It makes you dangerous if you weren’t a special driver to begin with…
Being able to produce mediocre ideas faster and with a bigger megaphone isn’t ‘better’, it’s louder, and once budgets and missteps are balanced, more expensive not less.
I was having lunch with a young woman and her business partner a few weeks ago, and of course we talked a lot about how AI is changing the game in some significant ways. Then they shared with me from their phones some of the recent output on the marketing front. They bragged about little it cost, and how easy it was after a little learning curve.
“All this” she said, “with no expensive marketing agency or consultants.” They beamed with pride as they sat back and pondered their increasing bright future.
It was total crap. But at least there was plenty of it. What it lacked in quality, they up for in quantity, cranking out several releases a week with ease. Filling a calendar that effortlessly allowed them to poison their brand on every social media platform in the modern world, and then some.
I felt bad for them. Sitting quietly by while observing observing someone else’s slow buring train wreck isn’t my fav. But they didn’t ask, so at least I didn’t have to try thread the impossible needle of honesty and integrity and hurt feelings. I just said, “That’s a lot of content.” and smiled. That was about the truest thing I could say.
We see this more and more, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better, IF it gets better. There are going to be a lot of naked emperors running around for a while.
I’ve seen a lot A/B testing endeavors fail to provide a sensible path forward because it was all crap. So they found least crappy thing to do. Yay. And now this can be amped up and automated and deliver massive volumes of content. As if doing a dumb thing harder and louder makes it less dumb.
The few times I’ve had the opportunity to have a meaningful conversation about this has been very rewarding though, as long as we had enough time to get know one another so that the ‘harder’ conversations could be had safely and without too much drama. Part of that challenge is that there plenty of people (with massive amounts of content and volume to match) that will tell them how smart they are. Explaining that once you find your voice or niche, all will be well.
At the end of the day though, the revenue will either emerge or it won’t. It won’t matter how loud or how much was produced, sooner or later it’s dollars in, dollars out.
Does this make me old school?
