Diagnose the Drift. Fix the Failure.
Marketing doesn’t fail overnight. It drifts.
“Gradually. Then suddenly.”
There are two kinds of drift happening right now. Both are dangerous, if left undiagnosed.
One happens when marketing execution drifts away from its own strategy.
The other happens when the real world drifts away from the theoretical strategy.
It’s natural for marketing to be tempted and compromised by drift.
Not because teams are careless.
Because entropy is inevitable.
1️⃣ The first kind of drift is internal.
Over time, strategy fragments into campaigns.
Campaigns fragment into tactics.
Tactics start optimizing for short-term signals.
Dashboards get better.
Tools get more sophisticated.
Activity increases.
But the system slowly drifts away from the core strategy that originally made it rooted in provable fundamentals.
New campaigns are added.
New channels appear.
New tactics are layered on.
Each one may make sense on its own. But collectively, the system becomes fragmented. What once felt coherent now feels complicated. And performance gradually becomes harder to maintain.
2️⃣ The second kind of drift is driven by externalities.
Markets change.
Technology changes.
Customer behavior changes.
But the marketing system doesn’t.
Companies keep running the same playbook that worked three or five years ago.
The same channels.
The same assumptions.
The same patterns of investment.
Meanwhile, the environment around them keeps evolving.
(Has there been a faster, more impactful evolution than the one we’re currently experiencing with AI?)
So even if the marketing system remains internally consistent, it slowly becomes misaligned with reality.
Worse yet, we use AI to amplify the wrong strategy that has become misaligned. We expedite failure. We amplify misalignment. We move faster down an errant path.
First Things First: Slow Down to Speed Up.
Most organizations today are experiencing both kinds of drift at the same time. They just don’t realize it yet.
But they’re falling in love with technology that fuels misalignment, getting to the wrong outcome faster, louder, and more expensively.
If you’re feeling the failure but can’t pinpoint the pain, stop now. Re-evaluate. Study. Diagnose. Identify root causes.
(Hint: You must go back to the very beginning—the very foundation of your marketing. The message itself.)