What Is Vibe Marketing? How Brands Use AI to Win Trends

During the third quarter of Super Bowl XLVII in 2013, a power outage struck the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans. The lights went out, stopping play for 34 minutes.

In that time, Oreo made advertising history. “Power out? No problem,” the brand posted on X along with an image of a single Oreo, spotlighted against a black background and captioned, “You can still dunk in the dark.” The ad went viral, and multiple publications declared the cookie brand the real winner of the night.

Though simple, the ad was backed by serious brainpower. According to Digiday, it took a 15-person team of copywriters, artists, and social media strategists from Kraft, creative agency 360i, and media agency MediaVest to create the copy and image.

The in-the-moment post is a now-legendary example of how brands can engage with pop culture. But for a long time, this zeitgeisty approach to marketing felt out of reach to brands without similar resources.

13 years later, that’s no longer the case. “Vibe marketing” combines AI and human vision to launch marketing activations that are creative, emotive, and culturally relevant in a fraction of the time required for traditional marketing.

What is vibe marketing?

Vibe marketing uses AI to accelerate asset creation, while incorporating strategy. Marketers focus on the “vibe” and creative essence of a launch, describing the outcome they want to AI, similar to how engineers can “vibe code.”

Then, AI does the heavy lifting: it builds assets, orchestrates flows, defines target segments, and creates assets, then tests, launches, and optimizes them.

What types of trends or quick marketing opportunities does vibe marketing work for?

Vibe marketing frees up marketers who are blocked by resources and time, not ideas. Here’s where it can be the most useful:

Seasonal marketing: Whether it’s a major shopping season like BFCM or year-round seasonal moments, use vibe marketing to launch fun and imaginative campaigns all year long. Check out Klaviyo’s holiday marketing calendar to stay on top of marketing milestones.
Cultural moments: Pop culture moves fast. With vibe marketing, you can jump on relevant moments while staying on brand and consistent.
Viral social media trends: These trends are a prime opportunity to showcase your brand’s unique point of view in a format viewers already enjoy.
New products: Create multiple campaigns tailored to your various customer segments for every new product, color, style, or drop.
Data-informed customer lifecycle moments: Predictive analytics can flag customers who will soon run out of a product they purchase regularly, are ordering less than they usually do, or may even be at risk of churning. Vibe marketing makes it easy to create win-back and replenishment flows that speak to (and convert) customers.

What do you need in a vibe marketing tech stack?

To be a vibe marketer, you need the right tools and tech. Here’s what you need in your stack:

Centralized data store: Your AI outputs are only as good as your inputs. Unify customer data from all marketing and service channels in a CRM with a built-in CDP, so your AI has a complete picture of every shopper.
Agents for AI content generation and visual production: Look for AI agents that support multi-step conversations (so you can refine outputs) and file uploads (so you can provide the agent with any relevant existing collateral, brand guidelines, compliance rules, etc.).
Agents for AI-powered targeting and segmentation: These AI agents learn to segment based on brand training (your website, assets, and brand guardrails) and historical customer data.
Agents for AI-powered marketing optimization and analytics: In order to measure performance and provide recommendations for what to do next, your AI agent should be able to ask questions, uncover trends, and generate new ideas based on what’s actually driving results.
A Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration: MCP is the open-source standard for connecting AI applications to external systems, like your CRM, brand assets, data stores, custom APIs, product catalogs, and loyalty platforms. Without this connectivity, your AI stack won’t have the full context it needs to generate content or export that content to your marketing systems. With MCP integrations, you can use plain language to learn from your data and create highly customized marketing. Prioritize marketing platforms that have native integrations with major LLMs (like Klaviyo, which has pre-built integrations with ChatGPT and Claude, and an MCP server to connect to other tools).

The step-by-step playbook to using vibe marketing to jump on trends

Vibe marketing is a mindset, and a complete shift in how marketers operate. To be successful, you need to get comfortable with the back-and-forth nature of iterating on an idea with an AI partner, and create repeatable processes.

That’s what the Oreo team did. They were prepared and knew exactly who would do what in a big cultural moment, so when an opportunity arose, they were a well-oiled machine and moved fast.

