I am beginning to think of myself as the human wake-up call.

I’m fortunate to meet with amazing marketers around the world, and I find that too many of them are living in the past. They set a social media strategy and then execute the same plan for years without looking up to see how the world works today.

So, I start clanging around trying to wake them up.

One of the biggest wake-up calls has to be for social media marketing. The fundamental premise is broken. And the brands still operating in the past aren’t just leaving opportunity on the table, they’re building irrelevance at scale.

Social media is not just a distribution channel for your podcast or YouTube videos. It is the operating system for a modern brand. Let’s do a deep dive on this today.

The brands pulling ahead right now have made five fundamental shifts in how they approach social. Not tactical tweaks.

Today I’ll cover:

• The central role of social media in culture
• Connecting brand messages to values
• An experimental approach
• Onboarding to the community
• Measurement

1. Connect to the culture

Most brands still approach social as if it were a publishing calendar. We have things to say. We will say them on a schedule. We will boost the ones that perform.

But culture doesn’t care about your schedule.

The shift is from broadcasting to tuning in to culture, to community, to what your audience is already talking about. Your community is telling you exactly what they want to engage with. The question is whether you’re listening or just waiting for your turn to talk.

This is a harder shift than it sounds. It requires giving up the illusion of control that a content calendar provides. It requires trusting that participation in real conversations is more valuable than polished proclamations. And it requires speed of execution.

Social-first brands aren’t just responding to culture, they’re creating it. They’re the emcee at the party.

2. Visible values

You can’t fill a social feed with product content without sounding like an advertiser. Nobody follows an advertiser.

The brands that win on social have what you might call vocal values — a clear point of view on the world that extends beyond what they sell. Consumers, especially younger ones, increasingly want to buy from brands that share their values. But values only count if they’re visible.

This creates a different kind of content challenge. Not “what should we post about our product?” but “what does our brand actually believe, and are we willing to say it out loud?”

Warning: I’m not saying you need to be political or divisive. That can be a hazardous strategy. Brand values can be positive and uplifting. For example, LEGO stands for wholesome, positive, creativity.

3. Decentralized and experimental

This is where organizational culture either enables or kills your social strategy.

The old model: every post has multiple approval layers, legal signs off before anything goes live, and brand guidelines are applied like brand armor — everything perfectly coordinated, perfectly safe, and perfectly forgettable.

The new model is decentralized and experimental:

• An agile social team that is empowered and trusted, with a direct line to the CMO
• Social managers are natives in the brand community
• The legal relationship is built on trust rather than friction.
• A bias toward trying things rather than perfecting them.

Today’s winning brands are elastic, moving when the moment arrives rather than when the approval chain completes.

A great example of this is the Duolingo owl, a brand mascot that has created social media mayhem for 15 years. The owl is not just responding to culture. The social media team is making its own. The owl is starring in his own anime series.

The phrase “just try it” sounds scary to many traditional brands. They’ve spent millions over decades to build trust and protect their images. They’re not going to risk over an experiment. How will they overcome that legacy? They probably can’t.

4. Onboarding for the community

I wrote a few years ago that social media is no longer a strategy — it’s the beginning of a process.

My thinking goes like this. A brand strategy means creating an emotional expectation between your products and your customers. The best way to do that is to use social media to drive customers to your content and hope they subscribe.

When people opt-in to your content, in a virtual way, they’re saying, “I like you. Tell me more.” It’s a higher level of emotional connection. Now you have an audience. Fantastic!

But most organizations stop there. They don’t take it to the next level: community. In a community, you can realize the highest level of emotional connection and create an experience where customers literally feel they belong to the brand.

This is a great opportunity — most businesses overlook the role of social media leading to brand community.

5. Measurement: The hardest shift 

This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. Especially for me.

I’m a measurement junkie but the science lags the current physics of business growth. The tools we have don’t adequately capture how trust accumulates, how cultural relevance translates into purchase intent months later, and how organic social builds the conditions that enable paid social to perform.

The dominant measurement philosophy — everything must trace to revenue, every dollar must be accountable — made sense 20 years ago. Marketing needed discipline. But this mindset has calcified into something that prevents a relevant strategy. When every social investment must prove direct revenue, you will systematically underinvest in the things that build brands over time.

You can be part of the culture, or you can measure. You probably can’t do both.

I’m not suggesting blind faith. We need to consider evidence-based trust. Organic social builds trust, engagement amplifies trust, paid social scales reach, campaigns scale relevance, and all of it fuels traffic to retail. Sales prove the trust. Reviews reinforce it. It’s a flywheel, and you can’t optimize one part of it while ignoring the rest.

The Underlying Problem

Strip away the frameworks, and what we’re really looking at is an identity crisis that most brands haven’t resolved: Are we a company that uses social media to advertise? Or are we a brand that participates in culture?

This new reality requires completely different organizational structures, talent, success metrics, and relationships among marketing, legal, and the C-suite.

The reframe is simple enough to put it this way: social is the operating system, not the megaphone. But simple doesn’t mean easy. Making it real requires organizational courage — the willingness to trust your team, loosen the approval chains, invest in brand-building that doesn’t trace back to a conversion pixel.

That’s the reckoning. Most brands will read something like this, nod along, and go back to their content calendar.

The ones who act on it will author the next great social media case studies.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

The post Five shifts in social media strategy that separate winners from wallpaper appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I know this seems like a very weird topic for a blog post, but I assure you, there is logic and a practical marketing application ahead.

My story starts with Walter Isaacson.

Walter is a renowned journalist and historian. Most notably, he has carved his niche writing bestselling books about geniuses like Steve Jobs, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Elon Musk.

A few years ago, I met and interviewed Walter at the annual SXSW conference. I asked him, “What are the personality traits that create a genius?”

He thought for a moment and said, “Two things: insatiable curiosity and an ability to connect the dots in a new way.”

I’ve met a few geniuses in my life, and I would concur that this definition is as good as any. It also points to an opportunity for you to leverage AI to reach for something greater. My thinking goes like this … AI is not curious, at least not yet. This is a uniquely human function. However, with the intelligence of all humanity at its disposal, AI excels at recognizing patterns and connecting the dots.

Let’s look at how we might put this together for you and your business.

The essential importance of curiosity

One of the conclusions I made in my book How AI Changes Your Customers is that curiosity is an essential human trait in the AI Era. If you’re curious, AI will feed you. You’ll gain wisdom. But if you’re lazy and just seek “the answer,” you’ll whither.

I am a massively curious person. Perhaps I am curious to a fault. I’ve certainly left money on the table over the years by pursuing interests rather than niches (and am much happier for it).

Here is what I have been curious about lately. My theory is that no matter what happens in the AI future, human art will persist. This suggests that a survival strategy for human marketers is to have our content approach the level of art. Not just stories … AI can do that. But a true, unique interpretation of the human experience, like the best musicians, poets, and painters.

Let’s test my latest curiosity flow and see if it can make me a genius.

Connecting the dots

For AI to connect the dots, I need to give it some dots to connect.

