Put yourself in the shoes of a painter who’s spent decades mastering your craft.

You’ve studied composition, light, and shadow for years. You’ve paced in front of countless blank canvases, sketched through millions of pages. You’ve agonized over painting a single blade of grass, willing the light to bounce off it just right.

Then one day, someone builds a tool that mimics paintings like yours. What took you a lifetime to master now takes a middle schooler a few keyboard strokes.

Untrained eyes look at this AI-generated “artwork” and think it’s amazing.

But you see every flaw.

And so it goes with every creative endeavor that’s getting displaced with AI—including writing.

When the average person uses AI to write, they feel empowered. They can now produce highly convincing content without all the toil of learning the craft.

Meanwhile, writers look at it the way a Michelin chef tastes a frozen dinner. Sure, it might satisfy hunger. But we can spot every shortcut, every place where depth got replaced with pattern-matching.

But the part that really stings?

For most business purposes, AI content is good enough.

Good Enough Is Good Enough

Like it or not, AI-generated writing gets engagement. It gets clicks and shares. Most people haven’t studied the craft like writers have, so they just see interesting ideas arranged in familiar patterns.

It’s convincing enough to pass muster with the masses.

Writers dunk on AI because—from our perspective—it’s mediocre at best. But to the majority of the business world, it works just fine. Plus it’s faster and cheaper than hiring a writer with talent.

It’s infuriating to watch your life’s work reduced to a commodity. To see the nuance and care you bring to every sentence get dismissed as unnecessary cost.

If you’re an artist, you’re likely outraged. But don’t make the mistake of blaming AI.

AI didn’t create the problem. It’s a scapegoat. The real problem is that AI has exposed what was always true.

Companies Don’t Value Creativity

Companies have never truly valued the art behind creative work. They only value the outputs. Technology just removed the need to pretend otherwise.

Here’s what I mean:

Artists value the mastery of their craft. The hours spent mastering rhythm and emotional resonance. The process of wrestling with old ideas until something new appears. The connection that forms between our work and other people. For us, the creative process is the reward—not the output.

Business leaders value entirely different things. Efficiency and predictable outcomes. The ability to scale without increasing costs. Metrics that fit neatly into spreadsheets. To them, creative work is a means to an end—and that end is always money.

This is why CEOs and CFOs can’t see what creatives see.

Artists aren’t better or smarter than them. People just lack the exposure and experience and expertise. To them, content is a lever to pull to make money. Humans are resources, listed alongside copy machines and computers in their ERP. And when you compare the cost of people to AI—people lose every time.

Look, I’m not saying every business is the enemy of art. That’s not what this is about. Business leaders can value creativity. But there’s a reason it’s so rare.

The Audience Problem

Think about the B2B companies people celebrate for bold, creative marketing. A few that come to mind are Vector, KlientBoost, and Klue.

Who celebrates them? Marketers. Who do they market to? Marketers.

They get to be creative because their audience permits it and wants it.

But if you’re marketing finance tools to CFOs, forget creativity.

If your buyers work in conservative industries—finance, healthcare, industrial—executives will tell you they “just want the facts.” That creativity will turn them off. That you need to play it safe.

But here’s what I can’t figure out: Do B2B audiences really prefer boring, safe marketing? Or have executives just convinced themselves they do?

What I do know is, B2B business leaders are risk-averse. It’s easier to play it safe than take the risk by coloring outside the lines. And when leadership won’t let you test creative ideas, their belief becomes your reality.

AI didn’t kill creativity in B2B. Risk-averse leadership did. AI just made it cheaper to stay comfortable.

The Lines We Never Asked About

Have you ever created something with personality—something more human—only to hear that it’s “not professional enough”? That it’s “too edgy for our audience”?

I’ve seen this play out more times than I can count. Marketing makes a bold play. Leadership responds with polite concern. The piece gets watered down or squashed entirely. Everyone moves on.

It happens because marketing was drawing outside the lines that no one told them about.

No one communicated the vision upfront. No guardrails to reference. We just get a vague mandate to “create compelling content” or “make us stand out,” followed by surprise and disappointment when the result doesn’t match the unstated expectation.

So whose fault is it? Leadership’s, for not communicating their vision? Or is it ours, for not asking before we started?

There’s a conversation between Dave Gerhardt and the great Mark Schaefer that’s been rattling around in my head.

Dave says: “It can’t be that we’re all just morons, right? I know a lot of smart marketers who are maybe trapped at the wrong company...I found that it’s usually some company strategy things that are flawed. Show me a company with a great strategy from a business standpoint, I’ll show you a marketing team that can be successful. Is that where you see it?”

Mark replies: “I’ve got a little video on my YouTube channel. It’s sort of like a movie trailer for the book and I start out by saying it’s not your fault. Most people, they want to create, they want to innovate, they want to do better. But we have this infrastructure of fear in our industry. There’s a scaffolding of fear holding boring in place.“

I’ll link Mark’s video below. Watch it. If you’re like me, it will resonate. You’ll get fired up about the injustice of it all. It feels so true.

But, I wonder.

I wonder if we can become so certain that we’re the good marketer stuck in the bad company that we never stop to ask whether we fully understood the job.

Maybe creative marketers confuse “creative direction” with “creative freedom.” Maybe the job was never to be an artist, but rather a creative professional within the boundaries of the business.

Learn About Your Boundaries

Yes, companies can value creativity. But creativity without constraints is just self-expression. Before we push against constraints, we need to understand what they are and why they exist.

You can bring creative excellence to work that serves business goals. You can care deeply about craft while acknowledging that not every piece needs to be art.

But you need to learn your boundaries first. Here’s how:

Ask About the Lines Before You Color Outside Them

Level-set with leadership upfront. Understand their vision before trying to execute on it. What does “professional” mean to them? What does “on-brand” look like? Where’s the boundary between safe and stale? Where can you carve out some space to experiment?

Know Which Game You’re Playing

If you’re marketing to marketers, you might get to flex creativity. If you’re marketing to other B2B buyers, understand their expectations and interests. The boundaries aren’t arbitrary. They’re either imposed by assumptions or imposed by your audience. If it’s the former and not the latter, make the case for change.

Separate Craft from Ego

You can care deeply about quality without needing every piece to be your magnum opus. Some work is meant to be functional, clear, effective. Save your creative energy for more high-impact content. Not every blog post needs to be a manifesto.

Recognize When You’re in the Wrong Environment

Some companies genuinely can’t support creative work in their market. Their audience won’t tolerate it. Their leadership is too risk-averse. Their industry is too conservative. As Mark Schaefer says, it’s not your fault—there’s a scaffolding of fear holding boring in place.

Before You Push Back

The painter will always see the flaws in AI-generated art. The untrained eye will always think “good enough” is good enough. And for most business purposes, it is.

AI didn’t change what businesses value. It just made their priorities brutally visible.

You can grieve that reality. You can rage against the scaffolding of fear. You can feel frustrated by risk-averse leadership. But you can also get clarity before you start creating.

No matter where you work, the lines are always there.

Some constraints are real. Some are just assumptions that need to be tested. But you won’t know which is which until you ask.

Napkin Notes

• Here’s a link to Mark’s video I mentioned. It’s for his new book, which “sets a framework for human-centered marketing that transcends the AI pandemic of dull.” Great line.

• “The longer you work at a craft or discipline, the more difficult—and rewarding—it becomes to improve. Going from zero to 80 percent is easier than going from 81 to 90 percent. Going from 91 to 95 percent is more challenging still. And going from 96 to 99 percent could be a lifelong pursuit.” – Eddie Shleyner

Imagine your content team doubles in size.

On paper, it’s a dream come true! You finally have more creative people to tackle those “someday maybe” ideas on your wishlist.

But, the reality isn’t so tidy.

• Writers are marooned in draft purgatory, refreshing inboxes for feedback that never comes

• Designers are trapped in déjà vu, re‑exporting the same banner in slightly different shades of blue

• Project boards are cluttered with half‑finished tasks and urgent requests (all marked “ASAP”)

And you spend more time on version control and approvals than shipping worthwhile work.

Growth doesn’t always create momentum. In fact, it can easily slow you down.

Size ≠ Speed

When you work on a small, “agile” marketing team with just a few people, you can get away with having little to no process in place. You all just agree on how things should get done, and then you do them. Easy.