Vibe marketers can act on their creativity just as quickly, at a fraction of the cost. Here’s how to get started:

1. Pick a trend

Here’s how to keep your finger on the pulse and develop a point of view on which conversations to join:

Social listening: Track and analyze online conversations about your brand(s) and products, your competitors, and your industry.
Search trends: Keep an eye on the searches that bring visitors to your website or social media, and monitor a set of core keywords related to your product areas or industry to understand what potential customers are interested in.
Creator/influencer behavior: Influencers in your industry speak directly to customers who are interested in the types of products you sell. Build a list of influencers that align with your brand and take note of what they’re covering and discussing to understand what potential customers care about.
Reviews/review sentiment: Dig into both negative and positive reviews. Use AI-powered sentiment analysis to quickly find trends and identify what’s driving enthusiasm (or lack thereof). Then, build messaging that highlights the good and mitigates the bad. Let’s say you sell flowy, wide leg pants that tend to run large, leading to negative reviews. Consider a campaign that reminds customers to size down if they don’t want such an oversized look.
Your customer data: Go straight to the source and consult your CRM. Whether it’s identifying your VIPs, seeing which text messages are most effective, or conducting RFM analysis, you can find valuable insights in the data you already have on your customers.

Need some inspiration? Here are some examples of recent marketing trends we’ve noticed:

The Y2K revival that’s bringing back retro-inspired products and driving nostalgic marketing design
The playful childhood photo trend that brings a human touch to brands
The parodies of McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski's Big Arch taste test video

2. Tell your AI marketing agent what you want to create

The key to vibe marketing is collaborating with an autonomous AI marketing agent. Most powerful when integrated with a CRM that unifies all your customer data, autonomous marketing agents can generate content and also learn from performance signals and customer behavior to improve over time.

In plain language, include the following information in your prompt:

Outcome: Define what you want the initiative to achieve. Are you looking to grow revenue? Win back lapsed customers? Launch a product? Clear out old inventory? Whatever your goal, make sure it’s clear and actionable.
Tone: Explain how your messaging should feel. An educational asset should be friendly and helpful. An activation based on a social media trend could be playful and fun. And if your AI agent isn’t already connected to or trained on brand assets that define voice or tone, make sure to include those guidelines here.
Audience: Describe your ideal audience. For example: “Customers who have spent more than $1,000 this year,” or “Women who mostly buy dog-related products,” or “Customers who usually convert on flash sales.” You don’t need to name specific, pre-built segments—that’s what the AI is for.
Guardrails: Alert your AI agent to any caveats or exclusions. For example, you might want to exclude any customers who have a support ticket open or anyone in a region where a product isn’t yet available. You could instruct your AI agent to use specific colors, or include at least one video, or link to a specific customer testimonial.

Then, prompt your agent to ask you clarifying questions throughout the generation process until it has enough information to act on your instructions.

3. Your AI marketing agent builds the marketing assets (with your help)

Once the AI agent has your inputs, it generates a suggested list of assets, target audience, email and/or text messages, and flows. If the initiative is omnichannel, the AI agent coordinates messaging across channels. All content is brand-consistent, grounded in real customer data, and checked against your guardrails.

But this isn’t just a one-and-done. Ideally, your AI marketing agent can ask you questions and retain conversation context. Iterate as much as you need to by providing feedback to the agent, along with any additional information it needs to make your marketing assets as good as possible.

4. Approve and launch

Once your AI marketing agent has drafted your assets, it’s time to take the reins. Follow your marketing team’s usual QA and approval process. Even though your AI agent should be doing QA of its own, a human should always be the last set of eyes on every piece of content you ship.

5. Optimize and analyze

Once your assets are live, your AI marketing agent collects real-time performance data, tracking who’s opening and engaging with your messages, who’s unsubscribing, who’s taking the desired action, and who’s taking an action you may not have planned for.

Based on these insights, your AI agent provides regular reports on how well your various marketing efforts are achieving your stated goals (you define the reporting cadence). It also provides insights you can use for future marketing.

For example, maybe women who live in America converted at a higher rate than any other demographic. That may indicate that the specific product or offer resonated with them more—a hypothesis you can test in the future.

Vibe marketing helps your brand join the conversations your customers are having

Marketing is moving faster than it ever has, and there’s no sign that things will slow down. But the good news is that the traditional obstacles to speed matter less than ever, too.

Your brand is no longer constrained by how many marketers you can hire or whether you can afford a creative agency. In 2026, the biggest question for growth is whether you have the right technical infrastructure to support speed and the most human factor of all: creativity. Brands with this foundation that adopt vibe marketing will jump to the front of the pack, while those that don’t will fall behind.

Klaviyo Composer is the generative AI agent that builds complete email and text message drafts, flow logic, and creative through natural conversation. Powered by your data to create and improve high-performing marketing content across every channel, Composer is the AI partner that gets you from idea to launch, faster.

See what happens when tasks don’t get in the way of your ideas. Get started

Katherine Boyarsky

Katherine is the co-founder and CMO of Datalily, a creative content marketing and research studio. She’s a word person with a background in strategic content, journalism, and brand campaigns, and she’s collaborated with leading companies, including Fortune 500 brands and tech unicorns. She’s based in the Boston area and you can find her hanging with her dog or working from breweries.

What is vibe marketing and how can brands use it to jump on trends?