It's January 21st, 2026, and I want you to just
think back for a second. Think back to last year,
to 2025. Oh, wow. Do we have to? We have to,
because honestly, it was a bit of a mess, wasn't
it? A total mess. It was just this fever dream
of hype and demos. Right. It felt like every
week there was some new game -changing tool.
You'd see it on X, you'd sign up for the waitlist,
and then you'd get access. It was basically vaporware.
Or it was just a toy. That was the worst part.
You play with it for 10 minutes and you realize,
OK, this can't actually fit into a real professional
workflow. And you just never touch it again.
It was the year of the demo. Exactly. The year
of overpromising. But now, sitting here today.
It feels like the dust has finally settled. We
aren't just chatting with bots for fun. We're
actually watching these complex workflows happen
in real time. I mean, we're seeing a four -hour
video shoot get remixed into a full campaign
blog, social email in like, what, five minutes?
And that's the headline for 2026. Yes. We've
moved from just experimenting to real execution.
So today, we're going to do a deep dive into
this guide that really claims to be the playbook
for right now. It's called... The Top Five AI
Skills for Marketers in 2026 by Max Anne. And
what I like about it is that it's not sci -fi.
We're not talking about flying cars here. No,
this is the baseline. This is, if you're a professional
marketer today, this is your new job description.
If you aren't doing this stuff, you are already
falling behind. Okay, so we've got five key areas
to roadmap. First is content remixing with Gemini
3. Then we have visual branding with a tool that
has my favorite name ever. Nano Banana Pro. I
still can't get over that. It sounds like something
you'd put in a smoothie, but it is seriously
powerful. We'll get to that. Then there's AI
video with VO and Sora, the rise of AI agents,
which is a huge mental shift. And finally, this
thing called vibe coding. Vibe coding. Yeah,
it sounds like something a teenager does on TikTok,
but it's actually one of the most practical skills
on this whole list. Okay, let's jump in with
number one. Content remixing. The source says
we've shifted from create once, use once to infinite
remixing. But we've been talking about repurposing
for years. What's actually different now? The
engine is different. The game changer is Gemini
3. And to get why, you kind of have to look at
how we did this back in, say, 2024. OK, so take
us back to the old days. Back then, if you wanted
an AI to summarize a video, you had to transcribe
it first. Yeah. You were feeding it text. a script
right you didn't know if you were whispering
or shouting it didn't see the slide you were
pointing to on screen it was basically blind
and deaf just processing words so it lost all
the nuance the emotion all of it exactly But
Gemini 3 has what they call native multimodal
understanding. It's not reading a transcript.
It is watching the video file. It's processing
the raw data, the audio, the pixels, the gestures.
It understands it like a person does. It gets
the context. It gets everything. And Max Anne
gives this amazing workflow example. You have
a four -hour video recording. Maybe it's a huge
workshop or a long interview. In the old days,
that was a week of work. Easily. For sure. Scrubbing
through timelines, finding clips. Now, you just
drop the YouTube URL into Gemini 3. No transcription.
Yeah. And you give it a very specific prompt.
Watch this. Extract 10 insights, write a 1 ,200
-word blog, 10 LinkedIn posts, and a three -email
sequence. And it just does that. In about five
minutes. Wow. That is a massive compression of
time. But is the quality any good? We've all
seen those AI blog posts that sound so robotic.
Delve into the landscape of... In today's fast
-paced digital age. Yeah. We all know that sound.
And that's a fair point. The guide is honest
about it. It says the output is good because
it understands the context. But this is a big
but. It still needs a human. It takes about one
hour for a person to review, refine, and polish
everything. It's not a magic button. It's a lever.
Exactly. But you're comparing one hour of polishing
to, what, three days of drafting? That's the
real ROI. It's about speed. The source also brings
up this idea of a smart stack, saying you shouldn't
just use Gemini for everything. What's that about?
This is so important. We all want one tool to
do it all, but different models just have different
personalities. Gemini 3 is your analyst. It has
this huge context window. It can hold that whole
four -hour video in its head. It's the heavy
lifter. It does the logic. Okay, so Gemini builds
the skeleton. Right. But for the polish, for
the creative flair, The guide says to move the
text over to Claude. Claude just has a better
ear for human nuance. It writes less like a corporation
and more like a person. Interesting. So Gemini
for thinking, Claude for writing. That's a good
way to put it. And you keep ChatGPT around for
just the fast, everyday stuff, quick questions.
It's not about one perfect tool. It's about stacking
them. Let me play devil's advocate here. If the
AI is doing the analysis and the AI is doing
the writing. What's left for the marketer? Are
we just pushing buttons? So does this replace
creativity or just distribution? It replaces
the drudgery. Creativity moves up to the strategy
level. Creativity moves up the ladder. I like
that. Okay, let's move on to the second skill.
Now we get to talk about Nano Banana Pro. Finally.
I've been waiting, Nano Banana. Visual branding.
