Foundations for Digital Marketing in the AI & Algorithmic Era.
Why the discipline is turning back toward marketing — and what capability now means. A white paper from the aFactor Education Excellence Council.
The scarcity that created the specialist is dissolving.
For roughly two decades, “digital marketing” has been treated as a discipline apart from “marketing.” That separation was real, but it was never permanent. It existed because operating digital platforms — the ad managers, the analytics stacks, the automation tools — was genuinely scarce and hard, and scarcity creates specialists.
Artificial intelligence is now dissolving that scarcity. When the machine can plan, target, produce, optimise, and report, the value of being able to operate the machine falls — and the value of deciding what the machine should do, for whom, and why, rises.
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How to cite this paper.
aFactor Education Excellence Council (2026). Foundations for Digital Marketing in the AI & Algorithmic Era: Why the discipline is turning back toward marketing — and what capability now means. First edition. aFactor. https://afactor.ai/insights/research-papers/foundations-for-digital-marketing-in-the-ai-and-algorithmic-era
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This paper is part of aFactor’s ongoing research into competency-based professional education.