Here is my input to Claude:

You are the world’s premier marketing consultant and an expert in the history of consumer behavior, creativity, and business success. I have a theory that I’d like you to test for me. Even with the increasing intelligence and sophistication of AI, human marketing creativity will still stand alone as long as it digs deep to explore the singularly unique aspects of humanity — like an artist. Please create a 750-word opinion on this idea and how it might relate specifically to content marketing success. Do not be afraid to criticize me and alter my position. My goal is to gain unique insights and wisdom I can use to teach others. Here are thoughts from my books and blog posts to help you connect the dots:

• Art is our last, best expression of hope.
• When we don’t know what to trust in a world of deepfakes, we will turn to the people and organizations expressing themselves in ways that are resonant, compassionate, and authentic.
• To stand out, we must be original. To be original, we have no choice but to tell our own story.
• As people seek meaning, this will not come from scientific explanations. The only adequate response comes from art. Art is a way for people to explore and celebrate their unknowing.
• If most of our human experience becomes AI-generated, authentic human expression will become a luxury and point of differentiation.
• With the glorious output of AI, we will become de-sensitized to the sensational and be attracted to content that seems to come from a familiar human friend. The all-consuming razzle-dazzle of AI slop does not bring us into a relationship with others.
• Similarly, with AI’s exceptionally persuasive capabilities, we will tire of constant manipulation. Art moves us while AI tries to make us move.
• AI output is built on conformity. Great marketing is built on non-conformity. Attention requires an element of chaos, something that shatters expectations. AI is built to eliminate the anomalies. Art is built to focus on the anomalies.
• The most human company wins.

The results

The output from Claude (I added the reference link):

Let’s start with where the theory holds. You named Content Shock years before anyone else saw it coming—the moment content supply outstrips human attention and volume stops working. AI didn’t soften that curve. It ended the argument. Anyone can now produce an infinite amount of competent, on-brand, search-optimized content for the price of electricity. The strategy that built most content marketing careers, including parts of yours, is now worthless. On this, we agree completely.

So scarcity moves. The rare thing is no longer the content. It’s the human behind it. Fine.

Here’s where I want to push you, because your theory is half-built, and the missing half is the part you can actually teach.

You’ve located the scarce, defensible thing in the output—in art, in expression, in content that “seems to come from a familiar human friend.” But that’s a look. And looks are exactly what AI counterfeits best and cheapest. The warm, vulnerable, hand-made-feeling personal essay is already being mass-produced. Authenticity as an aesthetic is being industrialized as we speak. If your edge is that your content feels human, you will lose that contest to a machine that can feel human on demand, at scale, for free, in any voice you name.

Art is not safe because it looks like art. Vulnerability is not safe because it sounds vulnerable. AI can fake all of it, and will.

So what can’t it fake?

Stakes.

AI generates vulnerability infinitely because it risks nothing. It has no body, no mortality, no customer who can leave, no reputation that can burn. It cannot take a position that costs it something, because nothing costs it anything. That is the structural gap, and it is the only one that doesn’t close.

This reframes your best line. You wrote, “Art moves us while AI tries to make us move.” True—but ask why art moves us. Not because it’s expressive. Because someone paid for it. There was a person who chose this and rejected that, who staked a reputation, who could be wrong in public. We are moved by evidence of cost. The brushstroke matters because a hand that could have failed made it.

Authenticity, then, is not a property of content. It is a property of accountability. It lives in the relationship, not the artifact. A familiar human friend isn’t trusted because their writing has a certain texture. They’re trusted because they’ve been consistent over time, because they have skin in the game, because they can be held responsible when they’re wrong.

That’s the anomaly that survives. Not stylistic chaos—AI does chaos now; “be weird” is already a prompt. The surviving anomaly is conviction with consequences: a point of view you would defend even when it costs you customers. Patagonia telling people not to buy its jacket worked because the sentence was expensive to say, and they meant it. No model will ever generate that because the words are free, but the position is not.

Now the criticism you asked for. “Art is our last, best expression of hope” is a beautiful sentence, and it is one prompt away from becoming its own slop. The romantic frame gives marketers permission to be self-indulgent—to mistake personal expression for customer value and call it courage. The artist who ignores the audience is, in marketing terms, a failed artist. Marketing has a job: it must arrive at a human need. Pure self-expression isn’t marketing; it’s a diary. Your theory, taught carelessly, produces a generation performing depth while forgetting the person they’re supposed to serve.

So here’s the synthesis I’d hand your students, sharper than where you started:

The most human company doesn’t win by looking most human. It will lose that fight. It wins by being the most accountable—by holding a conviction it would pay to keep, in service of a customer it actually understands. Art is the medium. The moat is the stakes behind it.

For content marketing specifically, this rewrites the whole job description. The work is no longer producing volume, or even producing beauty. It’s earning the right to be believed—through consistency, through positions that could cost you, through being a person your audience can hold responsible. Everything else is texture, and texture is now free.

Stop performing authenticity. Start risking something.

That’s the line AI can’t cross, and it has almost nothing to do with art. It has to do with whether there’s a person on the other end with something to lose—and whether your audience can tell.

Did this produce wisdom?

This Claude result should prove to anyone that AI does NOT have to be a sycophant! I laughed out loud at this sentence:

Now the criticism you asked for. “Art is our last, best expression of hope” is a beautiful sentence, and it is one prompt away from becoming its own slop.

Ouch!

Of course, we must approach AI output with discernment. Just because it says something doesn’t make it true. But I did learn a few things:

Claude pushed back on the sentimentality of “being human.” AI can replicate this. It forces me to accept an uncomfortable truth: Authenticity is being industrialized. If we can’t tell the difference, there is no difference.

“Vulnerability is not safe because it sounds vulnerable. AI can fake all of it, and will.”

I’m not sure I agree with this, but Claude is pushing me to realize that no matter how spammy AI is today, we must consider the capabilities of tomorrow. Can AI seem vulnerable? Yes, I can accept that possibility. It certainly replicates empathy.

Now we get to the critical insight:

So what can’t it fake? Stakes.

Essentially, Claude is saying, “You’ve dug deep. It has to be deeper. To stand out, you must risk something.”

Conviction with consequences. This is actually aligned with what I teach in my personal branding class. I call it spiky content — a provocative position that is defensible. So this puts a new name to something I have already been teaching.

I work with many large brands. I can tell you with certainty that creating “marketing with stakes” is a distant dream for any company with a legal department.

The work is no longer producing volume or even producing beauty. It’s earning the right to be believed.

Am I a genius now?

Here’s my view of AI. It’s Ripley in the movie Alien, climbing into the cargo loader to fight the intergalactic monster.

The exoskeleton makes her bigger, stronger, more effective. But notice what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t decide to go back for the child, Newt. It doesn’t choose the fight. Ripley does that in her own skin, before she ever straps in. That is the risk. Those are the stakes.

In this post, I’m inside the suit. AI didn’t transform me. It connected my dots and put a finer point on my teaching. It made good ideas better. Scarier, but better. And I’m the one putting my name on the line to publish something like this.