Remind us why this was such a headache before
now. Why was visual consistency so hard? Oh,
it was a nightmare. If you used Midjourney or
Dali back in 2024, you know this pain. You generate
a character, let's say a mascot for a coffee
brand, a bear in a hoodie. Sure, a bear in a
hoodie, classic. And it looks great. But then
your next prompt is, OK, now show that same bear
sitting at a desk. And suddenly it's a different
bear. The hoodie is a different color. The face
is wrong. It just morphed every single time.
You could never build an identity because you
couldn't get the same asset twice. It was a slot
machine. And Nano Banana Pro, which is really
just the Gemini 3 Pro image model, it solves
this. It does. It has true character consistency.
You can lock in a specific face, a specific outfit,
and it stays the same across different scenes.
The AI remembers who the bear is. What about
text? That was always the big tell for AI images,
the garbled words on signs. Gone. Text rendering
is finally clean. You can put your slogan on
a T -shirt in the image, and it's actually spelled
correctly. That's huge. The guide talks about
a workflow it calls the Brand Bible. How does
that actually work? So this is the pro move.
You don't just start from scratch every time.
You create this master document, your Brand Bible.
It has your hex codes, your fonts, your logo,
your mood board images. And you just feed that
to the AI? Every single time. You're priming
the model. The guide says you can upload between
1 and 14 reference images. So for our bear. The
bear in the hoodie. You define it once, minimalist
style, blue palette, hashtag 1E8085. You save
that reference image. Then next week, you don't
describe the bear again. You just say, using
this character, generate a scene of them celebrating
a win. And it looks like your brand because it's
locked to that reference. It looks like your
brand. And the cost change is just absurd. You
used to pay thousands for a photo shoot, for
models, a location. And now it's $20 a month
for a tool. Exactly. It completely democratizes
high -end visual branding. Okay, but here's the
question that races. If I can do this for 20
bucks, so can my competitor. So if everyone has
perfect visuals, how do you actually stand out?
If everyone has perfect visual consistency for
20 bucks, how do you stand out? You stand out
by having a better brand Bible and taste. Taste.
The human eye is the advantage. Okay, let's shift
to the third skill, AI video. This feels like
the one that really just crossed the good enough
threshold this year. Oh, yeah. This is the big
one. This is where the magic is happening. The
guide points to two main tools, VO 3 .1 and Sora
2. Are they basically the same thing or are there
real differences? Oh, they're very different.
It's really a case of physics versus vibes. Physics
versus vibes. I like that. Break it down. Okay,
so VO 3 .1 is from Google DeepMind. It's the
king of photorealism. It gets how light works,
how gravity works. If you need a product shot
of a soda can and you want it to look absolutely
real, you use VO. It respects the laws of nature.
Sora 2 from OpenAI is more of the creative artist.
It's way better for stylization, for abstract
concepts, for things that need to feel kind of
dreamy. It bends reality, but in a good way.
And there's a quick mention of Kling AI 2 .6.
Yep. It's noted as an S tier tool right up there
with the others in terms of quality. Now, the
guide has a golden rule for video. It says to
always start with images. Why? Why not just type
in a prompt? Because text is just too ambiguous.
If I tell you to imagine a woman in a cafe, you're
picturing something totally different from what
I am. Different lighting, different mood. Sure.
I'm thinking a rainy Paris street. You might
be thinking a bright Starbucks. Exactly. So if
you just give that text to the AI. you get a
random result, a lottery. But if you generate
the image first with nano banana, you lock it
in. You get the lighting perfect, the face perfect.
That image becomes the anchor. So the video model
isn't inventing the scene. It's just animating
what you've already approved. Precisely. It's
image to video. That's the secret. Okay, walk
me through that workflow. Step one, generate
your hero images. Get them perfect. Step two,
animate them with VO. Add a slow camera orbit,
maybe. Step three, create what the guide calls
lifestyle moments. Someone using the product,
smiling. Then you just cut it all together for
social. It sounds super efficient, but the guide
is also really honest about what AI video can't
do yet. Yeah, and this is so important to remember.
The biggest limitation is complex human conversations.
Just people talking. Yeah, it still looks off.
The lips move, but the micro expressions, they
aren't there. It's deep in the uncanny valley.
It just makes viewers feel uncomfortable. What
else? Long narratives. Anything over 30 seconds
starts to drift. The AI forgets what the character
was wearing. And precise brand compliance, like
getting a logo perfectly right on a moving shirt,
is still a bit hit or miss. So we aren't filming
the Super Bowl commercial with this yet? No,
this is for the daily content feed beast, not
cinema. Right. It feeds the algorithm. Okay,
skill four. This feels more technical, but the
source calls it a 10x multiplier. AI agents and
automation. This is that huge shift from chatting
with a bot to building a system. I think people
get a little lost on the term agent. How is it
different from just using ChatJPT? Well, a chatbot
is passive. It just sits there and waits for
you to talk to it. An agent is active. It runs
in the background. It watches for things to happen.
It makes decisions. And it takes actions without
you holding its hand. It's like a digital employee.
