I’ve been a marketer for 7+ years now, and I don’t have a relevant degree.
My journey started with content creation. At 18, I was already creating videos. Those were the days when I used to binge BB ki vines and Mostlysane, and at some point, I decided I’d be the biggest YouTuber ever.
I got my first two jobs mostly because I had a camera presence and knew how to market! (without ever learning professionally).
7 years later - marketing is wayyy different from where I started.
Back in 2019, when I was working as an editor at a media house, a good piece of content used to take 2-4 days, sometimes a week, to create. It was all manual - from ideation to production and then post-production. That used to be a fun process!
Today, content production has become wayyy easier and faster, and yet everything feels... forgettable? Why does everything feel so saturated? This issue is about exploring why good marketing doesn’t feel good enough.
Are we overwhelmed?
I looked to the internet, and research findings are staggering. Around 70% of consumers have unsubscribed from multiple brands within 3 months due to message overload. Roughly 85% of digital ads fail to hold attention for more than 2.5 seconds.
Now the question is: Is this an attention problem, or is the supply simply more than the demand? It’s a mix of both, if you ask me. I mean, we all have 24 hours in a day, and there’s only so much attention we can actually pay to all this content noise around. (This answers the impression and reach tank on most social media platforms.)
Does this mean consumers no longer want to consume? That’s not the case. We still binge, and we are still loyal to the creators we love. The key difference is simply how relevant this is to me. No one wants to waste their time on a 7/10 piece of content anymore. We are looking for that 9/10 or 10/10 content.
How will marketing change?
After AI, there’s this constant fear across all sectors that AI will make us null and void. And I subscribed to it for a very long time. But I’m increasingly getting confident that AI will become a means of execution but NOT so much thinking. The moats for good marketing (other than the obvious consumer psychology and strategy) would be:
Proof of Human Friction: In biology, animal communication relies on Costly Signaling. A peacock’s tail is heavy, metabolically expensive to grow, and makes it easier for predators to catch them. Economically and logically, the tail is a disaster. But peahens select for it precisely because it is a handicap. It is proof of genetic surplus: "I am so strong I can afford to waste energy on this absurd tail." This is the exact logic with human-written, deeply researched, messy pieces, raw stories. Something that AI just can’t generate on its own.
Premium curation: People who took time to dive into content garbage and bring out truly gem-like resources worth your time.
Word of mouth: If your content truly forces someone to share it across, it’s relevant.
Anti-automation: Deliberately doing things that cannot scale: having 1:1 conversations, offline meets, deep audits, solving individual problems.
Operator advantage: content written exclusively by people who actually do the work - consumers writing for consumers, marketers writing for marketers, and the like.
Low stimulus: Ensuring a non-spammy space for audiences. Also, not forcing tracking everything because the most valuable marketing activities will become completely untrackable because these happen in offline scenarios, dark platforms like Reddit, group texts, etc. If you tried to track these, you’ll be labelled spammy and highly unethical.
Audience Sovereignty: treating the reader as entirely free and completely in control. You make it incredibly easy to unsubscribe, you don't use dark patterns, and you deliver the value upfront with zero strings attached. Respecting the consumer’s boundaries and time becomes the ultimate psychological differentiator.
The Chronological Anchor: Instead of writing evergreen tips that could apply to any year, tie your arguments directly to the immediate, messy cultural or economic undercurrents of the exact week you are in.
Don’t chase trends blindly: The Lindy Effect states that the future life expectancy of a non-perishable technology or idea is proportional to its current age. If a concept has been discussed for 500 years, it will likely be discussed for another 500 years. Find those concepts.
But won’t this affect metrics?
Marketing fundamentally requires eyeballs and repetition. And if you stop posting frequently, the algorithm will punish your reach.
So, how do you maintain the high frequency with high quality? It’s a difficult task at hand but not an impossible one. Some ways could be
You spend 80% of your creative energy building one massive, high-friction, high-taste piece of content twice a month. Then break it into several pieces of content catering to the algorithm.
Stop relying on massive content generation. Lower the frequency and focus on high-value engagement instead. Commenting grows your account better than relying on content alone.
Shift the weight from impressions to actual conversations. Optimise for dwell time in place of just vanity. What would you rather have anyway?
And you have to accept that this WILL cost you some metrics. If you have the will to make your brand last the test of time, this is a risk that you have to take.
Where do I start?
Before anything, if you can afford it, invest in a strong digital detox. Gives you a clean slate. And here’s where you can start thereafter:
STEP 1: Find your why- why are you marketing at all? Then start with auditing your current presence and whether it actually fulfils your why. If it looks like anyone else could have posted it, you’re not building a brand at all.
STEP 2: Talk to your actual customers. If you don’t have them, talk to potential customers. Know them beyond just your product - what do they do other than obsess over your product/service? Reddit is a great place to do this.
STEP 3: Once your why is strong and you know what your audience thinks like, start messy. Ship raw, human insights. Bambi’s lines come to mind - “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.”
There’s a very thin line between publishing for algorithms’ sake vs withholding content because you think it’s not perfect. Read that line again.
Publishing just for algorithms is bad, but if you are withholding content just because it’s not perfect, resist the urge and publish anyway.
I’m in the same boat as you, too tired of AI slop and constantly trying to ensure quality while fighting the dopamine of quantity.
I hope quality content takes over the internet again.
Until next time,
- Shrishti