Let’s go back to Walter Isaacson’s definition of genius: curiosity plus connecting dots. This post was an illustrative exercise, and it proves something. AI might connect the dots better than I do. Maybe half of genius just got automated.

What AI can’t do is collect the dots. Jobs and Da Vinci didn’t connect a few; they connected a lifetime’s worth — gathered in arguments and failures and endless experiments. And then they bet on them. The collecting and the betting are still ours.

AI did not make me a genius. It came up with a nuanced insight that makes me better. But maybe someone could be a genius if they keep collecting dots over a lifetime and get a nudge over the line from AI.

But here’s an achievement: AI helped me produce something spiky today — content with stakes. Some people will hate this post. Good. I have a defensible position, and I enjoy the pushback. That stake (my reputation) is the part that was never coming from a machine.

Perhaps this one post will stand out, but the hard question is scale. Every large enterprise is engineered to strip the stake out — legal, brand safety, the approval committee. In the past, they’ve succeeded by killing anything that threatens “the stakes.”

So the real challenge isn’t a smarter AI. It’s whether a company can find the nerve to ship risky marketing on purpose — and protect the person willing to put their name on it.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy Google Gemini.

The post How to use AI to become a genius appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

My friend Joe Pulizzi attended my Uprising retreat and was so moved by the experience that he wrote a beautiful lesson about it in his newsletter for content creators, The Tilt.

Joe and I are aligned on most marketing ideas, and his conclusion at the end of the post was profound and eloquent: “You don’t start with the room.”

He was reinforcing the idea that nobody just starts with a premium event, a smash YouTube channel, or a must-read newsletter. You have to earn that “room.” Or, in the case of my retreat, literally a room.

He wrote this so elegantly that, with his permission, I’ve quoted some of his highlights here. I think you’ll love his wisdom:

Last week I spent three days at Mark Schaefer’s The Uprising marketing retreat in Tennessee. It was small, around 40 people, and that was the point.

The room was filled with smart marketers, entrepreneurs, authors, consultants, and creators. But what stood out was not just the intelligence in the room. It was how quickly people became useful to one another. Helpful. Honest. Shockingly vulnerable.

That does not happen by accident. It happens when the right people are brought together around the right idea, with enough trust already in the room for something meaningful to happen.

Over three days of conversations, presentations, sidebars, meals, and big questions about where all this is going, one idea kept coming back to me.

In the next 12 to 18 months, small, trusted communities will matter more than ever.

Not because community is trendy. And not because AI is going to destroy everything tomorrow.

Because uncertainty is rising.

Search is changing. Discovery is changing. Content is exploding. Trust is harder to earn and easier to lose. People are overwhelmed, distracted, and suspicious. At the same time, they are desperate to find other people who understand what they are dealing with. That is where community becomes incredibly powerful.

But there’s a problem.

Everyone now wants to “build a community.”

That sounds wonderful. It is also mostly wrong.

Community Is Not the First Step

You do not build a community first. You build the reason a community should exist. That’s the part most people want to skip.

They launch the group. They open the Slack channel. They create the Discord server. They announce the membership. They schedule the webinar. They build the event page.

And then they wonder why nobody shows up.

The mistake is simple. They built the campfire before anyone had a reason to sit down in front of it.

A community is not a Facebook group. It is not a LinkedIn group. It is not a membership site. It is not a monthly Zoom call. It is not an event. Those are containers.

The community is the trust inside the container.

It is the shared language, shared struggle, shared progress, and repeated interaction. It is the feeling that says, “These are my people.” It is the sense that if you disappeared, someone would notice.

Mark Did Not Start With a Room

This is what made The Uprising such a good reminder.

Mark did not just rent a space, invite some people, and magically create a community. He had already done the work.

For years, Mark has published, spoken, written books, shared ideas, challenged assumptions, and built trust around a clear point of view. People came to The Uprising because they already had a reason to believe the room would matter.

The event was not the beginning of the community. It was an expression of the community. It’s where the community happened to be at that particular moment.

This is what so many people miss. They see the outcome and copy the container. They see the event, but not the years of trust. They see the membership, but not the audience.

Back to me.

Joe and I preach from the same hymnbook when it comes to community and its importance in the AI Age.

So how do you get there?

There is a process. It is not quick. It is not easy. But it works. This is the process I teach in my personal branding master class:

1. Where do you fit in your industry or marketplace?

Figure out your unique angle. What problem do you solve, and how do you uniquely solve it?

How do you finish this sentence: “Only I …”

That might seem intimidating but I’ve never had a class participant where we haven;t been able to figure that out. There’s still a big world of opportunity out there.

2. Find Your Space

Now you have the story to tell the world?

Joe was also very specific on this advice: Pick One Main Platform

“This is where people get overwhelmed,” Joe wrote. “They think they need a podcast, newsletter, YouTube channel, LinkedIn strategy, Instagram Reels, TikTok presence, webinar series, book project, and community all at the same time. Do not do that. Pick one main platform. One.”

To stand out, you have to be great. And you can’t be great in 12 places.

3. Stick to a Consistent Schedule

If you take my class, you will hear one word more than any other — “consistency.”

Consistency is more important than genius.

Once you begin, give yourself 18 months at least to see if it’s working. You can build your “room,” but you have to keep showing up. This also has powerful SEO and AI visibility advantages, of course.

You’ve implied to your audience that you’re going to help them solve a problem.

“The promise does not need to be clever, ” Joe said, “It needs to be clear.”

Over time, you become part of your audience’s weekly routine. Your goal is to become a habit.

4. Build Your Audience

Joe advised, “Audience building is not just publishing. It is relationship building. This is the part that gets missed because it is not scalable at first.”

He offered specific advice:

Make a list of 20 people who matter to the future of the audience you want to serve. They could be peers, customers, readers, event organizers, authors, podcast hosts, niche experts, future collaborators, or people already gathering the audience you care about.

Then help them. Share their work. Comment with substance. Interview them. Send the useful email. Introduce them to someone. Buy their book. Attend their event. Meet them in person when you can.

The future may be AI-powered, but trust is still built person by person.

5. Audience Precedes Community

Most creators miss the biggest opportunity. Once they build an audience, they stop there. But the most value, the most fun, the most connection comes through a community.

A community differs from an audience in three ways:

1. There is communion. People know each other and become friends.
2. There is a shared purpose.
3. There is a shared direction (which might change over time as the community pulls you forward).

This is the room. This will matter the most in the AI Era.

How do you know you’re ready? Do you have a few super fans? It doesn’t have to be a big group. Maybe 5-10 people who just want to know more. They comment on your posts. They ask questions. They’re excited about your ideas.

If you want to know a whole lot more about community-building, please take a look at the book Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy.

Build the Reason First

I’ll let Joe Pulizzi take us home on this post. Here are some of his concluding comments:

I keep thinking about that room at The Uprising.

The trust. The conversations. The openness. The willingness to help. The feeling that the people there were not just attending another event, but participating in something that mattered to them.

