Picture a marketing leader named Maya. Maya’s got twenty years in the industry. She’s good at her job, she’s the kind of person who says useful things and is genuinely thoughtful and deliberate with her words.
After yet another planning meeting where the goal post shifts and then team has to come up new “strategies” to acquire leads, she has a thought she’d like to write about. Most companies don’t actually have a marketing strategy. They have a pile of campaigns that leadership has agreed to call a strategy. She started to put her ideas to paper and writes a headline: Marketing Doesn’t Create a Strategy, They Create a Collection of Tactics.
Headline needs work, but it’s a draft. The argument underneath it isn’t ready yet. Campaigns aren’t automatically unstrategic, a paid media plan can absolutely reflect a real decision about who to compete for. Maya can feel the actual point somewhere nearby, she just hasn’t caught it yet. So she talks it through with a colleague who disagrees with half of it. She rewrites the opening and realizes her original headline promised a cleaner argument that she hasn’t yet built. She sits with the idea and continues to work through her central argument.
A few days later, on a break from drafting her article, she sees a LinkedIn post from another marketing influencer: YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY IS F*CKED. Here are 7 brutal truths your CMO is too scared to tell you.
The seven truths are basic statements you’ve heard a million times. Stop chasing vanity metrics, talk to customers, tie marketing to revenue, be more strategic. None of them are new.
It explodes. Thousands of reactions, marketers tagging their whole team, executives reposting with “finally, someone said it.” Within a week, three other creators are running the exact same format with the exact same fake-outraged energy.
Maya’s actual idea is still sitting in draft mode, half-finished.
And this is what has become of content. Most content that “wins” arrives already shaped to fit the machine and support the algorithm.
Then we let the results decide the validity of the idea.
An idea gets published, gets a scorecard, and either lives or dies based on that one scorecard. If it works, you make five more like it. If it flops, you move on and never think about it again. That’s efficient if you’re manufacturing something with a fixed spec like an IKEA desk. Thoughts and ideas don’t have a fixed spec. Sometimes an idea flops because it’s not finished yet.
Imagine if the first draft had to had to slap every time. We’d never have any classic novels, from To Kill a Mockingbird to 1984. I believe it’s one of the main reasons art, entertainment and content suck now. We’re getting everyone’s first draft. And if it doesn’t perform, we throw it out. Since we “need” instant gratification, we rely on what works. So, we get Beverly Hills Cop 5 and the 50th version of Jurassic Park.
Attention matters, obviously. But we started treating “people engaged with this” as the same thing as “this was worth saying,” and those are not the same claim at all.
Say you post something thoughtful about pricing strategy. It gets 200 views, six likes, zero comments. The dashboard will say the topic didn’t land, try something else next time.
Except the dashboard has no idea why it “flopped”. Maybe you buried the interesting part in paragraph four. Or maybe you hadn’t built enough credibility yet for people to take a contrarian pricing take from you seriously, and the exact same post from someone with ten more years in the space gets 40 comments. The idea wasn’t bad; it just needed work. In the current creator economy, OK ideas never get to become GREAT ideas.
Meanwhile, watch what happens to a post that says something people already believe, wrapped in a slightly more dramatic headline. It’ll outperform the pricing post every time, because agreeing with something you already think takes zero effort and feels great. Confirmation is just easier to like than a new idea is.
That’s the trap. We keep mistaking “this traveled fast” for “this was worth saying,” when a rumor also travels fast and nobody thinks rumors are profound.
Once attention becomes the only scoreboard, content splits into two lanes, and good ideas tend to die in the middle.
Lane one is the safe template. The formula is used and beaten to death until there is nothing left. Strong hook, personal story, three lessons, clean CTA. You’ve read this post a thousand times with different names swapped in. It’s not bad, per se. It’s just completely forgettable, because everyone studying the same “best practices” produces the same output, which is precisely what you’d expect a system to do when everyone’s copying the same winning formula.
