I've been hearing a lot about 'vibe marketing' lately— podcasts, buzzy DTC marketers on X, and even recently in my LinkedIn feed.

So naturally I got to thinking about whether marketing newest buzzword actually has any practical applications for brand marketers operating in the pointy end of retail media? My first instinct was skepticism—after all, our world revolves around conversion metrics and retailer JBPs, not nebulous 'vibes.'

I've given it some thought and I think there might be something here for us. It's marketing, it's fueled by AI, its about connecting with your customer. But at the very least, a way to make things a little more fun for ourselves. Why should the DTC bros have all the fun?

Let's get into it.

Origins and Evolution

The term "vibe marketing" emerged from the tech world. In 2023, OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy coined "vibe coding" to describe a programming approach where humans set high-level direction while AI handles implementation details. More recently tech entrepreneurs like Greg Isenberg began applying this concept to marketing.

What makes vibe marketing different from traditional emotional or lifestyle branding is its emphasis on using AI to rapidly iterate emotional angles at scale. Traditional marketing required "copywriters, designers, analytics people, media buyers—drowning in meetings... taking weeks to launch anything." Vibe marketing, by contrast, enables "a single smart marketer with AI agents... testing tons of marketing angles in real-time." (Greg Isenberg)

At its core, vibe marketing aims to create an "emotional aura" around a brand that persists over time. As brand strategist Jeff Goldenberg puts it, "a brand's vibe is the emotional reaction someone has when they experience it—through story, aesthetic, product, or culture." This creates an intuitive connection with consumers that transcends logical product arguments.

In short, vibe marketing is an AI-powered approach to marketing, advocating for giving AI "agents" high-level outcomes while humans curate the output to maintain authentic connection.

As vibe marketing gains momentum in the broader marketing landscape, we ask ourselves: Can this approach work within the highly structured, performance-oriented environment of retail media, where multiple intermediaries sit between the brand marketer and the end consumer?

Can We Bring Vibe Marketing To Retail Media?

Yes, and here's two main reasons why.

Firstly, Vibe marketing needs lots of context. Vibe marketers need to feed the AI models data about our customer, our product, our trading environment. Data is the big unlock for vibe marketing.

Luckily we have plenty of data here. With rich first-party data, our retail media platforms and marketing clouds are a goldmine for the vibe marketer.

Secondly, vibe marketing thrives with needs specific things to do, specific outputs - a product Page, ad copy, ad creative, a video demo, deploying ad campaigns, personalized emails. Again, we face no shortage of use cases here in the retail media and marketplaces world. Here's a few thought-starters and resources to check out.

1. Scaling Content Efficiently Across Many Channels

Retail media requires platform-specific creative across multiple networks. Using AI-driven marketing tools, brands can quickly generate content variations that maintain emotional consistency while adapting to different specifications. Your brand can maintain its emotional through-line while fitting the technical requirements of each retail platform.

A key player in this space is It'sRapid, which enables rapid creation of retailer-specific assets, such as banners and videos, reducing production time from weeks to minutes. For instance, PepsiCo reported cutting campaign creation time from 4–5 weeks to just 15 minutes, and asset creation from 2–3 hours to 2–3 minutes per asset. Vibe marketing at its finest.

2. Personalization at Scale in Retail Media

Rich first-party data from retailers allows for identifying emotional patterns in shopper behavior. By pairing this data with vibe marketing approaches, brands can create subtle variations that speak to different audience segments while remaining true to the overall brand feeling.

3. Finding Hidden Trends in Retail Data

When retail media networks identify emerging shopper trends, vibe marketing allows rapid pivots to capture these opportunities. If your data reveals a sudden uptick in interest around "healthy indulgence snacks," you can quickly generate new creative that highlights the emotional angle most likely to resonate with this trend.

4. Automating and optimizing tedious workflows

Part of vibe marketing is knowing what's possible with AI and offloading as much of the repetitive, tedious aspects of any process. Media buying and reporting are prime candidates here.

Ad-tech company Xnurta (note, Xnurta is a client of mine) is differentiating itself on the ability to take sequential AI driven actions to optimize Amazon ad campaigns based on parameters you originally set.

One agency built 50 custom audiences in AMC in less than an hour using Xnurta - what would have taken weeks otherwise. Vibe marketers rejoice.

Internal advocacy for retail media is a vibe, too

Retail media marketers face a persistent challenge that's rarely discussed: internal selling. With budgets coming from various departments and stakeholders often skeptical about retail media investments, the ability to translate complex data and strategies for different internal audiences is crucial. This is where vibe marketing shows unexpected value.

Using AI tools to rapidly synthesize lengthy retail media reports or complex data into tailored communications for specific executives creates remarkable efficiency. Rather than spending hours reformatting the same information for your CMO (who wants big-picture strategy) versus your CFO (who needs hard ROI numbers), vibe marketing tools can quickly adapt your core message to match the emotional and informational needs of each stakeholder.

Resource to check out: Firstmovr is an education and training company that produces a lot of (free!) materials to help marketers frame retail media concepts within their organization.

Vibes Get A Reality Check

Not every retail media placement warrants a vibe-marketing approach. Search ads and sponsored products may still be best served by more functional approaches, while display and off-site media could incorporate more emotional elements. The key is finding the right balance between transactional efficiency and emotional resonance.

At the end of the day, vibe marketing isn't really anything new. But it's a neat way to encapsulate how AI is extending our capabilities as marketers and enabling us to be more creative and more fluid in our work. At the very least its a bit of fun.

Vibe on!