That is rare. I believe more of us are going to need that.

The people who have real trust with a specific audience will have an advantage. The people who have direct relationships will have an advantage. The people who are known for something will have an advantage.

Start with the person you want to serve. Start with the problem they are embarrassed to admit. Start with the one platform you can commit to. Start with the 20 people you can help. Start with a promise you can keep every week.

Do that long enough, and the community has a chance to appear.

Build the reason first. The campfire comes later.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

The post Content creators don’t start with “the room” appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Too short for a blog post, too interesting to ignore, here are a few snippets on what I’ve been thinking about lately.

Content creator angst

I am finding it harder and harder to post on social media. I feel like it has become a performance. People are trying to out-vulnerable each other.

I just want to do good work. Spending one second of my life editing a Reel seems like a waste of a second that will never come back.

Perhaps this is why I like writing. Create. Let it sit. Make it sing. And it doesn’t disappear.

There’s no schtick to it.

Content you can create in your underwear. Now that’s livin’.

Content creator angst part deux

My friends and colleagues are constantly debating any system tweak that pleases the LinkedIn algorithm. The major theme is to post stuff that generates comments. LinkedIn wants conversations.

I generally do not write for comments, but sometimes I stumble into it.

A few weeks ago, I posted a photo of myself sleeping on a bench in the Amsterdam airport after canceled flights and a hotel foul-up. It received more than 82,000 views.

The following week, I posted a helpful, original article reflecting on Peter Drucker’s unique wisdom and how his “five questions” remain relevant to marketing today. This post, which took about four hours to write, received 2,000 views, or about 3% of the airport post.

This suggests that the key to engagement on LinkedIn is goofy personal photos. But before you follow this path of least resistance, keep asking yourself — for LinkedIn and ALL social media activity — “to what end?”

Engagement is largely a vanity metric. You can engage yourself broke. Marketing is about creating customers.

It’s all about the feeling

New research shows that 42% of teens say that talking about their feelings is important to them, and brands are responding. McDonald’s new “Draw How You Feel” Happy Meal boxes trade the classic red for a blank canvas. This ties into a broader trend of experiential and wellness-driven packaging.

Built around the finding that 85% of teenage girls aren’t meeting recommended physical activity guidelines, Nike and Spotify launched Make Moves to encourage girls to move to just one song a day, using music to make physical activity more joyful and emotionally accessible. A UK pilot with 700 girls showed a 20% improvement in confidence and a 19% decrease in regular feelings of anxiety.

Experiential marketing is such a huge opportunity and is largely overlooked.

More about experiences

My new book, How AI Changes Your Customers, details six ways AI is rewiring human psychology.

Chief among these is cognitive offloading, addiction, and a trend to form trusting emotional connections with chatbots.

But pay attention to the news. There’s a backlash trend emerging.

Young people are rediscovering the joy of gathering. I’ve recently seen articles about young people watching movies together, listening to vinyl albums straight through at parties, and a surge in the popularity of board games:

How can your company help bring people together like this and be part of this trend?

Keeping pace with AI

The AI world is changing so rapidly. I think there are three key strategies to keep up:

1. Schedule time to dabble every day. Most platforms have a free or trial version. Push the envelope and experiment.
2. Subscribe to at least one podcast, newsletter, or video series commenting on the latest updates and releases. I really love the Artificial Intelligence podcast hosted by Paul Roetzer.
3. Join a community of like-minded people who are experimenting and can teach you by association. One option for marketers is RISE. You can’t stay relevant on your own.

We need to find new channels

Here’s another reason why looking at alternatives like experiential marketing and word-of-mouth makes sense: Social media use appears to be in decline. A roud-up of research I’ve seen:

• A 2025 Deloitte consumer trends survey of more than 4,000 Brits found that nearly a quarter of all consumers had deleted a social media app in the previous 12 months (inclund one-third of Gen Z)
• Social media use has steadily declined since time spent on the platforms peaked in 2022, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries by the Financial Times and digital audience insights firm GWI. Globally, adults 16 and over spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms by the end of 2024, down almost 10% since 2022. The decline was particularly pronounced among teens and 20-somethings…
• Young people who are deleting their social media platforms cite the increasing pressures of being online as well as damage to their mental health as causes. Deloitte’s consumer survey found that nearly a quarter of respondents who deleted social apps reported that these apps had negatively affected their mental health and consumed too much of their time.

Implementing AI in your company

Long ago, I led a Fortune 100 company into the digital age.

The marketing world faced the same distractions — lots of sexy opportunities to make a splash on social media, with easy-to-measure “Likes.”

I was more successful than almost any competitor in my space by staying strictly focused on one thing: Digital applications that could directly make us money or save us money.

And, like today, measurement with absolute attribution was difficult. But you know what great managers pay attention to?” Stories, like “hey, a customer just raved about how easy it is to do business with our new eCommerce system.”

I think this is still an effective implementation playbook: 1) Focus tightly on making money and saving money instead of vanity metrics; 2) Look for qualitative measures like comments and stories as a success indicator, at least at first.

Thanks for reading along with me today. I never take you for granted!

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post Content creator angst: You can engage yourself broke. appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

A few years ago. I had the famed author Tom Peters on my podcast. He was retiring and had written his last book.

Two years later, he was back on the show with another book!

“What happened?” I asked. “I thought you had retired!”

“I’m still desperate to get my ideas out,” he said. “I don’t think enough people have heard me yet. In fact, I think the best authors and speakers have this quality — they’re desperate to get their ideas out into the world.”

And, I believe this is true and wise. I feel the same way. I am driven to publish because I’m desperate to get ideas into the world that can help people … and not enough people are listening.

The math works like this: A respectable open rate for a newsletter is about 20%. I am fortunate to have eager and loyal readers so my open rate is typically above 40%. But that means that 60% of the people who love me most, my subscribers, may miss what I had to say that week.

So I feel desperate to try again.

This post is different. It’s a reflection on the ideas I’ve repeated often, and yet I think most people haven’t heard me yet.

Like Tom Peters, I will probably keep trying until the end (whatever that might be). Here we go with some primary ideas. I’ve provided links in the posts for more information if you want to read more (please do).

1. Your personal brand is your last line of defense against AI

I’ve been shouting this from the rooftops for years. In a world saturated with AI slop, the only messages that will rise above the noise carry meaning. You have to mean something to your audience.

Look, we’re in a tough world. AI might be nipping at the heels of your skill set or career. But if you’re KNOWN in your industry, more calls will be returned, more doors will open, more opportunities will come your way. Investing in your personal brand is like making deposits in an insurance policy for your career.

In any message, the “from” line is more important than the “subject” line.

Best resource: My book KNOWN, the world’s bestselling book on personal branding.

2. Give in to the bots.

The introduction of AI as our friend / co-worker / companion / enemy heightens the emotion in our marketing discussions, but perhaps nothing has fanned the outrage more than the idea that AI only exists by stealing our content.

Protecting our content from AI has become a global obsession.

