Session Link: https://youtu.be/Jf7gk7szrTc

​

Session Title: In An AI World, Principles Matter More Tham Prompts

​​​

Speaker: Mr. Chris Aarons, Assistant Professor Of Instruction, University of Texas

​​

Session description: Walk into any marketing team today, and you will see the same AI tools on every screen. Ask those teams to solve the same brie,f and something disturbing happens: their solutions start looking identical. Not similar. Identical. This is the efficiency trap, and it is reshaping marketing faster than anyone predicted.
 
Here is the paradox undermining marketing. AI optimizes for efficiency, but marketing only wins through distinctiveness. These forces are fundamentally opposed. Distinctiveness requires inefficiency. It means the inefficiency of thought, of exploring paths that do not scale, of investing in stories that break templates, and of refusing shortcuts that competitors will copy. AI does the opposite. It finds the most efficient path to every solution, which is also the most average path.
 
We have seen this movie before. When programmatic advertising made media buying perfectly efficient, display ads became invisible. Performance improved, but impact vanished. AI is repeating this pattern across all of marketing, only ten times faster.

This talk reveals how leaders can escape the efficiency trap. Attendees will learn how to spot when marketing is sliding toward the generic middle, how to craft a Never Rule that protects originality, how to run a Five Question Audit to test if their work is still distinct, and how to reframe workflows so AI amplifies unique ideas rather than replacing them.
The choice is simple. Chase efficiency and disappear. Choose distinctiveness and matter.

​

Bio: Chris Aarons is an assistant professor of instruction in the Department of Marketing at The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. He teaches courses on digital marketing. In addition, he also provides executive education on critical problem-solving and decision-making, dynamic communication, delegation and accountability, and the fundamentals of negotiation.

Aarons is a bestselling author and has designed marketing strategies for several leading companies, including Amazon, AT&T, Microsoft, LasikPlus, Coca-Cola, Dell, Kendra Scott, and USAA. He led the public relations team for Philips Technology to win a dispute with Toshiba, he is credited with launching one of the first corporate social media programs at AMD, and he led a campaign with Buzz Corps called “31 Days of the Dragon” for HP’s flagship laptop. This campaign prompted a book, “Social Media Judo,” in which Aarons outlines the strategy behind its success.

​

​