I was invited to speak to a marketing class. We were both surprised.

May 21, 2026

What happens when the most marketing-savvy generation in history starts asking questions.

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak to a marketing class at the University of Colorado-Denver. The invite was to "speak" but it was closer to a conversation. One where we both had a chance to learn.

The class was a mix of marketing, finance, writing, and visual design students. When we discussed a marketing principle, there were different reactions. Each was filtering it through their own career lens. The finance students heard budget implications. The writers heard narrative structure. The designers heard visual hierarchy. The marketing students heard all of it and somehow held it together simultaneously, which is honestly the job description.

But the thing that struck me most was something I hadn't fully anticipated walking in. This generation has grown up inside the marketing funnel. They've been targeted, retargeted, segmented, personalized, and A/B tested since before they had credit cards. They can identify a manipulation tactic in the time it takes to scroll past it. They are, without question, the most strategically marketing-aware audience any marketer has ever had to face.

That's not a problem. That's the whole point. And it shaped everything we talked about.

The question that set the tone

We started with what I find most challenging about marketing right now. My answer was immediate: the speed of change.

Not the technology specifically. The pace of all of it. The fact that as soon as you find something that works, everyone else finds it, too. Then it doesn't work anymore. What earns attention today becomes invisible noise tomorrow, because the moment a tactic becomes repeatable it becomes ignorable.

The big shifts get all the attention. AI, new platforms, new formats. But while you're navigating those, the day-to-day work doesn't pause. Campaigns still need to run. Content still needs to ship. The team still needs direction. Clear vision and detailed execution have to coexist, which is harder than it sounds when the landscape keeps moving underneath you.

One of the finance students asked a sharp follow-up: how do you plan for something that keeps changing? My answer was that you don't plan for the specific change. You build the habit of learning into how you work. Always be learning isn't a motivational poster. It's a survival strategy. The marketers who struggle are the ones who find what works and stop there.

The AI-lephant in the room

The AI question came up quickly, as it does everywhere. As students, they've been told not to use AI, and can even be penalized if they do. My take was less about the tools and more about the mindset required to use them well.

AI is real and it's not going away. But to use it effectively, you have to understand what you want out of it. Then train it the same way you'd train a new junior employee. For students who have never trained a junior employee, we had to go into more detail. We discussed how to give it context. Give it examples. Tell it who the audience is and what matters to them. Then, critically, challenge it to explain its reasoning. Ask it why. Push back when something doesn't land. Push back when it does and push for alternatives. The output is only as good as the quality of thinking you bring to the input.

The students who understand that will be more valuable than the ones who treat it as a shortcut. The shortcut version produces generic output that looks like everything else. The deliberate version produces something that actually sounds like a point of view.

The skill nobody teaches

When we got to essential skills, I gave an answer that surprised a few of them.

The most important skill in marketing isn't writing, or data analysis, or knowing the right platforms. It's translation. Specifically: the ability to take what you know and reframe it in terms of what your audience cares about. Because it's never your story. It's always theirs.

That applies to customers, obviously. But it applies just as much to the sales team, the finance department, the C-suite, and the developers you need to build the landing page. Everyone has their own goals, their own vocabulary, their own definition of what success looks like. The marketer who can speak all of those languages, without losing the thread of the original message, is the one who gets things done.

The designers in the room understood this immediately. The writers took a beat and then nodded with resignation. The design and finance students looked slightly concerned. Both reactions felt about right. Yet another skill they had to learn.

I also told them: learn how to interview people. Not in the HR sense. In the journalistic sense. Sit down with a client, a prospect, a subject matter expert, and ask questions until you understand what they actually care about. Not what they're supposed to care about. The best marketing content I've ever produced came directly from those conversations. The worst came from internal assumptions about what the audience needed to hear.

The career advice I almost didn't give

Near the end we got to career advice, and I told them a few things I wish someone had told me earlier.

You are always on. Not in the hustle-culture sense. In the representational sense. Every interaction, every event, every conversation is part of how you're perceived professionally. That's not a burden, it's just true. The sooner you're comfortable with it, the better.

Build a real community, not a network. Know what the people around you are good at. Be someone they can count on. Marketing teams change constantly. People move, companies restructure, roles disappear. The relationships you invest in genuinely are the ones that survive all of that. It's not building a book of besties, but a team you know you can work with. Don't network like a jerk.

And finally: do something completely unrelated to marketing. Follow artists, musicians, writers, people who make things for reasons that have nothing to do with conversion rates. They see the future differently. Some of my best creative instincts have come from places I'd never have predicted. Fire your brain in ways that have nothing to do with your job, and you will get better at your job. It's how our brains work.

What I took away

Walking out of that classroom, one of the students said they'd learned to distrust marketing that felt like it was trying too hard. That the most effective brand experiences for their generation are the ones that feel honest rather than optimized.

That's not a generational quirk. That's the direction the whole field is moving. The audience has caught up to the tactics. The only thing left that actually works is being genuinely useful, genuinely honest, and genuinely interested in the person you're trying to reach.

Which is, when you strip everything else away, what good marketing has always been.