But our own businesses and careers face an existential crisis if we are NOT seen by the bots. We have to put our egos aside and recognize that yes, it hurts that Ai is stealing our content, but in the long-term, our businesses are in a better position if we are in the game.

Give it away, give it away, give it away now.

3. Universities need a dramatic and immediate overhaul

I’ve taught at a university for 15 years and have lectured at dozens of colleges that use my books as texts. I care about these institutions, and they are in big, big trouble.

It gets down to this. Colleges are no longer the gatekeepers of knowledge. AI makes intelligence abundant and free. Colleges need to radically overhaul their systems, and in this post, I show how it is possible.

For most career options, it no longer makes sense to fork over so much money for four-year degrees that are becoming obsolete. Instead of the traditional four-year model, I proposed an affordable lifelong learning university subscription.

The university can still have a role in our future careers, but it must start an urgent transformation now.

4. Competence doesn’t cut it

Over the past year or so I’ve had to dig deep to discern how humans will survive and thrive in world of AI content and marketing … if at all.

Many marketers and creators are perilously close to crossing The Milli Vanilli Line. They’re not enabled by AI. They’re using it to fake their presence, their careers, their influence.

I went on a global journey to discover how the best creatives were rising above the noise in a way that was uniquely and sustainably human. The result is my book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World.

If you’re merely competent, you’re about to be replaced. The key idea is creating ideas that are truly disruptive. This is a book of hope filled with hundreds of ideas, inspiring case studies, and a framework for human effort to survive in the AI Era:

• Disrupt the story
• Disrupt where the story is told
• Disrupt who tells the story

5. It’s time for ethically-sourced marketing

Every digital ad dollar we spend fuels algorithms we know are harming people, chewing up the environment, and stoking hate between neighbors.

It pains me to write about this. I mean, I’m part of the problem, too. But it’s time to start this conversation because the traditional marketing approach is at a breaking point.

• AI-driven amplification of addiction
• Deep fake, misinformation, the decline of trust
• Easy AI content requires more energy consumption
• U.S. Surgeon General’s warnings on youth mental health and social media

We can’t keep burying our heads in the sand. It’s time to consider what it means to lead and sponsor ethically-sourced marketing.

6. The False Hope of Content and SEO

From Content Shock to the creator economy and SEO scams, I’ve tried to communicate realistic expectations for content marketing.

I’ve worked with dozens of diverse companies, and nearly always, they’re producing content because they’re afraid not to. Content marketing and a storytelling industrial complex seem to have taken on a life of their own.

Without a strategy and realistic, achievable goals, these random acts of content suck up time and contribute to an unwinnable content arms race. Breaks my heart to see this massive waste. And it’s getting worse in the AI Era.

There is a place for content and SEO. But marketing does not begin with TikTok videos, podcasts, and LinkedIn posts. It begins with strategy.

7. You’re not in control of the marketing message

The overarching theme of my popular book Marketing Rebellion is that most marketers are asleep and not connected to real consumer realities. The foremost concern is thinking that your marketing team is in charge of your marketing message.

A brand used to be what we said it was. Now, it’s what other people say you are (online, in reviews, in posts from influencers).

This trend is simply accelerating as employees walk off the job when they disagree with commercial contracts, and organized rage farms decide to take down brands at will. 

8. Community is the future of marketing.

In 2018, I began predicting that brand communities would play a bigger role in mainstream marketing efforts. I dedicated an entire chapter to this idea in Marketing Rebellion and believed this was probably the most important chapter in the book.

Then the pandemic happened, and this idea accelerated as online communities became the primary form of human connection. People dropped me notes saying my predictions were coming true before our eyes.

I decided this was important enough to devote an entire book to the subject: Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy.

A bold claim. Look around. I’m right. Dive in.

9. Momentum is a process

A great deal of my consulting practice is devoted to people and companies that are stuck. You can’t count on luck to rise to the next level. You need momentum, and that can be managed.

There is a whole field of sociology dedicated to momentum, but it hasn’t really been applied to marketing before. I did that for the first time in a book called Cumulative Advantage … in hindsight, a terrible title, but a beloved book nevertheless.

Having an idea, career, or business stuck in the mud doesn’t have to be destiny. There is a process behind successful people.

10. Influencer Marketing is just beginning

I suppose I was a pioneering voice in the area of influencer marketing, writing the first book on influencer marketing in 2012 — before anybody was even talking about it.

There has probably been no idea more battered, misunderstood, and left for dead.

But here’s what the pundits miss. An influencer isn’t just some kid hawking an energy drink. They are regarded as a trusted friend — a meaningful parasocial relationship.

And in a time filled with misinformation, polarization, and deep fakes, we will want to buy from trusted friends more than ever. Influencer marketing is jsut beginning.

11. Awe as marketing strategy

Let’s connect a few dots. In the AI Era, we’ll long for human connection. We are already in a period of unprecedented isolation, loneliness, and depression.

Bringing people together for experiences isn’t just good business, it’s great brand-building.

Recently, I gave a speech in New York and people were cheering and laughing out loud. I asked them, “If you were watching this online at home, would you have the same, vocal reaction to my talk? No. They wouldn’t. The most I could hope for would probably be a muted chuckle here and there.

What’s the difference? When we bring people together, it creates an emotional contagion of awe called collective effervescence. These great feelings transfer to the brand.

What would it look like to have a marketing strategy of “add more awe?” You can read more about this in the Audacious book.

12. The Most Human Company Wins ™

Perhaps my most durable argument, a theme that runs through every book, blog post, and speech — The Most Human Company Wins.

This is not a Pollyannaish “Go, Humans!” cheer, and I’m not anti-tech. I’m pro-humanity. I’m a realist. The paradox is that as automation rises, human connection becomes more valuable, not less.

By the way, going forward, the most human company isn’t necessarily all “human.” It will undoubtedly be a combination of AI trained on best practices and human connection.

Add your smile, your face, your personality. Add your story, your passion, your compassion at every customer touchpoint. The most human company wins.

So, those are a few ideas that burn in my heart every day. If you follow me, you’ll probably hear about them again because these ideas help people, and I’m desperate to get them out into the world.

Have you thought about the ideas and stories that you’re desperate to get into the world? Reflecting on that is a useful first step in building your own personal brand.

See? There I go again : )

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Illustrations a combination of prompts from Midjourney and Claude.

The post A dozen huge marketing ideas sitting right in front of you appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Is there anything more frustrating than justifying brand marketing to your boss? And yet, I’ll explain why brand is more important in the AI Era!

Maybe this post will even help your next budget request get approved.

Today I will cover:

• Brand as the AI override
• How AI erodes competitive advantage
• Brand as the Trust Anchor

Brand as AI override

AI is having a cataclysmic impact on every aspect of marketing, but none more important than search.

While a cottage industry emerges to figure out the new rules of SEO, perhaps your money might be best spent avoiding the SEO dilemma altogether.

Here’s what I mean.

Last year I had ChatGPT plan my five-day trip to Paris in every detail. It dutifully created an itinerary that included the best activities based on my budget and taste, every Metro stop I needed to reach my destinations, and restaurant recommendations that accommodated my need to be gluten-free.

