The Marta Puerto LinkedIn video became one of the most talked-about personal branding moments of the decade. But the context matters. In 2025, AI was cited as the reason for 54,836 layoffs in the US alone. In 2026, that number has already passed 61,000. And we’re not even halfway through the year.
Somewhere in that wave of polite emails and awkward Zoom calls sits a marketing professional. Someone who wrote copy, planned campaigns, managed social channels. Someone who did everything right. And then one morning, a calendar invite appeared: “Quick sync. No agenda.”
Marta Puerto got that meeting in late 2023. She was running marketing for the Spanish market at Xolo, a fintech company. She had years of experience across SaaS, brand communication, and digital marketing in both Spain and the UK. Results, skills, a solid portfolio. None of it mattered.
“Unfortunately, your position has been made redundant…”
What happened next is one of the sharpest personal branding moves in recent marketing history — and the reason the Marta Puerto LinkedIn video would eventually reach millions.
The CV Graveyard
Marta did what every laid-off professional does first. She updated her LinkedIn. Polished her portfolio. Sent CVs. Dozens, then hundreds. She customised cover letters, showed up prepared for interviews, followed up diligently.
The responses were a loop: “We’ve decided to go with another candidate.” “Budget constraints prevent us from moving forward.” Or simply: silence.
Here’s the thing about job hunting in marketing right now. 81.6% of digital marketers fear AI will replace content writers. That fear is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Companies aren’t just cutting headcount because business is slow. They’re cutting because a ChatGPT subscription costs less than a junior copywriter’s monthly salary. Bloomberg research shows AI could automate 53% of market research analyst tasks and 67% of sales rep tasks. The World Economic Forum says 41% of employers worldwide plan to shrink their workforce due to AI in the next five years.
Marta wasn’t just competing with other marketers. She was competing with the idea that maybe a company didn’t need another marketer at all.
When the Product Is You
So Marta stopped sending CVs. Instead, she did the one thing she actually knew how to do better than any AI tool: she marketed.
Not a product. Not a service. Herself.
She wrote a script. Found a cameraman. Chose locations. Edited a complete video presentation and called it “Meet Marta: The Movie.”
Forget the sad “please hire me” clips that flood LinkedIn. Marta built a full-blown marketing campaign, with herself as both the strategist and the product. Every frame was deliberate. Every second demonstrated a real skill. Ideation. Creative direction. Messaging. Storytelling.
She used the exact same playbook that makes brand videos go viral:
A strong hook in the first three seconds that made you stop scrolling. Retention mechanics through pace, editing rhythm, and smart narration that kept attention throughout. And a payoff that tied it all together.
The video ended with: “You’ve reached the end of the free version of Marta.”
That single line did more than any cover letter ever could. It said: I’m not a job seeker. I’m a ready-made solution for your marketing department. And it closed with a CTA: book an interview.
A marketer, marketing herself, using marketing. Marta markets Marta.
The Marta Puerto LinkedIn Video: One Million Views in Three Days
The Marta Puerto LinkedIn video exploded. Over one million views in 72 hours. More than 60,000 likes. Thousands of inbound messages from employers across the globe.
LinkedIn’s comment section called it “a new era.” Former employers reached out. Recruiters who had ghosted her suddenly found her email. At one point, Marta had to create a separate inbox just to manage the volume of job offers.
One of the first serious offers came from London. After conversations, the company agreed she could work from Madrid. Their logic was perfect: if someone can market themselves this effectively to a million strangers, they can certainly handle remote work.
The AI Paradox Nobody Talks About
Here’s the part that makes Marta’s story even more relevant in 2026 than when it happened.
The same AI tools that are eliminating marketing positions couldn’t have created what Marta created. An AI can write a decent LinkedIn post. It can generate ad copy, draft email sequences, build landing pages. It can do the tasks of marketing.
But it cannot do what Marta did: take a personal crisis, turn it into a strategic narrative, produce it with creative vision, and deliver it with the kind of human authenticity that makes a million people stop scrolling.
The paradox of AI in marketing: the more AI handles routine execution, the more valuable the distinctly human skills become. Strategy. Storytelling. Creative risk-taking. The courage to put your face and your name behind an idea.
Marta, by the way, built her website using ChatGPT. Lost her job, picked up AI as a tool, and shipped it. No “I don’t know how to code,” just prompting until the site took shape. A human using AI as a force multiplier. Exactly how small teams use AI to do everything themselves.
The Uncomfortable Question
Critics pointed out that this approach works mainly for marketers. If you’re an accountant or a lawyer, a cinematic video CV probably won’t land you a job. Fair point.
Others worried that if everyone starts doing this, job hunting becomes even more expensive and competitive. Also fair.
But here’s the uncomfortable question nobody’s asking: What’s the alternative?
Right now, 37% of companies expect to have replaced jobs with AI by the end of 2026. Freelancers in marketing and creative fields have already seen a 2% decline in contracts after generative AI adoption. And that’s just the beginning.
The old playbook of CV, cover letter, LinkedIn headline, maybe a portfolio PDF was designed for a world where your competition was other humans. Now your competition includes tools that never sleep, never ask for a raise, and produce “good enough” work at a fraction of the cost.
In that world, “good enough” is a death sentence for your career. The only defensible position is being unmistakably, irreplaceably human.
Marta figured that out before most of us did.
What This Teaches
Your personal brand is not vanity. It’s a survival strategy. Not just for marketers. For anyone whose job involves creativity, communication, or strategic thinking. Your personal brand is how people perceive you in a real meeting, a real collaboration, a real crisis. It’s your reputation, made visible.
Market yourself the way you’d market a client. Every marketer has spent hours crafting the perfect positioning for someone else’s brand. How many have done the same for themselves? Marta treated herself as her most important client. The results speak for themselves.
Story sells. But not a pity story. What works is a story that’s honest, confident, and focused on solutions. “I lost my job” is not a hook. “I lost my job and here’s what I built next” is.
Job loss can be a launchpad for personal branding. The worst moment in your career can become the best case study in your portfolio. If you have the nerve to treat it that way.
AI gives the humans who use it a multiplier effect. Marta didn’t fight AI. She picked it up and used it. The people who will thrive aren’t the ones resisting AI or the ones being replaced by it. They’re the ones who use it to amplify what makes them human.
One Last Thing
54,836 marketing professionals lost their jobs to AI last year. Sixty-one thousand more this year so far. Somewhere right now, another marketer is getting that calendar invite with no agenda.
If that’s you, or when that’s you, remember Marta.
She didn’t send CV number 48. She made a movie.
