Your 2026 Marketing Budget Has a Hole in It — and It's Called Tokens

Carilu Dietrich · 9 Apr 2026

Carilu Dietrich did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Token costs scale with usage and leave a hole in marketing budgets that first-year plans did not foresee.

Their wordsIf your team is doing real AI work, running agents, scaling content operations, personalizing at volume, you are consuming tokens. And unlike most costs in your budget, tokens don’t come with a fixed cost. They scale with usage, and usage is scaling faster than most first-year plans assumed if your team is pushing the envelope.
Our reading
Token consumption is becoming a proxy for how seriously a team uses AI.

Their wordsToken consumption is becoming a proxy for how seriously a team is using AI, and right now, almost nobody has enough history to forecast confidently.

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