It did a perfect job. I didn’t see any ads, branded content, or influencer recommendations. I just followed the plan exactly.

Except.

I decided to use Delta Airlines. I chose my hotels based on brand preferences. I stuck with my favorite brand names when it came to things like soft drinks, the clothes I packed and my favorite On Cloud sneakers.

My brand preferences are AI overrides. It doesn’t matter what AI thinks, I like what I like.

Figuring out the future of SEO and AI search will be critical for many brands. But don’t overlook an investment in brand to sidestep the never-ending battle over keywords.

AI eroding competitive advantage

How do you create a sustainable competitive advantage for your business?

• Special market insight?
• Do you react to market changes faster than competitors?
• Employees with elite levels of intelligence?
• Significant iteration and innovation?

All of these advantages can be neutralized by a competitor with AI. What do you have left? Your brand.

In my book Audacious: How to Win in an AI Marketing World, I feature a case study on Liquid Death, the fastest-growing beverage in the world — a five-year-old startup! Founder Mike Cessario said that brand is all he has as a competitive weapon:

“You’re only going to win with branding. You won’t win with some functional ingredients you can’t own. In that case, when you’re big enough, Coke or Pepsi or someone else will just produce the same thing—same ingredients, cheaper, more widely distributed, and then you lose. With water, there’s minimal, if any, functional difference between the brands. The difference is purely marketing. People want to walk around with this thing instead of that thing. None of the water brands were interesting. I did my homework. There was a huge opportunity to tell a different story.”

Brand is what’s left when the substantive differences between products disappear. When AI erodes competitive advantage, branding still creates distance between you and your competitors, paving the way for future growth.

Brand as the Trust Anchor

There’s a paradox emerging in the AI era: the more content AI produces, the less people trust what they see.

My brain hurts from trying to figure out what is real.

And, I’m not alone.

Consumers aren’t stupid. They feel it even when they can’t name it — a creeping sameness, a vague sense that the voice behind the content isn’t quite human, that the brand they’re engaging with is running on autopilot.

In this environment, trust becomes a luxury, and trust, at scale, is what a strong brand delivers.

But here’s the part most marketers miss: trust isn’t rational. You don’t earn it with better specifications or a more accurate FAQ page. Trust is emotional. It accumulates through consistent experience, shared values, and the feeling that a company sees you and stands for something you care about. That’s the domain of brand, and it’s precisely the domain where AI falls short.

Think about the brands you love. Chances are, your attachment has little to do with product superiority. It’s about how that brand makes you feel. Maybe it reflects who you are or who you want to be. Maybe it’s earned your trust through years of delivering on its promise. That emotional connection is essentially AI-proof because AI didn’t create it and AI can’t replicate it.

Liquid Death understood this intuitively. There is no functional difference between water brands. Mike Cessario built his entire competitive strategy on making people feel something when they held that black can. Rebellious. Irreverent. Part of something that rejected the corporate blandness of traditional beverage marketing.

The product is water. The value is identity. That’s pure brand.

I know the fight for your brand is never-ending. You’re constantly being pulled into the trenches of Facebook ads and proving the ROI of that Instagram post.

But try this. Ask your boss to talk about their favorite purchase of the past year. Tickets to a show? A dream car? A special gift for a friend?

Then ask them WHY they bought it. Was it because of SEO or an ad … or was it because of how the product made them feel? Because it was something that they love?

AI can optimize your media spend, personalize your messaging, and automate your content, but it can’t make someone love you.

It can’t build the loyalty that makes a customer choose you before they even start their search.

It can’t create the feeling that makes a person walk past a cheaper alternative because this is the brand that “gets them” or reminds them of the best memory.

That work is yours to do. And in a world where your competitors have access to the same AI tools, the same data, and the same efficiencies, brand may be the last remaining source of true competitive advantage.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustrations courtesy Mid Journey

The post Three reasons why brand is more important in the AI Era appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I teach an online class about personal branding and wrote a book about it too, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of AI helping you become “known.”

There are the obvious AI benefits like creating and re-purposing content, topic research, and even strategy. But there is a bigger question: What happens when a person uses AI to fake their way to thought leadership?

While many argue that AI content will never replace human effort, I’m skeptical. AI can create compelling work, perhaps indistinguishable from original human effort. We are definitely in an era where anything seemingly “human” can be faked, including voices, videos, and online intellect. I, for one, am overwhelmed by AI slop.

The AI tsunami raises the bar for what we will consider true thought leadership. Leadership begins with trust, and that will require extraordinary effort:

• Transparency about the use of AI
• A commitment to human authenticity, even when it’s messy. Sharing genuine setbacks, mistakes, and course corrections that AI would never volunteer.
• Elite, non-AI accomplishments and awards that cannot be faked. Social proof displaying that you’ve done the work. “I was in that room” detail that only comes from having actually done the thing.
• We will look for origin stories and flaws as evidence of authenticity.
• Consistency — Demonstrating an alignment of wisdom, values, and helpfulness over time.
• Real-time demonstrations of authority, such as live speaking, unscripted conversation, podcast appearances, and Q&A. Performances that can’t be pre-generated.

The signals of truth become more costly when we compete with others hacking their way through with an AI assist. Remaking a masterpiece isn’t hard. Making a masterpiece is really hard.

As I proposed in my book Audacious, culture will favor originality more than ever before.

Just as the ubiquity of fast food didn’t threaten the business of fine cuisine (and arguably further distinguished it), they will crave more original high-quality storytelling. We see this in our growing hunger for weirdness and unhinged marketing.

To create your authoritative personal brand, show up in a way that is uniquely you, tell a story only you can tell, and don’t give up.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustrations courtesy Mid Journey

The post Faking your way to thought leadership appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Over the years, I’ve written about how I think humans will survive and thrive in the AI Era, and today I thought I would pull my main ideas together in one post.

Many people are defensive about AI or skeptical that our marketing jobs are at risk. I believe AI will certainly replace many tasks and even entire organizational roles. But there are four pillars of human dominance that will persist:

1. Personal brand
2. Brand communities
3. Experiences
4. Transcendent content

Let’s explore each one in detail.

1. Personal brand

You can’t love a logo, jingle, or piece of branded content, but you can love a person. In many cases today, the personal brand is the company brand, especially in smaller and medium-sized companies.

In an era dominated by deep fakes and misinformation, we will value humans who are the go-to people pointing us toward truth.

When ChatGPT hit the scene, I called tech analyst Shelly Palmer to get his view. “It’s terrifying,” he told me. “I just asked ChatGPT to compose a blog post in my writing style, and it did a great job. I’ve blogged almost every day for 15 years, and it wrote a perfect post in three seconds. I’m 80% replaced.”

While that “80%” quote certainly seems terrifying, a more interesting question is, “What is the 20% that is NOT replaceable?”

It’s his personal brand.

