Have you ever stopped to really look at the advertising around you? How many campaigns have actually struck you as smart, relevant, or interesting? How often have you felt personally reflected in an ad?
There’s a golden rule in sales: we have two ears and one mouth for a reason — to listen twice as much as we talk. Great salespeople don’t just convince, they connect. And that only happens when we’re willing — and disciplined enough — to listen. When I truly understand what you need, my sales pitch becomes infinitely more powerful. That’s why I always remind my clients and students: the best salesperson is the one who listens, not the one who talks the most. Selling shouldn’t be about imposing; it should be about aligning needs on both sides.
And yet, in the world of Mexican marketing, we keep doing the opposite. We talk a lot and listen very little. Want proof? For every peso invested in listening to customers, 18 pesos are spent on advertising to them.
According to IAB Mexico’s report “Total Media Value 2019–2023”, in 2023 total media investment (across digital and traditional channels) reached almost 135 billion pesos. Of that, digital media took 60%, while traditional media shared the remaining 40%, with television taking the lead at 22%.
Now compare that to how much is invested in listening: the AMAI’s annual study (in partnership with ITAM) estimates that the entire market research and consumer insight industry in Mexico received just 7.3 billion pesos in investment. A tiny fraction compared to what’s spent on speaking.
To put it into perspective: a recent Euromonitor study revealed that in 2023, the burger market in Mexico was worth over 35 billion pesos — five times more than what we spend on understanding people’s needs.
Why do we keep betting more on talking than on listening? Maybe because talking is more visible, more immediate… and more profitable for some players. Just a few days ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced that advertising agencies could soon be obsolete. Why? Because he’s launching a new AI-powered platform that promises to create entire ad campaigns — no agency, no creatives, no copywriters, no designers. Advertisers just input their goals, and the platform takes care of the rest: generating the content, building the strategy, and even measuring results.
Sounds efficient, right? Maybe. But here’s the big question: who’s going to write the brief, the prompt, the creative brief?
Because using AI isn’t magic. And while it may deliver lightning-fast results, its real power lies in context — in the way we frame the request. AI is, after all, a statistical processor of language that relies on the data it’s trained on and how clearly the question is asked. So the real value still lies in the person asking the question, not just in the technology answering it.
That means whoever writes the prompt needs two key skills:
-
A deep understanding of the customer and their context.
-
The ability to clearly and objectively define what the campaign is meant to achieve.
If we remain stuck in the paradigm of talking more than listening, even the best AI won’t save us from producing the same old pushy, tone-deaf advertising. Which brings us to one final thought:
Could it be that we’d rather let someone else think for us, instead of doing the thinking ourselves based on research?