But as your content team grows, process becomes exponentially important.

Every time you hire someone new, it’s like flipping on fluorescent lights in a room you’ve worked in by lamplight.

Now you see (in harsh detail) every shortcut, every faulty step, and every rickety workaround. What felt like scuff marks now look like craters.

On a small team, it’s easy to overlook small points of friction. But as your team grows (even by just one person), those small speed bumps can turn into real barriers to growth.

That’s because adding people multiplies dependencies. Every new hire means more handoffs. More reviews. More opportunities for miscommunication. More friction that slows you down.

Think of It Like Directing the Flow of Traffic

More people producing and more projects in flight. It sounds great in theory, but it means more content traffic.

You need to keep that traffic moving smoothly—ideally at a brisk pace. Which means you need the infrastructure to support the extra people moving through your production process.

Without clear lanes, signs, signals, and rules, you end up in gridlock.

The symptoms look like this:

• Blurry accountability – Work overlaps, people duplicate effort, and projects stall because everyone assumes someone else is driving

• Version chaos – You waste hours reconciling edits, comparing a file called “final_v6_reallyFINALnew” with “final_v6_reallyFINAL2.” And nobody’s sure which to publish

• Inconsistent execution – One week your brand feels polished. The next, it looks and sounds like three different companies mud wrestling for attention

• Stale project plans – Project plans become a documented formality, while no one really knows what’s changed or the status

• Aimless output – Teams crank out content to look productive on paper but it seldom makes an impact to your audience (or your business)

This is the worst kind of environment to work in, by the way.

Not only are you constantly frustrated by the lack of process, but you’re also forced to continue to deliver work despite all the potholes and detours along the way. It’s a listless existence in content purgatory, where you do just enough to meet expectations, and creative space feels like a luxury you will never experience.

The good news is that content marketers already have the skills to avoid these problems. Content people know how to build project plans, content briefs, and enablement tools to make their audience’s lives easier.

The trick is to treat your internal team like a second audience.

The Engine Behind the Content

You have an content marketing strategy (I hope). But you also need an internal content enablement strategy.

Think about it: With content marketing, your job is to anticipate questions and remove friction for your buyers in their journey. You create helpful guides and resources that keep them informed and moving forward.

Internal content enablement works the same way.

Your team has recurring questions, too: What does good look like? Who reviews this asset next? Where do I find the latest brand guidelines?

If you treat those questions like signals, they point to the internal content you need to create—documentation, templates, playbooks, review cadences, and so on.

So, before you start pining for that one extra headcount that’s going to solve all your problems, think about giving the people you already have the tools to work more efficiently.

A Few Moves to Make Your Engine Hum

Here are some easy ways to get your internal content strategy started.

1. Document while onboarding. Every time a new hire asks you how to do something, capture the answer in a shared doc or wiki. Over time, you’ll build a lightweight knowledge base. It means you don’t have to answer the same question five times, and it makes you look organized and prepared in front of leadership. One teammate once told me they solved an issue in minutes because they found the answer in our knowledge base instead of waiting for me to reply.

2. Define clear swim lanes. Without them, people don’t know what to send to who, who’s doing what, and it starts to feel like a very unfunny performance of “who’s on first?”. When people know exactly what they own, projects move faster. Plus, you look decisive rather than reactive. Swim lanes give everyone—including your boss—a clear view of who’s driving what. Leadership knows where to look for progress, and the team knows exactly who to call when they need something.

3. Shorten review cycles. You don’t need five rounds of reviews if you set the right checkpoints. Two or three defined reviews—draft, final, design—give you quality control without inviting too many opinions. The reality is, everyone has different taste. If you invite too many people into the review cycle, it only slows things down and waters down your work.

4. Leave space in your structure. Process can become constrictive if left unchecked. But the right amount of structure is liberating. Guardrails mean your team can create confidently without second‑guessing every decision. Your team gets more space to express their creativity, and that creative confidence gets noticed by top brass. It makes your team look sharper and it shows that you trust your people to do their best work.

Scaling a team can be messy. Every new person adds another layer of dependencies. But when you have a solid process in place—and the internal enablement to keep it running—growth becomes a whole lot easier.

Napkin Notes

• “Stop Creating Media Like Inventory” – a short punch in the gut from Dark Star Crashes. The takeaway is to stop treating content like parts on an assembly line. Make work that carries an idea, rather than just filling a slot.

• “Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action. Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.” – James Clear

Let me tell you about the worst purchase I ever made at work.

It was a few years ago. Gen AI tools were just catching on, and I started looking for ways to add AI into our production workflow.

So, I:

• Scoured product reviews and forums

• Found a tool that matched my criteria

• Built an internal business case

• Got leadership buy-in and company-wide support

And eventually signed a one-year contract with a promising tool.

But there was a problem. I just didn't know it at the time.

We're Here, but Should We Have Come?

I invested a ton of time and energy an social capital to get that project off the ground. Everything I researched pointed to this tool as the right choice for the problem I was trying to solve.

But once I understood more about how AI tools like that work, it became painfully clear that ChatGPT on its own could do most of what we needed for a fraction of the cost.

Needless to say, we never fully implemented that tool. Spent a lot of money. Wasted a lot of people's time. And I felt like a failure for investing so much in an initiative that died on the vine.

What I didn't know then is that my experience is fairly normal for B2B buying decisions.

The Psychological Toll of the Buyer’s Journey

You've heard the stat that 70 percent of the buyer's journey happens before talking to sales.

But marketers often don't fully consider what happens during that time.

Just like my story, it's a lot of self-directed research, making a business case, getting internal buy-in, and defending the decision against any skeptics that get in the way.

And it all takes an emotional and psychological toll, leading to what behavioral scientists call Escalation of Commitment.

Picture a VP of Customer Success at a mid-sized SaaS company.

She's three months into building the case for a $200K customer health scoring platform. She's done the research, run the demos, and built compelling ROI projections around preventing customer churn.

But the process has been exhausting.

Three rounds of stakeholder meetings, endless questions from finance, pushback from her team, and the CEO keeps asking if it’s really the right move.

She’s staked her reputation on this initiative. So when someone questions whether health scoring platforms actually reduce churn, it doesn't feel like helpful information—it feels like an attack.

She's gone too far down this path to turn back now. The psychological cost of admitting she might be wrong feels impossibly high. So she doubles down on her commitment and charges forward.

Escalation of Commitment is a vicious cycle:

• Commit to an approach

• Hit obstacles or resistance

• Double down instead of pivoting

• Defend decision to stakeholders

• Escalate your commitment even more

Most marketing teams try to shock buyers out of this pattern. They create provocative messaging and content that challenges assumptions, points out mistakes, and highlights the cost of inaction.

It's a proven approach for grabbing attention and driving action. But when buyers are already emotionally invested in a decision, it backfires.

The Coaching Mindset

What if, instead of trying to provoke buyers out of their current approach, we helped them evolve it?

Instead of: "Five Mistakes You're Making in Your Sales Training Strategy"

Try: "One Simple Way High-Performing Sales Teams Accelerate Training Results"

Instead of: "Your Current Content Strategy Isn't Working"

Try: "The Missing Piece Preventing Your Content From Reaching Its Full Potential"

Notice the pattern? You're not attacking their current approach. Rather, you position your insight as an enhancement to what they're already doing.

The formula is:

1. Validate their thinking ("You were right to focus on...")

2. Acknowledge progress ("Teams like yours have seen success...")

3. Introduce a new perspective ("What we're seeing now...")

4. Frame as evolution ("This builds on what you have...")

Instead of making buyers feel defensive, you help them feel smarter for considering a new approach.

The challenge, of course, is turning this insight into something your team can actually execute.

Here's How I'd Roll This Out

1. Start with the team conversation

Position this as adding a psychological layer to what we're already doing, not starting over: "We're going to coach buyers to rethink their approach instead of provoking them to change their minds."

2. Map buyer escalation patterns

Comb through call recordings, customer interviews, and talk to customer-facing teams. What do buyers typically think their problem is when they first come to us? What's the actual problem we end up solving? The goal is learning our prospects' frame of mind and how it changes over time.