Shelly is known, loved, and respected. In a chaotic world of misinformation and deep fakes, we will always depend on a human being for insight and truth. Shelly has nothing to worry about. He cannot be replaced by AI because of his powerful personal brand.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve added a “100% Human Content” badge to my posts. I want to assure you that this is me. You can count on me. I’m not going away. I still matter.

For the past 10 years, I’ve shouted from the rooftops that your personal brand is the ONLY defense we have against the bots. Are you a trusted and beloved presence cutting through the noise of your marketplace?

It’s not too late to start your personal branding journey. The best place to start is my upcoming Personal Branding Master Class, the finest of its kind.

How do you thrive in an AI world? Your personal brand is your oxygen.

2. Brand Communities

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Belonging to the Brand. It had a bold subtitle: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy.

I think I was right. Community was the FIRST marketing strategy. It’s the only marketing strategy people actually WANT in their lives.

SXSW, the largest annual gathering of thought leaders on earth, recently sent me an update that the most popular topic submitted this year was community — even bigger than AI! The need for brand communities and community professionals will increase.

I was recently asked how AI will take over brand communities. I can’t imagine a scenario where that would happen. Community is out of bounds for AI. It is uniquely human, an engine for connection, compassion, and love.

3. Experiences

Over the past 10-15 years, people have been pulling away from one another. We can now entertain ourselves, soothe ourselves, and play games all night long without ever leaving our living room.

But a strong longing for reconnection is evident, and signs of a renaissance in human experience are everywhere. Groups of young people are forming clubs and affinity groups to play board games, watch movies together, and discuss books. The greatest human memories come from shared experiences, not a gaming victory celebrated alone in a dark basement.

Have you ever attended a music event alone? Perhaps it was a pleasant experience. You enjoyed the music.

Now compare that to attending a concert with friends who are singing with you, dancing, and jumping for joy. The difference is a state of awe called collective effervescence, a powerful emotional contagion that occurs when you bring people together in a joyful way.

Businesses can help make this happen. How can we create shared experiences that make people feel our brand in a new way? What would a strategy look like if your goal was to add more awe?

4. Transcendent content

This is the main idea behind my book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World.

Creating content that is “competent” is a losing proposition. You’re a commodity. Worse, you’re ignorable.

But we can create from a place of vulnerability and human truth that AI never can.

There’s a lot of anxiety about AI. And there should be. But when it comes to creating content, I’m not concerned. My posts are filled with insights, emotion, story, and Dad jokes that AI can’t replicate. I interpret the human experience in my own way, and that approaches art.

This is a unique time for human content. Most companies will opt-in to the AI slop. It may check a box. But it won’t win hearts and minds. Amid this AI frenzy, true human content is a luxury.

This is a big topic and an important one. My book teaches three methods to disrupt the pandemic fo dull fueled by the bots:

• Disrupt the narrative
• Disrupt how and where the story is told
• Disrupt who tells the story.

Here’s a simple example. I uploaded my book to AI and instructed it to create abstract images from the best stories. I then linked this to a QR code on the book’s cover. If you hover over the QR code with your phone, you will see an endless display of changing designs — the Infinity Cover!

Through this innovation, which cost alomst nothing, I disrupted how the story is told, where the story is told and even “who” is telling the story (it’s the cover!). This is audacious content that transcends the blah.

We are in for challenging times. But it is also a time of magic and endless opportunity. I’m sure these four areas of traditional marketing will continue to rely on human effort. Did I miss something? I’d love to hear from you if you have other ideas.

Need an inspiring keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post Four Pillars of Human Dominance in the AI Marketing Era appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Too short for a blog post, too important to ignore, here are some short observations from the world of marketing and beyond.

The personal brand journey

It had a busy year, and it was nice having some downtime. What did I do with it? I was WRITING!

I have a long trip to Asia coming up. I won’t have time to blog. That means I need at least four great posts teed up and ready to go ahead of time.

Building your personal brand isn’t a project; it’s a lifestyle. No excuses. Keep going. Get it done. Show up for your fans.

If your personal brand is a priority it has to be part of your lifestyle like working out, going on a date, or going to church on Sunday.

The two personal brand failure modes are 1) the person never started 2) the person quit too soon.

Out to sea

Had a friend on LinkedIn comment: “You can be noise in a sea of calm or calm in a sea of noise” — either way you have a choice. You alone can decide what you want to be to stand out.

I don’t think it’s that easy. In reality, you will be calm in a sea of calm or noise in a sea of noise. There is a third choice. Do something completely different! Be audacious in a sea of boring.

So true.

My friend Billy Dexter says, “We don’t look like our stories.”

Six words. So powerful.

His point: Ask questions before you judge. Lots of questions.

The real AI advantage

I’m astounded by the number of professional people I encounter who are not even dabbling in AI.

AI isn’t democratizing marketing; it’s creating a new aristocracy. The “AI-haves” will run circles around the “AI-have-nots.”

But here’s the twist: the real power won’t lie with those who own the AI, but with those who own the questions. In a world where AI becomes a commodity (everyone can have the latest and greatest for $20!), the competitive edge goes to those who know which problems are worth solving.

Bacon diplomacy

Just got back from a vacation in Europe. While Europe has so much wonderful food, I don’t understand why it has not picked up on American bacon. So crispy. So delicious. So much better than the limp, greasy fare across the pond.

Free business idea: Start a cafe in European capitals called “American Bacon” and watch the lines form. No need to thank me.

The wrong question

Maybe we’re asking the wrong question about AI in marketing. It’s not “How can AI make us more efficient?” It’s “What if efficiency is the enemy?”

In our rush to optimize, we’re creating a world of frictionless, forgettable experiences. AI won’t drive the next marketing revolution — It’ll be a rebellion against it, championing the beautifully inefficient. Leave a little dust on the lens. Be the glitch in the story.

Being real is becoming a luxury.

Word to the words

I really love Grammarly. It might not be considered a leading AI app … but it is the AI app I use the most! It’s also cool to see my monthly stats. Here is one that has me flummoxed.

This is cool in one respect. I’ve used more unique words than just about everybody. But I’m not sure if this is a badge of courage or shame. I’m using that many unique words, it probably means some people don’t understand what I write, especially if English is not their first language. Not sure what to make of it.

And I’m guessing “flummoxed” might be word number 12,859!

Marketing speed

One of the least-discussed challenges in marketing today is speed. It’s not just reaction time. It’s also impacting time to market.

The line between marketing and product development is blurring. When AI can predict what customers want before they know it, marketing becomes less about promoting what exists and more about shaping what could be. The future of marketing isn’t just about selling products; it’s about co-creating experiences with our customers in real-time.

I’m eager to see how this rolls out!

Need an inspiring keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post Your personal brand isn’t a project, it’s a lifestyle appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

For more than 15 years, I’ve studied and written about “rising above the noise” — how a business or individual can be seen, heard, and discovered amid the overwhelming wall of content competition.

Since I wrote about Content Shock more than 10 years ago, the total number of hours each day that consumers spend watching, listening to, reading, and interacting with content has barely grown. At the same time, technological innovations in production and distribution, the rise of user-generated content, and the proliferation of premium content have created a dizzying array of new choices.