Exactly. A digital intern who never sleeps and
never complains. The source gives this specific
example using a tool called N8n. Can you walk
us through that? I think this is where people
get intimidated. Yeah, it looks scary, but it's
really just a flow chart. You start with a blank
canvas, and you drag these little nodes onto
it. Okay. So your first node is the trigger,
let's say, a chat command. The second node is
the brain, the AI agent. You connect it to OpenAI
and tell it, write an HTML blog post about this
topic. Okay, so far that's pretty standard. But
this is where it gets cool. The next node is
an action Google Docs node. The agent literally
creates a new document in your Google Drive.
Then another node inserts the content. And the
last node uses Gmail to email you the link. So
in practice, I could type a topic into a Slack
channel, and three minutes later I get an email
with a link to a finished Google Doc. That's
it. You didn't copy -paste anything. You didn't
open a new tab. It just happened. Do you suck
silence? Whoa, I mean... That sounds like actual
magic. It really feels like it. And the guide
compares this skill to knowing Excel. Excel.
Yeah. 20 years ago, if you were in finance, you
had to know Excel. The guide says marketers who
understand automation tools like Make, ZP or
N8N. They're the new Excel experts. It's becoming
mandatory. This sounds like engineering, not
marketing. Is the line blurring? The line is
gone. The modern marketer is a systems architect.
A systems architect. That's a heavy title. We're
going to take a very short break. Mid -roll sponsor
read. We are back and we are at the final skill.
Skill number five, vibe coding. Vibe coding.
I just love that term. It sounds so casual. Just
doing some vibe coding. What is it really? It's
really the democratization of making software.
It just means using plain English to tell an
AI what kind of tool to build. You don't need
a computer science degree. You don't need to
know Python. You just need to be able to describe
the vibe or the function of what you want. So
English is the new coding language. Exactly.
And the only syntax you need to know is clarity.
The guide mentions tools like ClaudeCode and
Cursor. What are people actually building with
this stuff? Well, we're not building the next
big banking app or a secure OS. Right. Please
don't do that. No, don't vibe code your security.
We're building useful, maybe even disposable
internal tools. Can you give me an example? Okay.
Say you need a dashboard to track a campaign.
Normally you'd file a ticket with IT. You'd wait
six weeks. And by then the campaign's over. Of
course. With vibe coding, you open cursor and
you just say. Build me a dashboard that pulls
data from these three CSE files and visualizes
it with a bar chart. Make the background dark
mode. And it just writes the code. It writes
the code, shows you a preview of the app, and
lets you talk to it. If the chart is the wrong
color, you just tell it, make the chart green.
You iterate in minutes, not weeks. It just removes
that bottleneck completely. That's incredibly
empowering. But the guide does mention what not
to build. Besides security, are there other limits?
Yeah, it's mainly about mission critical stuff.
If the company would shut down if this tool breaks,
don't vibe code it. Yeah. But for a quick competitor
scraper, an ROI calculator for sales, it's perfect
for that. This raises a really interesting point
for me. If the barrier to entry is just describing
what you want, what's the actual skill that's
scarce now? If the barrier to entry is just describing
what you want, what is the scarce skill? Clarity.
The ability to clearly articulate exactly what
needs to be built. Clarity of thought. That's
it. If you have fuzzy thinking, you're going
to get fuzzy code. The AI does exactly what you
tell it. If you can't explain the logic clearly,
it can't build the tool. So it actually forces
you to be a better thinker. 100%. Clarity of
thought is the new coding. We've covered a lot
of ground. Content remixing, nano banana, AI
video, agents, and vibe coding. Max Anne ends
this guide with this conclusion about a chasm.
Yeah, this is the big takeaway at the end. He
splits all marketers into two groups, Group A
and Group B. Okay, break that down for us. Who's
in Group A? Group A are the people using AI as
a force multiplier. They're building the agents.
They're vibe coding dashboards. They aren't working
harder. They're just working smarter. They move
10 times faster because they have all this leverage.
And Group B? Group B is stuck. They're the ones
still manually copying and pasting data between
spreadsheets. They're waiting three days for
a designer to make a thumbnail. They are doing
the rote work that machines have already solved.
That is a very stark contrast. It is. And the
guide's main point is that the barrier between
group A and B isn't a university degree anymore.
It's not about who knows C++A. Then what is it?
It's curiosity. That's the only requirement.
If you're curious enough to just open N8N. And
try to connect two nodes. Even if you fail at
first, you're putting yourself in group A. If
you're just waiting for someone to give you a
manual, you're going to stay in group B. That's
a powerful place to leave things. But I also
know, for you listening right now, if you try
to do all five of these things this week, you're
just going to burn out. Oh, absolutely. Don't
do that. That's a recipe for disaster. I mean,
I still wrestle with prompt drift myself when
I try to do too much at once. So what's the real
first step? Just pick one. Seriously. Blah, blah,
blah. Maybe it's the nano banana images. Just
go try to create a brand character and see if
you can make it look the same in two different
pictures. That's it. Or maybe it's the N8A agent.
Just try to automate one simple email. Just get
your hands dirty. Exactly. Don't stay in the
audience. The only way to really learn any of
this is to just do it. The chasm is here. The
tools are here. The only question left is, which
side are you standing on? That is the question.
Thanks for listening to The Deep Dive. We'll
see you on the next one.