platform, runs the prompts, and in theory, watches the output multiply.
If you're like most marketing organizations, you start shipping immediately. And this, according to Jack Hardy, CMO of UK-based AI marketing consultancy Jam 7, is exactly where things go wrong.
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And, he has a single metric that makes his case better than any argument could—that Jam 7 does not launch a client's first campaign until day 90.
In an industry obsessed with speed, that number sounds almost reckless. But Hardy's philosophy is that AI amplifies whatever you feed it. I’ve heard this line shared repeatedly in my conversations with marketing leaders over the past few weeks.
Akin to hiring and developing an intern, if you provide clarity and guidance, you’re likely to arrive at the deliverables you’re after.
The brands winning with AI aren't the ones who are adopting it fastest. Instead, it’s investing in strategic thinking where the brands are benefiting from doing the hard foundational work first.
Supply a clearly defined brand, and you’ll create the foundation for a machine that can scale. Offer up a half-baked concept rife with confusion and you get what Hardy calls compounding errors. Messaging that quietly poisons a brand's growth before anyone notices the damage.
The Problem With Random Acts of Marketing
Hardy has a diagnosis for how most companies approach marketing. He shares that his team works in lockstep with clients to arrive at a strategic destination they’re happy with pursuing.
"A lot of businesses we speak to charge in one direction for a little bit, get 10% one way, change their mind, come back, go 10% another way," he says. The result is what he describes as a geological strata problem. Visit a company's website and you can read the layers like rock formations, each section reflecting whoever happened to be working there at the time.
The deeper issue, he argues, is that marketing has become an internal exercise rather than a customer-facing one.
"Marketing is often just an internal amalgamation of opinions. But the message isn't for you, it's for the people who are going to buy the product or service." Founders and marketing leaders, attached to their own narratives, fill their FAQs not with questions customers actually ask, but with questions they happen to have impressive answers to.
You’re not going to buy it yourself. Their pains, gains, and jobs to be done are not the same as yours. We need to get all of that down — and then everything we do aligns to that.
Introducing AI into an undisciplined system doesn't fix this problem. It just creates more noise.
The 90-Day Rule
Jam 7's first 90 days with any client are spent entirely on groundwork. Starting with positioning, his team digs into brand messaging, ideal customer profiles, personas, and the full landscape of customer pains, gains, and jobs to be done. Hardy wholly believes in starting from ground zero, without campaigns or content—just clarity.
The principle is straightforward but easy to skip under pressure.
"You need to get everyone in the business to know who they are so then the AI knows who they are. A company's marketing shouldn't sound like five different companies."
Once that shared identity is locked in, it becomes the governing logic for everything the AI produces. The system doesn't drift because it has a fixed reference point.
I’m going to take twice as long on this now so I can be fast forever, rather than constantly going back and being really slow because we’re always amending and revising.
There's also a political reward. One of the most expensive drains on any marketing team is revision cycles driven by competing opinions rather than customer evidence. This bears repeating, but I’ll say it a different way, the slowdown rarely stems from polarizing customer data. Marketing teams get bogged down by internal contrasting opinions.
So, when messaging is grounded in research rather than preference, Hardy notes, it stops being a matter of debate. "It's never a point of opinion. It's a point of: this is right for our target audience."
While the first campaign may not launch until day 90, after that, the machine runs cleanly. The slow start, Hardy insists, is what makes the fast finish possible.
Consistency as Competitive Advantage
Jam 7 has built its own narrow, purpose-built AI marketing platform, and the distinction from off-the-shelf tools matters enormously to Hardy. The platform is organized around four growth pillars— speed, scale, consistency, and credibility. And these values are structural outputs baked into how the system operates.
"That just allows us to deliver to that standard every single time," he says. Sure, a human marketer has good days and bad days, energy and distraction, clarity and fatigue. The platform doesn't. "You cannot avoid having that systematic checklist done to the highest level of quality" — each piece of content it produces has, by design, considered the brand, the persona, and the technical landscape it needs to perform in.