Lane two is the extremity lane. When the safe format stops working, people don’t get smarter, they get louder. More outrage, more absolutism, more “everyone else is lying to you.” The idea doesn’t actually improve, it just becomes impossible to scroll past.
The good ideas that could become great get lost in the middle of those two lanes. The things like, “this is true, but only under these conditions,” or “I believed the opposite of this six months ago and changed my mind.” That kind of honesty is slower to process and harder to react to than a hot take, so it loses the algorithm’s popularity contest, even when it’s the only actually correct answer presented.
Real ideas usually start as an itch, something doesn’t quite add up, a pattern that keeps showing up that you can’t name yet. You talk about it, a friend or colleague pokes a hole in it, you do some research, you narrow the claim, and eventually it becomes something actually useful, because it survived contact with other people’s brains.
That process is slow. It might not produce anything postable for months. Our content systems weren’t built for that. They publish the half-formed version once, check the scoreboard, and move on forever.
The Great Gatsby wasn’t a hit when it came out in 1925. It became a classic decades later, partly because the U.S. military printed 155,000 free copies for soldiers in World War II. Fitzgerald’s book didn’t fail. The launch week metrics just weren’t measuring the right thing yet.
That’s not a license to keep publishing a bad idea forever and calling yourself misunderstood. But most ideas need time to become good, but working those ideas out, especially in public, doesn’t feel safe. You risk being called names, harassed or “cancelled”. Where is the “hey guys, I’m just thinking this through” part of the content game?
Every so often, someone says something genuinely original. Gives us a new way to explain an old problem, a voice that doesn’t sound copy-pasted from someone else’s.
The industry’s response is never “let’s sit with this.” It’s “what’s the framework.” How long was the post, can we build a template out of the structure, can we sell an eBook on it. The original idea gets stripped for parts before anyone’s fully understood why it worked in the first place.
That creates an annoying loop. Original thinking gets punished while it’s still risky and unproven. The second it actually works, it gets copied into oblivion until the thing that made it interesting is the thing that makes it feel stale six months later. Then everyone moves on to find the next original spark, and the whole cycle repeats, a little louder each time.
Anyone remember the AI Doll Trend that took over LinkedIn? A cool original idea that was copied so much it became annoying.
Marketing has poured huge resources into producing and distributing content, workflows, calendars, dashboards, now AI tools that can spit out fifty variations in seconds. Almost none of that same energy has gone into building a place where an idea is allowed to just be unfinished for a while.
When can someone on your team say “I’ve noticed something weird, I don’t know what it means yet”? Where can people be wrong out loud long enough to find the actually interesting version of the idea?
Companies keep saying they want original thinking while systematically removing every condition that would let it develop. You can’t put a raw idea straight into a factory and expect it to come out the other end more interesting. Factories are for reproducing things that already work. Original ideas need a workshop first.
So what needs to happen to fix this mess?
The fix is separating the thinking from the publishing. Not every observation needs to become a LinkedIn post by Friday. Build in actual conversations, not “content meetings,” where the goal is sharpening a thought instead of filling next week’s calendar slot. When something underperforms, ask a real question before moving on. Was the idea wrong, or just badly explained, or simply early?
And widen what counts as a win. Did the idea change how a sales call went? Did it give your team language for something you’d never been able to explain clearly before? Did someone come back to it three weeks later still thinking about it? None of that shows up on a weekly dashboard. It’s still real.
The algorithm should help you get a good idea in front of people. It should not be the thing deciding whether the idea was worth having.
The content machine isn’t broken, by the way. It’s doing exactly what it was built to do, produce more content, faster, based on precise data about what already got attention last time. That’s exactly why it keeps getting louder and dumber. It doesn’t need another optimization pass.
It needs a workshop.
Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/
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Content and adtech now have the same problem. The machine can optimize an idea long before anyone has decided whether it was a good one.
MoniOloyede, reheated Nachos is such a cool analogy!
I especially liked your distinction between a factory and a workshop. Most teams have systems for producing and distributing content, but very few create a space where unfinished thinking can be challenged without being judged by reach.
How do you think teams can protect that workshop time when publishing targets are still very real?