3. Audit existing content

Which assets might accidentally make committed buyers feel defensive? Which could be quickly refreshed with de-escalating headlines? Test new versions against originals to build team confidence and get data to show it works.

4. Create targeted content

Build new marketing and sales assets using the de-escalation framework. Work with sales leaders to integrate the approach into discovery conversations, and build AI workflows plus editorial processes to scale production without losing quality.

It would take some time. But my hunch is that we’ll capture more revenue from buyers who would have otherwise dismissed our provocative messaging.

Napkin Notes

• "Neurologically speaking—and contrary to popular belief—we don't make logical decisions. We make emotional ones. And emotional avoidance clouds our decision-making." – Executive Coach Joe Hudson, from this excellent article.

• "Writing is a costly signal of caring about something. Good writing, in fact, might be a sign of pathological caring." From Velocity Partners’ Yes, AI Is Making You Stupid

• Try this experiment: Track how much time your team spends creating versus debating for one month. I bet you'll find they're spending more energy defending their creative choices than making them. That's not a creative process. That's an endurance test.

“AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do.”

That's what Klarna’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg late last year, right before he replaced the entire customer service department with AI chatbots, cutting the workforce by roughly 40 percent.

The result? They boasted $10 million in savings thanks to “AI efficiencies,” but reported $99 million in losses for Q1 this year.

So, you do the math.

Siemiatkowski now admits that cutting costs wasn’t the best idea. “Cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this. What you end up having is lower quality.”

Try not to point and laugh at Klarna. The reality is a lot of companies are facing similar pressures to do more with less.

Two Paths to AI

There are two ways companies think about the value of AI.

“This could save us so much money.”

Or,

“This could help us do so much more.”

That’s the difference between efficiency and cutting costs. Companies often conflate the two, perhaps because so many use the word “efficiencies” to spin budget cuts when things get hard.

But there’s an important distinction.

A cost-focus is reductive. They look for ways to cut costs to improve profits, and quality becomes a casualty in the process.

An efficiency-focus is additive. They want to augment their team’s talent to make them more efficient and effective, without sacrificing quality.

Of course it’s tempting to cut costs with AI. But don't cut the good out of the equation. The companies making headlines are learning the hard way that there's a line you shouldn’t cross.

The Quality Line You Can’t Cross

I've been thinking about where that line sits, and I keep coming back to the customer experience. It's the last bastion of quality.

Prospects and customers will put up with a lot if you have a good product, but if you push it too far, they’ll walk out the door.

Take Duolingo. They replaced human translators and content writers with AI. Sounds smart if you’re cost-focused, but it’s backfiring. People are calling the AI output “boring” and, worse, it makes mistakes. The brand is losing the fun, quirky personality that made Duolingo stand out in the first place.

Quality slips, and people aren’t happy. The customer experience suffers, so they leave.

When you automate interactions that have historically been human-to-human—like sales, customer service, or brand—it feels disingenuous and cheap. Like the company doesn't care enough about its customers to warrant spending money on them.

People notice the robotic tone in writing, sure. But it's way more pronounced when talking at an automated agent or chatting with a bot that clearly doesn't understand your question.

That kind of customer experience is the last thing you should automate. Your customers have enough robots in their lives already.

What Smart Teams Automate

So what should you be automating?

All the behind-the-scenes, workflow heavy stuff that doesn't directly touch the customer experience but absolutely drains your team's energy.

• Data processing.

• Administrative workflows.

• Content tagging.

• The spreadsheet swamp of sadness that bogs your people down and keeps them from their best work.

Automate that, but don’t sacrifice the customer experience.

You can use AI to cut creative talent and surrender your content to the same cheap robot labor that every other company employs. Or you can use AI to finally free your team from mundane tasks, clearing the way for them to build memorable, meaningful work that reminds people there are still humans behind your brand.

I know which one I'd choose. I'm betting you do too.

Worth Noting

• AI accountability gap. Maybe it’s time to move from AI adoption to AI governance. McKinsey's latest research shows only 27% of companies review all AI-generated content before it goes public, while 47% of organizations have experienced negative consequences from using AI.

• The market strikes back. Google announced its March 2024 update achieved a 45% reduction in low-quality, unoriginal content from search results, exceeding their 40% target. Mediavine (a major ad network) terminated publisher accounts for overusing AI content, stating they "do not monetize low-quality, mass-produced, unedited, or undisclosed AI content."

Try This

Want to find safe places to automate? Try this short exercise with your team:

1. Have everyone write down their three most draining tasks

2. For each task, ask: "Would customers notice if we automated this?"

3. Pick one or three where the answer is "no" and automate it for 30 days

4. Track time saved and team satisfaction

If both metrics improve and no customers complain, you've found your sweet spot for automation.

Napkin Notes

• “The words in advertising are like the windows in a store. You must be able to look right through them and see the product. If you see the window, it's dirty-and you're going to see yourself, or you're going to see the smear. You're not going to see the product, and you're going to lose.” – Eugene Schwartz

• Google announced AI mode, and I appreciate how Garrett Sussman breaks down the key points.

• The CEO of Anthropic says that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. This from the guy who’s building the tools.

CFOs love paid marketing.

It's neat, predictable, and fits nicely in a spreadsheet.

Spend $10,000, get $30K back. It's clean math they can depend on.

Content, by contrast, is like Paid's misunderstood sibling. (The one who doesn't want to go to business school, dad. He just wants to make art.)

Organic and brand-focused content is messy, hard to measure, and it takes time to see returns.

Unpredictable? CFOs aren't crazy about that. So we have to justify our existence.

And that's where I think a lot of marketing leaders make a mistake.

Talk in Terms of Risk

I don’t imagine CFOs like surprise parties.

Their whole job revolves around making the unpredictable predictable.

So when you walk in asking to shift budget to content marketing, it’s like asking them to trade the certainty they love for some potential that might pay off later. Not an easy pitch.

When your CFO says, "What's the ROI?" they really want to know:

• "How certain are you about the projected returns?"

• "How long before we see tangible results?"

• "What happens if it doesn't work as planned?"

CFOs aren't against making more money. They're against not knowing when or if they'll make that money.

Content as Investment, Not Expense

If you walk into your CFO’s office talking about content as a cost center, you've already lost the battle.

But if you frame it as an asset that appreciates and pays dividends over time, you're speaking a language they understand.

Content you publish today might bring in just a handful of leads this quarter, but it keeps working for you month after month, year after year, with little additional investment.

Unlike paid media that stops paying back the moment you stop spending, content keeps bringing in traffic and leads long after you publish.

Okay. You get it. So how do you translate this into numbers?

Content Math

How do you make your creative, long-term content play fit nicely on a spreadsheet? Here are three ideas.

1. CAC-Based Measurement

If you sell a straightforward product with a quick sales cycle, this is your play.

Calculate how much it costs to acquire a customer through each channel and compare. And don’t forget to account for time.

While paid’s CAC stays relatively consistent month to month, content marketing's CAC starts high and drops over time as your content continues to work with minimal upkeep.

2. Pipeline Influence

Selling complex solutions or professional services? CAC probably isn't your metric.

Sales cycles drag on forever, and it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint what actually led to the sale.

So instead of CAC, track how your content influences qualified pipeline. For example, if you influenced $10M in pipeline from a $50K content budget, that’s a 200:1 return.

3. Intellectual Property

This one’s out of the box.

Think about when HubSpot acquired The Hustle and Semrush bought Backlinko. They invested millions in content libraries and an established audience.

Why? Because they valued those assets like other business investments—by calculating their ongoing returns. They looked at:

• The cost to rebuild that audience through paid channels (often millions per year)

• The predictable traffic that generates leads month after month

• The established authority that would take years to build from scratch

So instead of treating content as a marketing expense, present it as capital with lasting value.

Track metrics that finance understands. Things like replacement cost (what you'd pay to recreate it today), traffic value (what you'd pay for equivalent paid traffic), and projected future returns.

Build Your Case to Finance

CFOs don’t hate content marketing. They hate uncertainty.

Show them how your content holds value over time.

Yes, the initial payback period for content is longer than paid. But once you build a decent library, the quarter-to-quarter performance becomes more predictable.

Plus, you don't need to make it an either/or proposition.

You could present a plan that starts heavier on paid (for predictable quick wins) and gradually shifts toward organic as content starts pulling its weight.