AI is across everything we do, but it’s a sliding scale — human on one side, AI on the other. Depending on the task, you flip. It might be 80/20, it might be 50/50.
Hardy describes the moment a client searches for themselves in ChatGPT and sees their brand name surface unprompted. "That’s when you know you’re not just shipping content," he says. "You’ve built something consistent enough that the machines can recognize it and repeat it. That only happens when the foundations are right.”
How AEO And GEO Are Changing Search
Hardy has retired the alphabet soup of SEO, AEO, and GEO in favor of a single term he now refers to as xEO, or Everything Engine Optimization. This reflects a genuine shift in how audiences are sourcing information.
"It's no longer a debate. You need to be visible in organic and AI search. The more tech-savvy your audience, the less they Google and the more they're having conversations in ChatGPT."
For brands operating in technical or specialist markets, this isn't a future consideration. It's already how buyers research. In fact, 64% of prospective buyers are doing the bulk of their research online, without vendor representation or connection.
Be the first to answer the questions that are actually being asked. If you’re that reliable source of information around your thought leadership topics, you win the search battle before it even gets to search.
His model for this is HubSpot. When Hardy was a student, nine times out of ten a marketing question led him to a HubSpot article, and not because HubSpot dominated paid search, but because they had spent years answering the questions their audience was actually asking. The CRM loyalty that followed was almost incidental. "Guess who I use now as my CRM?" he says.
Besides optimizing for keywords, Jam 7 uses its platform to scan what's genuinely being asked on Reddit, social media, and elsewhere, then builds content designed to answer those questions with specificity and authority. "We answer the questions people are actually asking," Hardy says, "not the ones we've already got a good answer to."
And, in doing so, he’s able to strategically position the brands he works with in a way that yields meaningful results.
The Hidden Risk of AI on Growth
Hardy is no AI skeptic. In fact, his entire agency is built on the technology's capabilities. But he is realistic about the specific failure mode that catches most companies off guard. And, it’s the confident, well-articulated wrong answer.
Off-the-shelf AI tools are, by design, optimized to please. They generate outputs that sound authoritative, move quickly, and rarely push back. That combination can be more dangerous than obvious failure. "AI can really speed you up, but it can also really slow you down. It delivers with such confidence and such gusto—and the worst part is it might trick you into thinking you're doing really well."
If you start pushing out unaligned messages to the wrong people on the wrong channels at the wrong times, you’re effectively poisoning the growth of your business. You only get one chance to make a first impression.
The stakes compound quickly. Hardy points to the well-established principle that a buyer needs to encounter a brand roughly seven times before they begin to take it seriously. "Now imagine if all seven of those communications are all over the place. They might not even link them together." Seven impressions of a confused, inconsistent brand don't build recognition. They build noise.
The solution isn't less AI. It's feeding the AI a cleaner signal, which returns, inevitably, to the foundational work.
Slow Down to Go Fast
There's a feeling I think we can all relate to in that the world changes so much quicker now. Jam 7's CMO has articulated it directly, sharing that what would have taken a decade in the pre-AI era now compresses into a year or two. The pressure to move fast is real and legitimate.
But Hardy's argument is that speed without foundation is a trap. The brands that will win in the long-term aren't those who adopted AI earliest or were most enthusiastic about it. They're the ones who invested in the unglamorous work. They are digging into the messaging documents, the persona research, the alignment conversations with customers, and then let AI multiply the clarity they'd defined from a multi-pronged approach.
It’s like any tool in the world. You need to pick the right one for you and then learn how to use it right. Otherwise, you’re just moving fast in the wrong direction.
This means the 90-day wait isn't a delay. It's an investment in being fast forever. And in a landscape where compounding errors in brand messaging can quietly stifle growth for months before anyone identifies the source, the willingness to slow down at the start may be the most strategically sound decision a marketing leader can make.
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