Vibe Marketing: A Declaration Of Independence From The Martech Machine

InnovationVibe Marketing: A Declaration Of Independence From The Martech MachineByLisa Sharapata,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 12, 2026, 10:00am EDTLisa Sharapata is CMO and AI & GTM Strategy Lead at Metadata.io, an agentic GTM platform for B2B revenue teams. gettyI have been a marketer for over two decades. At my core, it’s how I think. But for the last ten years, being a "true" marketer has felt nearly impossible.Real marketing is about four pillars; some adhere to the 4P’s or a modern version of that. We need a deep understanding of the market to build a brand that stands for something, craft an experience that earns trust and drive sustainable growth. That is the "market" in marketing. That is the work that matters and the part where human discernment excels.But until recently, the "-ing" took over. The executing. The clicking. The optimizing. We became technicians of complex ad platforms with secret handshakes and dashboards designed to serve the platform’s bottom line, not ours. As a leadership team member, I’ve seen the "-ing" expand into internal politics and the exhausting justification of ROI to skeptical executives.We didn’t lose focus; we became collateral damage in a martech arms race. The landscape has grown over 100-fold in 15 years. According to industry data, 55% of us feel overwhelmed by the channels we manage. Our best ideas are dying in the gap between strategy and execution.We are standing at the edge of the most significant shift in a decade. I call it vibe marketing.The Developer’s CueTo understand where marketing is going, look at software development. In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, coined the term "vibe coding" in a post on X. He described a shift in which developers stop writing code line by lin...