Worth Noting

• Self-reported attribution is making a comeback. As cookies disappear, marketers are returning to simply asking customers "How did you hear about us?" to capture “dark” touchpoints. This combination of qualitative data with digital attribution provides a more complete picture of how content influences buying decisions.

• B2B measurement is still a dumpster fire. Forrester reports that only 3% of B2B organizations consistently use data to inform decisions. If you can show your CFO meaningful metrics about your content program, you're already miles ahead of competitors who might as well be guessing.

Try This

Want to impress your CFO in just 30 minutes? Here's a dead-simple way to show the long-term value of just one piece of content:

1. Pick your star performer. Find one piece of content that's been live at least six months. Could be a blog post, guide, video, whatever.

2. Grab just two numbers.

• How many monthly views is it getting? (use a three-month average)

• What's the conversion rate?

3. Do some fifth-grade math.

• Monthly visits × conversion rate × average deal size = What it makes you each month

• That monthly number × 24 months = What it'll make you over two years (and that's being conservative)

That's it. No attribution models. No spreadsheets. Just a simple calculation that proves a single piece of content keeps paying you back long after you've paid to create it. Even your most skeptical finance leader will get it.

Napkin Notes

• Mary Keough says that two things set great marketers from the pack: Focus and intention. Most teams are drowning in tactics—trade shows, webinars, paid ads, content—but rarely ask if it's actually working. Worth a read.

• I recently read about Morgan McBride, who runs a DIY home improvement site called Charleston Crafted. In March 2024, she posed for photos for a Google ad celebrating how the search giant helped her business grow. By the time the ad ran a month later, her traffic from Google had fallen more than 70%. She suspected people were getting renovation advice from AI answers at the top of the SERP instead.

• I was on a podcast. Check out the latest episode of Demand-Geniuses.

This struck me (again) last week at our annual Revenue Summit.

After three days packed with keynotes, workshops, networking, socializing, and customer meetings, I left exhausted.

Don't get me wrong—I genuinely love these events. I get fired up about our products, our team, and seeing firsthand how we're actually (not hyperbole) helping our customers.

But I'm an introvert. I enjoy being around people, it just burns energy. After a while, my tank hits empty, and I need some space and quiet to refuel.

Some people exude a seemingly limitless amount of energy at work. They're like well-oiled machines, assembled in the future and sent back to our time to achieve a singular objective: Hustle.

I'm not built like that.

If you’re an introvert, you get it. But after working in sales-led organizations my entire career, I've learned it isn't always easy for others to understand.

The Misunderstood Contributor

You know how it goes in sales and marketing. The most charismatic and outgoing people get noticed. They're visible. They're social. They're "passionate." And passion, in most organizations, is measured by how visibly excited someone appears to be at meetings and events.

Meanwhile, introverts are more comfortable operating behind the scenes, building the systems and processes and frameworks that make everything else possible.

Since we're not on stage, it's easy for our work to get overlooked.

And therein lies the dilemma.

It happens in subtle ways.

• The thoughtful analysis sitting unread while an impromptu whiteboard session gets all the attention

• The carefully documented insights that never make it into strategy because they weren't delivered with enough flair

• The quiet creative whose name somehow never comes up for promotion despite leaving fingerprints on every successful initiative

These small slights accumulate. And one day, another desk is empty. No dramatic exit interview, no passionate plea for recognition. Just the gradual drip of strategic depth, leaking from your team.

Okay. This isn't a eulogy for introverts at work. Far from it.

My point is that high-performing teams need both types of energy to thrive.

It Takes Two

As an introvert in marketing, I've had to stretch myself constantly:

• I've learned to prepare more thoroughly before meetings so I can contribute confidently

• I've adopted “recharge” routines that help me recover in a short time after intense social interactions

• And I've gotten better at communicating my working style so teammates don't misinterpret my need for space

Is it fair that introverts have to adapt to a workplace designed for extroverts? Probably not. But it's better than being constantly overlooked.

The most effective introverts don't ask for special treatment. They recognize that getting ahead means being visible, shaking hands, and yes, attending the occasional networking event.

Extroverts I've worked with have learned to adjust, too:

• They invite space for quieter teammates to speak up during group meetings

• They recognize that thoughtful ideas often come after a brainstorm, not during it

• And they've learned that silence doesn't immediately mean disinterest

Engagement looks different on everyone. That teammate staying late to perfect your campaign architecture cares just as much as the one high-fiving people at kickoff.

They're just expressing it differently.

Worth Noting

• Passion Bias – Supervisors are more likely to perceive extroverted employees as passionate compared to introverts, even when the two groups report similar levels of excitement and motivation for their work (Harvard Business School).

• Subtle Selling – A 2023 analysis by Objective Management Group found that 62% of the best salespeople (top 5%) are introverts. Introverts can excel in sales thanks to their consultative approach, strong listening skills, and ability to focus on complex, long-term deals.

Try This

Ever notice how ad-hoc brainstorms favor quick thinkers and leave quiet creatives behind? Here's a more inclusive design-thinking variation to try:

Frame the Challenge (10 min)

• Define what challenge you're solving and why it matters

• Share key constraints and insights to ground everyone

Silent Ideation (15 min)

• Everyone works individually

• Give simple prompts like "How might we..." to guide thinking

• This quiet time is gold for your introverts

Equal Airtime (20 min)

• Each person shares their top three ideas, no interruptions

• Two minutes max per person

• Capture everything

Find the Winners (15 min)

• Look for patterns

• Combine similar concepts

• Vote on what to pursue

Within that hour, you’ll create an environment where everyone contributes their best thinking. Your extroverts still get to collaborate, and your introverts have space to formulate ideas worth hearing.

Napkin Notes

• “Whoever you are, bear in mind that appearance is not reality. Some people act like extroverts, but the effort costs them energy, authenticity, and even physical health. Others seem aloof or self-contained, but their inner landscapes are rich and full of drama.” – Susan Cain

• Creative breakthroughs happen when you have the space to connect dots that aren't obviously related. That rarely happens in a room full of people.

Creative work that once required specialized talent can now be approximated with a few well-written prompts.

We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of what AI can do. And with every new feature and every new discovery, we’re left awestruck and spellbound by its potential.

But beneath the surface, a division is forming in marketing teams everywhere.

• On one side: Strategists and enthusiasts marveling at AI's capabilities, automating everything they can, and sharing with fervent amazement what these tools can produce.

• On the other: Creative professionals—writers, designers, illustrators—in the midst of an existential crisis as they watch their craft become quickly commoditized.

To be clear: This isn't another "authenticity vs. automation" debate.

But the undercurrents of the conversation are worth exploring. Because between all the breathless banter about AI breakthroughs and cautionary tales about creativity lost, there’s a restless buzz of apprehension—the sound of opposing sides reacting to the same economic pressures from different positions of power.

Different Positions, Same Pressure

When executives celebrate saving thousands of hours of work thanks to AI, it doesn’t mean they believe it delivers superior results. They're feeling relief from the immense pressure they’re under to deliver more with less.

Their excitement masks the underlying knowledge that their job depends on aggressive efficiency goals that were impossible to hit a year ago.

Still, the language they use is telling.

Creative work is often framed as a "cost center" instead of an investment. Content creation is framed as a "nightmare" to be solved. Execs applaud cutting costs while brand is reduced to a line item on a budget sheet.

Meanwhile, creative professionals are boiling in an existential crisis. They’ve spent years mastering a craft that’s suddenly deemed "automatable." When your life's work becomes an algorithm’s parlor trick, you begin to question what the future holds for your profession.

This tension isn't visible in boardrooms or strategy meetings.

It's felt in quiet moments of anxiety:

• When a CMO scrolls through budget sheets by lamp light, knowing they need to cut another 15% before this week’s board meeting

• When a talented copywriter solemnly updates her resume, wondering whether 15 years of experience is now worth less than $20 per month

• When creatives compare their rate to the pennies it costs AI to rip off their life's work

It’s the same economic anxiety from two different sides—one side with power to make decisions, and one subject to those decisions. Both sides are responding to the immense pressures to do exponentially more with continuously less.

