From Classified Ads to ChatGPT: What 25 Years in Marketing Has Taught Me
By Jo McAuliffe, Founder, GoClearcut
I started in marketing before Google existed.
That's not a flex, it's context. Because when I tell you that what's happening right now with AI is the biggest shift I've seen in 25 years, I need you to understand I've got something to measure it against.
My career started in traditional marketing. Print ads. Direct mail. Brochures that took three weeks to design, two weeks to print, and cost a fortune to distribute. We wrote copy carefully because once it was printed, it was printed. We thought hard about who we were talking to because we couldn't afford to get it wrong.
There was something clarifying about those constraints.
The first big shift: the internet arrives and everyone panics
When the web arrived in the late nineties, the reaction in traditional marketing was a mix of excitement and deep scepticism. "It's just a fad." "Our customers aren't online." "We'll wait and see."
The businesses that waited lost ground they never got back.
I didn't wait. I found it fascinating — this idea that a small business could have a presence that anyone in the world could find. Together with some business partners we foundered and created MiStable and website based CRM system for Horse trainers in the Thoroughbred Racing Industry. It was this business that I learn’t web design, started building sites, automating communications for 100’s of racing clients. In 2009 I founded Clearcut Marketing, now GoClearcut. Back then, having any website put you ahead. The bar was low and the opportunity was enormous.
What carried over from traditional marketing? The fundamentals. Know your customer. Be clear about what you offer. Make it easy for people to say yes. Those principles didn't change, the medium did.
The SEO era: everyone becomes a publisher
Then came search engines, and everything changed again.
Suddenly it wasn't enough to have a website , you had to be found. SEO became the obsession. Keywords. Backlinks. Meta tags. Google updates that would tank a site overnight if you'd been cutting corners.
I have watched a lot of businesses get burned chasing algorithm tricks instead of building something real. The businesses that did well in search were almost always the ones doing what good marketing had always required: being genuinely useful, being clear, being consistent.
Social media arrived and layered another channel on top. Then smartphones changed how people searched. Then voice search. Then Google started answering questions directly in results, bypassing websites altogether.
Each shift felt seismic at the time. Each one rewarded the same underlying behaviour: show up consistently, say something worth reading, be easy to find and easy to trust.
Now: the AI era
What's different about AI isn't the technology. It's the speed and the scale
AI-powered search, Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, voice assistants is fundamentally changing how customers find businesses. Instead of returning a list of links, these tools synthesise an answer. They recommend. They describe. They tell someone "here's the best option for what you're looking for."
And if your business isn't structured in a way that AI can understand, summarise, and recommend you're invisible in a way you've never been before.
This is why I built GoClearcut's AI Marketing Snapshot. Not as a gimmick. As a genuine diagnostic because most small businesses I talk to have no idea how they appear (or don't appear) in AI search results. They're still optimising for a version of Google that no longer exists.
What hasn't changed
Here's what I keep coming back to after 25 years:
Clarity wins. If you can't explain what you do and who it's for in a sentence, no algorithm is going to do it for you.
Consistency compounds. The businesses I've watched succeed over time are never the ones who did a big push and disappeared. They're the ones who showed up every month, year after year.
Trust is still the currency. Technology changes how customers find you. It doesn't change what makes them choose you, return to you, or refer you.
The tools I use today: AI for content, structured data for search, automation for consistency are in service of those same principles I learned writing copy for print ads in the nineties.
The medium keeps changing. Good marketing doesn't.
If you're wondering how your business looks in this new AI-powered landscape, start with a free AI Marketing Snapshot. It takes the guesswork out of where you stand and what to do next.
