Your Content Isn’t Broken. The Way You’re Using It Is.
For a while now, something has felt off.
You’re publishing consistently. You’re showing up on LinkedIn. The blog still gets written. The newsletter still goes out. On paper, everything looks fine.
And yet the returns feel thinner. Engagement feels flatter. Meaningful conversations feel harder to come by.
Most teams respond to this moment the same way: more content, more frequency, more volume. That instinct made sense once. It doesn’t anymore.
Because the problem isn’t that brands stopped publishing. It’s that publishing itself has lost meaning.
The Algorithmic Noise Floor
We’ve crossed an invisible threshold.
Algorithms now decide what’s seen. AI now generates what’s said. Attention dictates who listens. Audiences skim, summarize, or outsource their thinking entirely. Which means your next blog post isn’t competing with a handful of peers—it’s competing with everything that’s ever been written on the topic.
Most of that content isn’t bad. It’s just forgettable.
The market isn’t short on content. It’s drowning in it. And when leaders ask why their marketing “isn’t working like it used to,” they’re usually asking the wrong question.
The real question is simpler…and more difficult: Why would anyone notice?
The Content Treadmill
Here’s the model most organizations are still running, even if they won’t admit it:
→ Pick a topic.
→ Write a post.
→ Send an email.
→ Share it on social media.
→ Repeat next week.
It’s tidy. It’s measurable. It feels productive. And in today’s environment, it’s also transactional.
Each piece exists in isolation. Each message resets the clock. Each post starts from zero. In a world where attention compounds only through familiarity, that’s a structural problem.
The irony is that many brands are working harder than ever just to create less cumulative impact than they did five years ago.
Storytelling Isn’t the Strategy
This is usually where someone says, “We need to tell better stories.”
That’s not wrong — it’s just incomplete.
Storytelling is a delivery mechanism, not a strategy. What actually creates momentum is something far less romantic and far more powerful: a repeated point of view. A consistent narrative. A recognizable cadence.
In other words, not stories — programming.
Think Like a Network, Not a Publisher
In a recent internal conversation, my colleague at Collideascope, Curtis (now there’s some alliteration!) framed it this way: What if we thought about our content platform as “the show?”
That single shift changes everything.
Shows behave differently than posts. A show has a premise. It has a recurring cast. It has a predictable format. Over time, it trains the audience what to expect.
Nobody asks, “What’s the topic this week?” They ask, “Is the next episode out?”
That’s not semantics. That’s strategy.
When you build the show, you stop chasing attention and start earning familiarity.
Familiarity Beats Frequency
Algorithms reward output. Audiences reward recognition.
The brands that are winning right now aren’t louder…they’re clearer. They say the same thing from different angles, in different formats, over longer arcs, with human faces attached.
They don’t publish more. They publish with more intent.
And they stop pretending that every piece of content needs to “convert.”
Which brings us to measurement.
Why Your Metrics Are Misleading You
A lot of marketing frustration comes down to mismatched expectations.
We ask whether a post generated leads, whether a video converted, whether a webinar closed deals. Those are sales questions masquerading as marketing metrics.
Modern marketing does one primary job: it earns the right to a future conversation.
That right is signaled by things like attendance, repeat engagement, and opt-in moments that require time rather than clicks. Warmth matters more than volume. A room full of the right people matters more than a database full of strangers.
Fewer at-Bats. Bigger Swings.
One of the most productive shifts we’ve made internally is this: stop thinking in weekly or daily posts and start thinking in terms of 90-day commitments.
Instead of a blog here and a video there, we design around one idea, one narrative, and one audience tension…explored deeply over time.
That idea gets expressed through short-form video, long-form commentary, live conversations, events or briefings, and follow-up sequences that actually mean something.
Not because every brand needs a podcast or a webinar or a video series. But because ideas need room to breathe.
AI Didn’t Kill Content. It Exposed It.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: AI didn’t lower the bar. It revealed how low the bar already was.
If your content can be replaced by a prompt, it was never strategy. It was output. And C-plus content isn’t neutral anymore. It’s reputationally dangerous.
Because when you’re not in the room to defend yourself or your C+ copy masquerading as thought-leadership, your content speaks for you. And right now, it’s communicating to the market whether you’re thoughtful, or merely present.
The Fix for What Ails Conventional Thinking
What’s broken isn’t content marketing. It’s the assumption that content is something you “do.”
Content is something you build on. A platform. A narrative. A show.
Not to feed the algorithm, but to train the audience. To be recognizable. To be trusted. To be remembered before you’re needed.
Do less. But do it with more intention.
Because in a world full of noise, the brands that win aren’t the ones publishing the most. They’re the ones people know how to come back to.
And that doesn’t happen by accident.