A Paradoxical Response

Here's where it gets interesting. As companies rush toward AI-powered efficiency, audiences are beginning to move in the opposite direction—developing a heightened sensitivity for anything that feels fake.

It's the Uncanny Valley of content—somewhere deep down, people can tell when something's off. Even if it's a close simulation, there are nuances to creative work that trained eyes catch consciously, but most only see subconsciously.

The result is a strange paradox: We're optimizing for production while our audience is filtering for authenticity.

The marketing world is experiencing its own version of the Innovator's Dilemma. Companies invest heavily in automation to gain a competitive edge, only to discover they're perfecting something their audience is increasingly tuning out.

Here’s What’s Happening

The rise of AI democratized access to baseline creative quality. Anyone with an internet connection and a keyboard can now produce content that looks and sounds…good enough.

The technical barrier to entry has virtually disappeared.

Meanwhile, companies realize they can save a lot of money if they cut back creative budget. And they’re converging on the same AI-generated tactics to fill the gap.

That, in turn, is creating the exact opposite of differentiation. It's like showing up to a trade show where every booth has nearly identical messaging with different logos slapped on.

The market’s response?

• The sameness becomes a dull background hum that audiences begin to filter out

• Distinctly human work stands out as a bright spot against a tapestry of monotony

• Truly creative content becomes exponentially more valuable because it's increasingly harder to find

When people are anxious about their economic future, they don't have patience for content that wastes their time.

What Both Sides Get Right

The tension between companies and creatives isn't about resisting change vs. embracing progress. Both sides are making valid points in response to real pressures and opportunities.

AI enthusiasts are right about several things:

• Content creation has genuinely become more efficient, with tools that can generate solid first drafts in seconds

• The volume of work required for modern marketing is virtually impossible to produce manually at scale

• Many repetitive aspects of creative work (like writing basic product descriptions or collecting data) don't require human creativity

Meanwhile, creatives are equally correct that:

• AI still struggles with originality, emotional resonance, and cultural nuance

• The quality gap between AI-generated and human-created work remains painfully obvious to discerning audiences

• Strategic creative thinking—understanding why something works beyond just how to make it—remains a uniquely human trait

So, what can we do?

The Choice

Marketing leaders face a fundamental decision about AI's role in their organization.

Teams who only chase efficiency will use AI to cut creative talent, surrendering their content to the same cheap robot labor that almost every other company employs.

Teams who value creativity will use AI to finally free their creatives from the spreadsheet swamp of sadness, clearing the way for memorable, meaningful work that reminds people there are still humans behind the brand.

The solution, in my mind, leans more toward the latter.

Give your creatives time to think, strategize, and push new ideas beyond what’s obvious. Automate mundane tasks as much as possible. And set clear boundaries to protect your creative capital.

AI is a powerful tool for every marketer to do more with less—just don’t overlook the value of the human touch behind it.

Worth Noting

• Companies Are Hedging Their AI Bets - Forward-thinking organizations are increasingly viewing AI as a way to enhance human capabilities rather than replace them. Adobe's 2025 AI and Digital Trends report found that 80% of senior executives plan to increase spending on new technology, but 69% also plan to increase spending on talent, recognizing that "technology investment isn't replacing people...success takes more than just adopting new tools."

• AI Isn’t Always Easy to Spot - Humans can barely distinguish between AI and human-written content, with accuracy landing under 40% (no better than a random guess). Audiences claim to value authenticity, but they’re not so good at identifying it.

• The ‘Show Me Your Work’ Movement - People are turned off by businesses when they learn that so-called “heartfelt” content is generated by AI. The authenticity penalty is especially severe for emotional content compared to factual information, suggesting a clear boundary line that brands shouldn't cross.

Try This

Here’s an exercise to find where AI can free up your team's creative capacity without threatening their value:

1. Map Their Workload: Have your team track their work for one week, categorizing tasks as something like:

   • "Robot work" (repetitive, formula-driven, data-processing)

   • "Human work" (strategic thinking, creative concepting, emotional storytelling)

   • "Hybrid work" (tasks that benefit from both human insight and AI efficiency)

2. Identify the Low-Hanging Fruit: Look for tasks where team members spend significant time on "robot work" that could be automated, like:

   • Writing first drafts for formulaic content (product descriptions, instructions, summaries)

   • Image creation for social channels or background visuals

   • Basic research and data gathering

3. Address the Anxiety: Address fears head-on with your creative team. Position AI as their copilot, not their replacement. Try saying: "We need your expertise to pilot these AI tools effectively. Your job isn't at risk, it's evolving. Your creative judgment and strategic thinking are more valuable than ever."

4. Set Clear Boundaries: Decide and document which creative assets must always have predominant human involvement (brand voice, flagship content, strategic messaging) vs. where AI can take the lead.

This simple exercise creates transparency, reduces anxiety, and helps your team see AI as an ally rather than a threat.

Napkin Notes

• The corporate voice itself has become a liability. When company communications sound so artificially different from how real humans talk, it signals to audiences that the company doesn't understand—or worse, doesn't care about—the real human experience.

• "What if execution becomes so cheap, so automated, that the idea itself becomes the rare commodity?" A thought-provoking statement from this brilliant article by Tim Metz.

• “There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.” Raymond Chandler wrote that in 1944. It still rings true.

Last week, I introduced you to Decision Tax.

Decision Tax is the undertow of indecision that’s slowly sinking your marketing team's time and energy.

It’s the price our teams pay when ideas and decisions get bogged down by politics.

To illustrate:

It's Thursday afternoon. You’re approaching hour two of what was supposed to be a 30-minute planning meeting.

Sales and product passive-aggressively debate what should be top priority next month.

"The product launch is strategic," says product.

"But we need revenue right now," counters sales.

Meanwhile, you watch the sun crawl across the afternoon sky. Your content lead mentally updates their LinkedIn profile. And that one eager marketing manager is furiously taking notes that will never be referenced again.

Two hours of combined salary, wasted. Two hours of time you and your team could be doing literally anything else.

That’s Decision Tax at work.

Long Tail Thinking

Decision Tax Is Draining Your Content ROI

Every content request that lands in your inbox carries a hidden cost that never shows up on a budget spreadsheet…

Read more

a year ago · Anton Rius

Poor Prioritization Compounds Over Time

Last time your team faced competing priorities, how did you really decide what made the cut?

Was it the project that would impress the board? The loudest voice in the room? Whatever aligned with the CEO's latest pet project?

Most teams don't have a real prioritization system—just workplace politics wearing a strategy costume. So when making important decisions, whoever has the most conviction (not necessarily the most expertise) wins.

Team members learn that value is subjective and politics trump merit. Pretty soon, you're sitting on planning calls with brilliant but disengaged creatives who are simply waiting to be told what to work on next.

Content teams might have it worst of all.

Other marketing functions have established metrics (paid media has ROAS, demand has conversion rates), but how do you measure the value of content?

This is where Decision Tax compounds exponentially. Without clear metrics for ideas or potential value, teams spend hours debating subjective opinions. They schedule follow-up meetings to continue discussions that never reach resolution.

All that wasted time and creative energy—just because they never properly defined what makes content valuable in the first place.

So What Really Makes Content Valuable?

When most content teams talk about value, they typically talk about:

• Business Value: "Does this content support our strategic goals?"

• Audience Value: "Does this content address a real need for our audience?"

Both of these facets of value are vital for any content marketing initiative.

But what happens when teams need to decide between two or more competing priorities that both fit the criteria?

The content teams that consistently deliver exceptional work go a level deeper when evaluating ideas. They examine several other facets of value, like:

• Cross-functional utility – How many teams can leverage this content? When marketing creates a customer story that sales, customer success, and HR can all use, that's infinitely more valuable than a piece that serves a single function.

• Scalability – Can this content be easily adapted across channels and formats? Content that requires minimal rework to function across your website, social channels, sales enablement, and event marketing creates compound returns.

• Longevity – Will this content be relevant six months from now? A year? Three years? The shelf-life of content dramatically impacts its ultimate return.

I share the framework and scoring model in the Try This section below.

You can use this approach to reduce the Decision Tax your team pays for every new content idea. When your entire team understands the criteria for judging what's valuable, you can make quicker decisions without getting stuck in endless debates.

