One of Korea’s most talked-about marketers lately is Kim Su-seong, a civil servant in Bonghwa County. To promote the county’s apples, he spent roughly 330,000 won of his own money on a Times Square billboard in New York. When footage of “Bonghwa Apples” on the screen appeared, it went viral at home. The goal wasn’t selling apples in America. It was turning the fact that Bonghwa apples appeared in Times Square into content for Korean audiences. He bought a story people wanted to share, not seconds on a screen. Columnist Bruce uses the case to ask what defines marketing skills in the AI era: when everyone has similar tools, what makes the difference?
The author’s company uses tools like Claude Code and Codex. His team finds and works with influencers, but years of campaign data sat in inconsistent files and formats. Using Claude Code, he sorted and merged it into a usable influencer database in about three days, and built a simple tool that turns a news link into a standardized monitoring report. Tasks postponed for years were done in days.
The biggest change, he says, isn’t that AI does the work — it’s that the distance between thinking and doing has collapsed. Ideas once abandoned for lack of coding skills or time can now largely be built by the person who had them.
Delegating to AI doesn’t mean you can stop understanding the job. To explain what to input, what to cut and what to check in the output, you need to know the work — and to separate tasks done out of habit from tasks that serve the goal.
AI serves up plausible options fast — too plausible. Once you see A, B and C, you start choosing among them and lose the chance to imagine a 10-out-of-10 option D. AI lowered the cost of thinking, the author notes, but it also lowered the cost of not thinking. Keep taking the easy option and you end up moving only within AI’s average.
Ask AI for Bonghwa apple promotion ideas and a Times Square ad might appear. What matters isn’t who thought of it first, but the judgment to read the context — use an overseas ad as domestic buzz — and spend the money to make it happen. Good ideas are completed by choosing, not by generating options.
People still buy products, hire people and love brands. Ten marketing ideas AI won’t come up with and Hoka putting runners’ miles on Times Square screens answer the same question. As everyone gets similar weapons, the difference is the thinking you swing them with.
It wasn’t meant to sell in the U.S.; the fact of appearing in Times Square became viral content in Korea — a story bought for about 330,000 won.
Understanding your work well enough to explain it, and the judgment to look beyond AI’s plausible options and decide what to do now.
Write down your own idea before asking AI, and practice connecting unfamiliar elements.
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