This is Content Shock on steroids. There are 50 times more amateur uploaders than professionals on Spotify, 25,000 times more hours of content produced last year on YouTube than on all traditional television networks and video streaming services, and AI has flood the zone and is now the dominant source of web content.

So you can imagine my excitement when I discovered a new McKinsey Research report that offers an important new clue about how content actually cuts through effectively.

The breakthrough idea in this report is that most businesses focus on the time spent on content and the size of their audience. This overlooks a more important issue: the quality of time spent.

Not all consumer attention is created equal. Consumption and monetization vary widely across the content marketing spectrum, and the quality of the attention is the reason for that variability.

Let’s dive into this today and learn about how to measure and optimize the quality of attention on your content.

The drivers of attention value

Backed by an in-depth survey of 7,000 consumers worldwide, McKinsey developed an “attention equation” that reveals the full drivers of attention value. Attention doesn’t simply equal the amount of time spent; it equals the amount of valuable time spent, driven by focus and intent. 

Using a new equation, McKinsey measured the value of consumer attention across 20 media channels. Not all content types are created alike. The value of an hour of consumption ranged from:

$33 per hour for live sports,

$17 per hour for live concerts

$7.18 for movies

$0.37 for books

$0.25 for social media posts

$0.12 per hour for digital music

$0.05 for podcasts

This is common sense. If you’re attending a live sports event or a concert,  you’ve paid a lot of money for that “content.” You’re committed!

But looking at the “lower tier” of content we usually produce — social media posts and podcasts — there’s a massive difference McKinsey describes as an “attention quotient.”

The attention quotient consists of two primary components: 1) consumers’ level of focus, or how actively they’re engaged with the content, and 2) the job to be done, or why they are consuming the content. Taken together, these components have significant predictive power on monetization.

Let’s look at these two factors — level of focus and the job to be done — more carefully to see how this might work in practice in our own companies.

Level of focus

McKinsey’s research revealed several insights about where and how consumer focus differs across media:

• In-person experiences elicit the highest level of focus.
• Books (digital and physical) engage audiences to a comparable degree with live experiences
• Console and PC gaming is the only digital medium that gets close to live levels of focus
• Community events create a high level of focus, even in digital, where group activities elicit higher focus than more solitary activities.
• Younger consumers aren’t less attentive; they just pay attention to different media. Gen Z consumers and baby boomers report the same average level of focus, but it’s split across different media: Gen Z consumers are highly focused when playing video games, while boomers prefer reading.
• Overall, the more focused consumers are, the more likely they are to spend. Across consumers, a 10 percent increase in average focus paid across media is associated with a 17 percent increase in consumer spending. Consumers in the top quartile of focus spend twice as much as those in the bottom quartile.

The job to be done

The second factor builds on a famous framework created by Clayton Christensen. When a person consumes your content, what are they “hiring it” for? What is the job to be done?

The primary “job to be done” of media consumption falls into one of five categories (from most to least valuable):

1. To enjoy something that I love. In-person experiences—including live concerts and music festivals, theme parks, sporting events, and movie theaters—dominate this category. Physical books and (to a far lesser extent) audiobooks are also consumed primarily for love.
2. For education and information. This is the primary job to be done for newspapers, magazines, and podcasts.
3. For social connection. This is the primary job of social media sites (Facebook more so than others). Social video (including Instagram reels and TikTok but not YouTube), live events, and video games overindex on this role.
4. For light entertainment and relaxation. This is the primary job of cable television, video streaming, social video, and mobile and console gaming.
5. For background ambience. This is the primary role of radio, digital music, podcasts, and cable television.

Adding these two factors to our content analysis begins to shed light on why not all marketing-related content is created equal:

Implications for demographics

The research also allowed McKinsey to tease out three distinct customer groups based on their high level of economic value:

Content lovers

Entertainment omnivores represent 13 percent of all consumers. Curious and passionate, they spend 2.4 times more money on content and consume 1.7 times more content than the average consumer. They’re the superfans, casting their consumption nets wide to see the movie franchise, watch the spin-off show, ride the themed roller coaster, and buy the items advertised at every step.

Interactivity enthusiasts

The immersion seekers (16 percent). Competitive and lively, they love video games, sports, online betting, and comedy. They prefer endorsements to advertisements, overindex in user-generated content, and spend a reasonable amount of time on online message boards such as Reddit. Although eager consumers, they find the modern media landscape confusing, difficult to navigate, and overly expensive.

Community trendsetters

The culture creators (10 percent). Extroverted tastemakers, they seek out large communal events such as concerts, movies, and theme parks. They’re active on social media and drive online culture and fandom, often with outsize spending on their hobbies and interests. They enjoy advertisements more than any other segment, and when they’re not setting the cultural conversation, they’re shopping.

The report clusters the remaining 60 percent of consumers in groups with lower attention value, and thus lower economic value.

Implications for marketers

The competition for consumer attention has long been measured by audience size and time spent. This view misses the whole story (a point I made in my 2017 book, The Content Code).

It also reinforces the basic idea behind Content Shock: you’re probably going to have to pay more for the content types that cut through the noise.

The attention equation helps clarify what the winners in that competition have suspected: Quality and relevance, not just quantity, of attention go a long way in determining success. In a media environment defined by abundance, fragmentation, and distraction, marketers must ask themselves:

• Is my content designed for high focus or low focus?

• What job am I really being hired for?

• How can I elevate the focus or shift the job?

Think about this practical example: Google wanted to shine a light on the Nobel Prize-winning work of its genius AI leader, Demis Hassabis.

Most companies might put out a press release or a blog post — very low attention value. But Google produced a full-length documentary called The Thinking Game. It already has 14 million views on YouTube alone.

According to the McKinsey formula, this film is already worth more than $100 million in attention. Let’s say it took $5 million to make the film. This would break most content marketing budgets, but within the McKinsey model, that is a bargain. And that return on attention that will only grow as the movie is viewed over time.

Implications for strategy

This research tells us something I’ve been circling around for years: the brands that win aren’t the ones who shout the loudest, but the ones who create moments that matter. Attention is no longer a game of volume. It’s not about hacking the algorithm or flooding the zone. It’s about earning focus and aligning with the deeper job your audience needs you to do in their lives.

That’s the frontier now. Not more content … but higher-quality attention.

The companies that embrace this shift will stop measuring the wrong things. They’ll stop obsessing about impressions and start designing for immersion. They’ll stop producing noise and view content as nourishment. And in a world overwhelmed by Content Shock, that will be the ultimate competitive advantage.

I also want to connect the dots between the Attention Equation and a post I wrote about ethically-sourced marketing. If we turn our focus to higher-value content, it could reduce the social media “litter” that drives up energy costs and funds online hate and bullying.

Make something worth hiring. Make something worth focusing on. Make something worthy of the precious, finite human attention that has become the most valuable currency in the world.

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Illustration courtesy Nano Banana

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