Worth Noting

• CMOs Are Fighting Invisible Battles – According to the 2024 State of (Dis)Content Report, nearly half (43.7%) of content marketers cite "workflow issues and approval processes" as a major non-creation challenge, making it the third most common obstacle they face.

• AI Won't Save Us From Bad Decisions – Everyone's rushing to implement AI content tools to produce more faster, but it creates a new problem. The bottleneck isn't production—it's deciding what deserves to exist in the first place.

• The LinkedIn Rebellion Has Begun – LinkedIn’s algorithm is rewarding people who ditch the corporate speak and just show up as humans. Nick Power at Noun Project is the perfect example. He's crushing it with absurd, funny, and awkward posts that are grabbing engagement in a way that corporate posts can't touch. He’s carving a new path while most other marketers are stuck debating whether em dashes originate with AI.

Try This

Next time your team debates competing content priorities, try this simple but powerful scoring model.

The Content Value Scoring Model

Step 1: Create Your Scoring Matrix

Draw a three-column table on a whiteboard (or in your digital workspace) with rows for each content idea. Label the columns:

Column 1: Audience Value (Score 1-5)

• 1 = Tangentially related to audience interests

• 3 = Addresses known secondary concerns

• 5 = Directly solves a top-priority challenge verified through research

Score each content idea based on:

• Does it address a verified customer need?

• Is it unique compared to what's already available?

• Is it timely and relevant right now?

Column 2: Business Utility (Score 1-5)

• 1 = Indirectly supports broader business goals

• 3 = Clearly aligns with a secondary business objective

• 5 = Directly advances top organizational priorities

Score each content idea based on:

• How directly does it support top strategic priorities?

• How many teams or functions can effectively use it?

• Does it fill a critical gap in your content ecosystem?

Column 3: Impact Potential (Multiplier 1-3x)

• 1x = Primarily serves one function with limited longevity

• 2x = Serves multiple functions OR has direct revenue impact

• 3x = Serves multiple functions AND has direct revenue impact

Score each content idea based on:

• How many departments or teams can effectively leverage this content?

• How directly will it influence revenue/pipeline metrics?

• What's its expected useful life?

Step 2: Calculate the Content Value Score

Now calculate the Content Value score for each idea using this formula: (Audience Value + Business Utility) × Impact Potential

This gives you a maximum score of 30 points [(5+5)×3] and a minimum of 2 points [(1+1)×1].

Step 3: Prioritize Based on the Score

Use this scoring guide to make better prioritization decisions:

• 25-30: Must-Create Immediately. These rare, high-value assets should be fast-tracked. They're your strategic cornerstones that will drive disproportionate returns. Allocate your best resources here.

• 18-24: High Priority. Schedule in your next content cycle. These are valuable assets that should be in your near-term roadmap.

• 12-17: Medium Priority. Add to your upcoming quarter's plan if resources allow. These are solid ideas worth pursuing when bandwidth permits.

• 6-11: Low Priority. Keep on your radar but place in your backlog. Only move forward if higher-value content is complete or if a specific tactical need emerges.

• 2-5: Reconsider or Revise. These ideas likely won't deliver meaningful returns. Either significantly rethink the concept or redirect those resources elsewhere.

The beauty of this framework is how it moves discussions from "I think this is important" to "Here's exactly why this deserves our time."

Try it with your last three content requests. I bet you'll find that at least one of them wouldn't have made the cut if you'd used this framework.

Napkin Notes

• “The content we regret is rarely the content we decided not to create.” I wrote this down after killing a project that would have consumed three months of work for questionable returns.

• Decision debt compounds just like technical debt. Every arbitrary content decision creates a precedent that makes the next arbitrary decision more likely. Break the cycle.

• The quality of your content is directly proportional to the quality of questions asked during planning. Teams that normalize uncomfortable questions will outperform those that prioritize consensus and harmony.

Every content request that lands in your inbox carries a hidden cost that never shows up on a budget spreadsheet.

I call it Decision Tax, and it's bleeding marketing teams dry without them even noticing.

Think about it. Every piece of content that gets proposed, debated, created, and distributed consumes organizational energy—meetings to discuss it, emails to review it, time to produce it.

It's every status meeting that should've been an email, every review cycle that adds nothing, every "quick sync" that kills momentum.

And it's costing you more than you think.

What's At Stake

When this tax goes unchecked, the symptoms are painfully obvious. Your best writers spend more time in meetings than writing. Your designers create thirteen versions of the same asset because one more person needs to review.

Your team's creative energy gets sapped by endless revisions and stakeholder debates. They have no gas left in their tanks for other high-impact work.

I've been there, unfortunately.

My team once spent 14 days—yes, 14 shameful days—getting a single homepage headline approved.

We started with a clear, compelling vision. Then we threw it in the corporate blender of stakeholder reviews, revisions, and countless drive-bys with "just one more quick thought."

What emerged was a watery soup of meaningless superlatives that no one loved but everyone could tolerate. All told, that single headline burned over 120 hours of company time. And by launch day, we were too exhausted to fight for what we'd lost.

Look, I'm not proud. But this isn't an isolated horror story.

Every day, marketing teams waste hundreds of valuable hours on low-stakes decisions that don't warrant the attention. Worse yet, all that deliberation often produces worse outcomes.

The cruel irony is that we pay Decision Tax twice—once with time and again with quality.

The Decision Tax Rate Is Rising

The IRS has nothing on these three market forces driving up our Decision Tax liability:

1. AI solved the production problem. Five years ago, creating quality content required significant time and specialized skills. Today, AI generates serviceable drafts in seconds. Meanwhile, our decision-making and creative-thinking abilities remain stubbornly human. The result? Marketing teams face an overwhelming flood of content possibilities with no reliable way to separate high-value opportunities from time-wasting larks.

2. Executives are increasingly risk-averse. As content becomes more visible and permanent, executives get increasingly paranoid about what goes public. Every piece of content now represents a potential reputation risk, leading execs to overly scrutinize even minor decisions. What used to be a marketing director's call now requires VP or C-suite sign off, and by the time it's approved, it's lost its personality and punch.

3. Everyone's an armchair critic. Everyone wants a say in content decisions, but they seldom bring expertise. Marketing teams now field input from product, sales, legal, and executives—each adding their perspectives and preferences without understanding audience needs or marketing principles. And those added voices often lead to muddled compromises.

What makes Decision Tax truly insidious is that the slow drain on resources masks itself as productivity.

Your calendar is full. Your team is busy. Everyone's giving input. And suddenly, without realizing it, you're the marketing leader with a team that's working harder than ever but somehow delivering less real impact.

It's time to stop paying taxes on decisions that don't matter and start investing in the ones that get returns.

Next week, I'll bring my framework for slashing Decision Tax and turning your content into an appreciating asset. Until then…

Worth Noting

• Decision Fatigue is Real – Neuroscience research shows that decision quality declines dramatically throughout the day as mental resources are depleted. When your team debates 13 small content decisions before lunch, they've got nothing left for the strategic thinking that actually matters.

• CMOs Are Fighting Invisible Battles – According to McKinsey, only half of CEO-CMO pairs at the same company agree on marketing's primary role. Think about that. How can you possibly make efficient decisions when you can't even agree what game you're playing? This fundamental disconnect is Decision Tax in its purest form—marketing leaders spending precious energy just trying to get everyone on the same page.

• Corporate Approvals Are So 2020 – Marketing teams are shifting budget from traditional ads to brand-led content that builds trust. But many aren't prepared to abandon the rigid corporate approval processes designed for ads—effectively strangling the authenticity that makes creator-style content work in the first place.

Try This

Run a Decision Tax Audit at your next team meeting:

1. Map the paper trail. Pick a recent content initiative and track down every version, from messy first draft to final version. Lay them out chronologically on a conference table (or, you know, do it digitally).

2. Play "spot the difference." Compare the first solid draft with the final version. Ask your team: "Did our extensive review process meaningfully improve the content, or did we just make it different?"

3. Calculate the real cost. Tally the total person-hours spent on revisions, meetings, and feedback rounds from that first solid draft to final version. Then ask: "If we had invested those same hours in other projects, what could we have accomplished?"

4. Create a decision-free zone. Identify one upcoming project where you'll dramatically limit stakeholders and approval stages. Document your new process and commit to it publicly.

This exercise won't solve everything, but it will give you evidence to push back on unnecessary review cycles and build momentum for a more efficient process.

Napkin Notes

• "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." – James Clear

• The traditional CMO is vanishing. Major brands like Starbucks, Uber, and UPS are eliminating their CMO roles entirely, redistributing responsibilities across multiple executives. Only 36% of Fortune 500 top marketers still hold the traditional CMO title.

• CFOs actually support brand marketing? That's what Peep Laja says (sort of) with this data. Think the story would change with a larger sample size?

I lived an hour away from the first reported case of COVID in the US, and overnight, everything changed.

It was March 2020, and at Corporate Visions, where I lead content, we were watching the dominoes start to fall. The company had historically relied on in-person sales training and messaging workshops—the kind that suddenly wouldn't be happening for...well, no one knew how long.

While competitors scrambled to figure out what to do, we launched two virtual sales training toolkits by April. And then proceeded to have two of our best years ever while the rest of the sales training industry slowly figured it out.

Was it chance? Partly. But we'd been experimenting with virtual training modalities and researching their effectiveness long before COVID hit. We had products ready to go.

Of course, no one predicted COVID, but we'd been paying attention to subtle patterns—increasing travel restrictions at companies, growing environmental concerns around business travel, and rising acceptance of video conferencing. These signals weren't obvious, until they suddenly were.

So when the world changed, we adapted while others panicked. And it made all the difference.

That's the marketing metagame in action—and it's the difference between companies that merely survive sudden changes and those that capitalize on them.

The Meta-What?

The "metagame" concept comes from competitive gaming.

It's not the explicit rules of the game, but the game within the game—the underlying and ever-evolving layer of strategies and counter-strategies that emerge as developers make balance changes and players discover (and exploit) what works best.

If you know someone who obsesses over competitive games like League of Legends or Hearthstone, you've seen this dynamic at work. It's why certain characters and strategies become popular, then fall out of favor, then return again.

Here’s where it gets interesting: The vast majority of players are stuck in middle ranks. Sometimes it’s a skill issue, as the kids say, but most of the time the difference between most players and the top 1% is the ability to read the meta and quickly adapt.

Marketing strategy works in much the same way. Most teams are busy mastering today's best practices: optimizing their ABM strategy, fine-tuning their SEO, A/B testing landing pages.

Nothing wrong with that. Table stakes matter. But while they’re working so hard to solidify their stance, the ground keeps shifting beneath their feet.

Now Comes the Hard Part

The best marketing leaders I know connect dots between seemingly unrelated shifts in technology, buyer behavior, economic conditions, and competitive moves. They sense the vibrations in the market before others feel the tremors.

With me so far? Good.

Now, understanding the meta is critical. But it’s not the hardest part. The tough part is convincing everyone else to change direction before the new reality becomes obvious.

I've been in those meetings. You're essentially saying, "I know our current approach has worked well for us, but we need to invest in something completely different."

Try that with your CFO sometime. Not easy.

This is the central challenge that separates good marketing leaders from the top 1%. You not only need to understand and adapt to the meta, but you also need a compelling strategic narrative that brings others along.

At Corporate Visions, we had research to back our virtual approach, which made convincing buyers easier. We'd been running experiments that validated our hypotheses. But I've been on the other side too—missing opportunities because I couldn't get buy-in fast enough or because we were too focused on doing more of what had worked in the past.

Your next big breakthrough won’t come from copying other people’s best work or doing more of the same. You only gain an edge by seeing the underlying patterns and finding new ways to win before it all congeals into conventional wisdom.

Because by the time it's obvious, you've already lost the advantage.

Worth Noting

• AI Prediction > Production – AI is fundamentally changing how we approach personalization. While everyone's focused on using AI to create more content faster, the real players are using it to anticipate what specific buyers need and deliver hyper-relevant content at the right time.

• More Is Not Better – There’s a sea change from simply producing "more" content to producing deeply original, visually compelling, or uniquely positioned work. Creative thinking is a key differentiator, but it demands that leaders foster a culture where breakthrough ideas can flourish.

• Ecosystems Over Funnels – The sales funnel is on life support, and it's taking our attribution models with it. I'm watching CMOs wrestle with the reality that their buyers touch 20+ pieces of content across multiple channels before making a decision. The teams gaining ground are the ones who've stopped obsessing over which content "caused" the conversion and instead build an ecosystem of value that meets buyers at any entry point.

Try This

Try running an "Attribution Stress Test" to uncover which touchpoints in your buyer’s journey are doing the heavy lifting.

1. Pick two recent successful deals and try and map every interaction the buyer had with your marketing content—ads, emails, e-books, events, etc.

2. Bring the data to your team and have them debate this question: "If we removed this touchpoint, would we still have closed the deal?"

3. Identify which moments consistently drive action and allocate more resources to them. Cut or rethink channels that aren’t pulling their weight.

This won’t solve all attribution debates, but it sharpens your focus on what drives results in a messy, non-linear buyer journey.

Napkin Notes

• "Crafting a story that tricks people into making short-term decisions they regret in the long run is the worst kind of marketing sin." Love this quote from Seth Godin.

• Tim Metz wrote an excellent content attribution guide for Animalz. This is one to bookmark.

• Lauren Lang says that “when demand gen leaders run marketing departments, they often treat content as a lead-generation campaign filler rather than a strategic cornerstone.” Discuss.

Let me ask you something.

When was the last time your team produced work that genuinely excited you?

Not "met the brief" kind of work.

But "this changes everything" kind of work.

Here's why I ask: B2B marketing departments are incredibly efficient at producing content, campaigns, and collateral, but systematically terrible at producing breakthrough creative work.

And it's not our teams' fault. It's the environment we've created.

Your Best Ideas Aren't Born in Slack

You've probably had it happen. You’re in the zone, wrestling with a big idea you've been stuck on for weeks. Your energy is electric. You can almost hear the sparks from one brilliant idea after another.

Then you hear the ding.

“Quick question” in Slack.

And just like that—poof—creative thread lost.

Cal Newport talks about "attention residue" (a term coined by Sophie Leroy), where your brain can't fully focus because it's still processing the last interruption. It takes about 20 minutes to get that focus back. But the real cost is more than time.

Every “quick sync” and check-in actively sabotages your team’s ability to produce their best creative work. This might be heresy in a world where collaboration is corporate religion, but creative work has phases—and ideation is an essential and solitary activity.

Think about it. If anyone can use AI to produce decent content, the original idea is everything.

Ideas are currency. And their value is skyrocketing.

Protect Creativity at All Costs

We all have the same 24 hours, but after a day stuffed with meetings, Slack messages, and emails, the creative gas tank is empty. There's nothing left to fuel the work that actually differentiates your brand.

Marketing leaders must protect their team’s creative energy—it's a strategic weapon. While your competitors drown their creatives in task management and meetings that could've been emails, you can create time and space for work that propels you ahead.

The Importance of Ritual

I used to scoff at the idea of creative rituals.

It all seemed a bit precious. But I can’t deny that when I need to create something important—not just another status update—I have my own little pre-game routine.

Rituals are vital for creative work because you can't risk anything pulling you out of your flow. If you think about interacting with your environment—even for a microsecond—it can send your brain off track. Attention residue.

In every truly creative work, you need to eliminate friction between you and your words, your art, your music—whatever it is you're creating right now.

But in marketing, we often expect creative work to function like admin work. Need a breakthrough campaign concept? Great, let's schedule it for Tuesday at 10 AM in the main conference room, right after the budget review and right before the sales meeting.

If you pack their days with status meetings, you're not giving them much time at all.

If you mandate a rigid work schedule, you might not be getting their best creative energy.

If you mandate that they work in an office—even most of the time—you’re adding friction to their space. There are too many distractions and far too many conversations that can pull their focus out of deep work.

Okay, okay.

Some of this might be unrealistic based on your company policies.

But my point stands.

No matter where they work, you must give your creatives space to think.

You know this stat: B2B buyers spend about 70 percent of their buying journey doing their own research.

What you might not realize is what happens before that.

• 80–90% of buyers have their vendor shortlist before starting research (6Sense)

• 78% of B2B buyers shortlist only three vendors to evaluate deeply (Wynter)

So, most buyers have already decided who they want to shop before digging into the details.

And when they finally crack open those browser tabs? They're not starting from zero. They’re trying to:

• Understand their challenges

• Make sense of all the information they find

• Evaluate potential solutions

• Build consensus among stakeholders

Here's what nobody talks about—buyers already have their shortlist before they fully understand their problems. They're doing a ton of research, trying to piece it all together, but they often can't find the answers they need.

And that confusion comes with serious consequences.

The Cost of Confusion

Research from Florida State University's Sales Institute shows that even though buyers spend months doing their own research, they often haven’t identified their problem by the time they reach out to vendors.

It’s not because they're lazy. Trust me, these poor souls are spending too much time trying to understand what they’re doing wrong.

But instead of getting clear answers, they find a hot mess of:

• Vendors pushing their own agenda instead of addressing buyers' needs

• Generic 'thought leadership' that rehashes the same surface-level insights

• Competing claims and contradictory information that causes more confusion than clarity

It makes those buyers' decisions feel like untangling Christmas lights in the dark. And it creates a vicious cycle. The more overwhelmed buyers feel, the more they dig in their heels and stick with their initial assumptions—even when those assumptions are flat-out wrong.

So what happens?

• 71% of buyers go with their first choice product after creating their short list (TrustRadius)

And:

• 81% of buyers express dissatisfaction with their chosen providers (Forrester)

Think about that for a moment.

Buyers don’t find the answers they need, so they throw up their hands and default to buying from their first choice vendor—even when it's not the right choice.

The Root of the Problem

This cycle of confusion isn't entirely the buyer's fault. It's made a whole lot worse by how most companies approach content.

When executives plan their content strategies, they almost always start with their wants and needs:

• "We need to do webinars"

• "We need X blog posts a month"

• "We need more case studies"

• "We need to generate X amount of pipeline"

The logic appears sound. Producing content means more leads. More leads mean more pipeline. Simple math, right?

But there's a problem.

The Problem is that focusing on these self-serving tactics misses the bigger strategic picture. It perpetuates the cycle of confusion I just described.

As a result, most companies miss the opportunity to influence those critical deciding moments early in the buyer's journey—the very moments that determine whether you make the buyer's shortlist (or not).

Seven Critical Moments of Influence

Instead of creating content around what you want to say (which, let's face it, is usually "buy my stuff"), find out what your buyers actually need to know.

You can start by defining the moments where your buyers are actively seeking guidance—moments where you can help them name their problems and get answers they need.

Here's what the moments might look like.

Early in their research journey, buyers are trying to make sense of their challenges and figure out who can help. These early moments include:

• Initial Consideration: When buyers create their first list of vendors based on past experience and what others recommend

• Sense-Making: When buyers try to understand what's actually causing their problems

• Requirements Setting: When buyers decide what they think they need in a solution

In the middle of their journey, they're wrestling with bigger questions. How do they get their stakeholders to agree? How do they justify spending six or seven figures? These moments include:

• Consensus-Building: When buyers try to get everyone on their team to agree on the same solution

• ROI Justification: When buyers need to prove the solution is worth the money

As they get closer to a decision, they're looking for validation. They want to talk to other customers, see the product in action, and confirm they're making the right choice. These moments include:

• Trust-Building: When buyers want to hear from other customers about their experiences

• Validation: When buyers need to see the product in action to confirm it does what they need

"Okay," you say. "But how do we create content for all these moments without blowing our budget and waiting months for results?"

I'm glad you asked.

When Does This Pay Off?

Look, we can philosophize about the "right way" to do content all day, but you've got pipeline targets to hit.

You can't wait for a content transformation that pays off next year, so how do you make this practical and profitable right now?

The answer is: Work backwards from the point of purchase. (Revolutionary, I know.)

Start with content that influences active opportunities in your pipeline.

This is your fastest path to ROI. Focus on those validation and trust-building moments to help buyers clear up lingering doubts and confirm their decision. When you help buyers feel confident about their choice, deals close faster. That means revenue now—not later.

Then, build content that helps build consensus and make the business case.

In these mid-journey moments, your buyers are stuck in agreement-by-committee purgatory, trying to navigate a gauntlet of stakeholders—all with strong opinions, competing priorities, and absolute veto power. The right content here can rescue deals that would otherwise flatline next quarter.

Finally, move to content that helps buyers in early sense-making moments.

These are the moments when buyers are trying to wrap their heads around their problem, understand what solutions even exist, and figure out who can help them—not just sell to them. This is your opportunity to shape how buyers think about their problems and help them see solutions in your terms.

Yes, it's a long game. But it's also the best way to crack those vendor shortlists—before your buyers start their research.

Look, I get it.

The board wants better ROI every quarter.

Your c-suite is demanding more pipeline faster.

Your team is stretched thin, you’re on a tight budget, and here comes AI, promising to grant your wildest content wishes with a push of the button.

Of course you're tempted. Who wouldn't be?

And to be clear, those AI outputs are pretty good. They're grammatically perfect, they hit the right keywords, they follow best practices. They're...fine.

This isn’t to knock you if you’re using AI. I use it every day.

But if you lean too heavily on AI-generated content to communicate, it can slowly erode all the wonderful quirks and qualities that make content unique and different, leaving your brand and your competitors’ swimming in the same muddy puddle of mediocrity.

Once you spot this AI-driven sameness, you can't unsee it. It's like noticing a glitch in the Matrix—and trust me, this rabbit hole goes deep.

The Uncanny Valley of Content

You can see this happening already.

Scroll through LinkedIn these days and you'll feel it—that nagging sense that something's off.

The posts are well-written, they’re structurally sound, but they feel...hollow. You can't quite put your finger on it, but it's there.

This is what robotics professor Masahiro Mori called the Uncanny Valley. It describes people’s emotional response to things that appear almost (but not quite) human. His theory suggests that as artificial creations become too humanlike in appearance, it makes us uncomfortable.

It creeps us out.

And that's exactly what's happening with AI-generated content today. It sounds technically perfect but it’s emotionally empty.

Think people don't notice?

Watch how quickly people pounce on anything that smells like AI. They're eagerly calling out every em dash, parallel structure, and any hint of robotic rhythm.

We get an eery feeling about AI—even if we can't explain why.

A Slow Fade to Black

Here's where this gets really problematic for brands.

First, you start using AI to write your social posts because, hey, who has time to craft original LinkedIn content every day? Then you use it for your blog posts because your editorial calendar is packed and your writers are overwhelmed. Soon you're using it for email campaigns, sales enablement, and maybe even your core brand messaging.

You end up with content that sounds almost human, but just artificial enough to make your audience uncomfortable. And while your CEO celebrates the short-term metrics bump, your audience slowly starts to pull away.

With every AI-generated piece, you trade a piece of your identity for convenience. And instead of being a brand people seek out, it becomes another voice in the corporate choir, singing the same tired hymns.

Think about it: When every company in your industry uses AI to generate their communications, they're all drawing from the same well.

Everyone's messaging slowly blends together.

The impact isn't just external. When you regularly defer to AI to think and write, you get less practice developing and defending your point of view. You spend less time finding compelling ways to express complex ideas.

And you can bet your leadership team will sense the shift. They can tell when you're recycling safe, dull advice instead of bringing sharp, original insights.

Death by a thousand shortcuts. It happens so gradually you might not even notice.

Like the story of the boiling frog, you might not realize you're in trouble until your brand’s already cooked.

Reclaim Your Creativity

Before everyone brings out their pitchforks, let me be clear:

I'm not suggesting you abandon AI tools.

Just be intentional about when and how you use them.

Use AI as a thought partner, not a thought leader. Use it to pressure test ideas, flesh out your thinking, and spark inspiration. Let it handle routine tasks while you focus on what matters—developing a point of view that makes people think, telling stories that make them feel, and building a brand that makes them care.

Will it take more time? You bet. Will it make you squirm sometimes? Like a long overdue workout.

But that discomfort you're feeling?

That's your creative muscles waking up from their AI-induced nap.

Don’t shy away from the friction of wrestling with new ideas, pushing against conventional wisdom, and articulating a truly distinct point of view—that's not inefficiency. That's what takes you from forgettable filler to a brand worth following.

Choose your shortcuts wisely. Don’t outsource your thinking to AI.