Valuable Friction
Instead of living up to the promise that AI will “unlock our creativity”, we risk living down to the possibility of locking ourselves out of it.
It’s Monday. Soooo… Anything on your mind? Tomorrow is just another Tuesday right?
So - we wrapped Content Marketing World two weeks ago - and I thought I’d share my opening remarks on where we find ourselves here at the end of 2024
We marketers are living in extraordinary times.
Every day, we have the opportunity to reshape how people think, work, and connect with the world.
But too few of us do.
It’s not just that marketing is more complex than ever. It’s that too many of us are starting to miss out on essential, nourishing experiences, the “valuable friction” that comes from doing difficult work.
Before I go on - speaking of friction…
<cue “and now the ask”>
As we wrap up the year, we’re just starting up a new engagement with a client, and focused on developing a measurement program for their content marketing plans for 2025.As you start your next year’s planning - if this is the kind of project that might provide value to what you’re looking to do next year - let us know. We’re ready to take on some new engagements.
<scoots off stage>
Okay… Let’s get focused and talk about Valuable Friction!
In this episode:
The medium and its message…
Nutter Butter is crushing it
Owned media is still a thing… well at least Semrush thinks so.
Let’s roll….
ZOOM LENS: THE VALUABLE FRICTION?
We Shaped Our Tools, Then They Shaped Us
If that line sounds familiar? It should. I’m echoing the famous quote (wrongly) attributed to Marshall McLuhan: “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”
But this phrase helps explain McLuhan’s more famous and often misunderstood saying, “The medium is the message.”
“We shape our tools” describes the start of a new medium (innovation). And “then our tools shape us” describes the “message” (effect) of that medium.
The effect of innovation (whether electricity, the internet, social media, or generative AI) is how it ultimately shapes us.
What does this have to do with content and marketing in 2024?
We’ve Reached The “Meh” Era of Marketing
CMI’s recently released B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Outlook for 2025 research revealed that too many marketers produce underwhelming results:
58% of marketers rate their content strategy as only moderately effective.
53% describe their content as average, fair, or poor.
Nearly half struggle with unclear goals.
Only one in three has a scalable content creation model.
We’ve become what Monty Python might call the Knights of Meh.
Marketing teams are trapped in an endless cycle of fixing things. The CMS was never fully implemented. Marketing automation still doesn’t work. No one can access the right data, but we’re all looking for it. Analytics are broken. The new CMO is reorganizing and auditing everything. And we’re all playing with AI like it’s a shiny new toy, but no one knows where it fits.
Why are so many marketing teams playing not to lose instead of to win?
We shaped our tools. And then they shaped us.
Organizations have plugged each tech innovation into marketing, hoping to make it more efficient or effective.
But they’ve failed to convey the actual purpose or objectives of marketing full stop. And they rarely consider how to nourish people so they can continue to improve their skills or build institutional wisdom to apply to this business strategy we call marketing.
We’ve reached peak tools. We gather data that we can’t access and expend all our efforts to drive incrementally more clicks, views, or purchases. Then, we claim we’ve improved our marketing.
But we haven’t.
Instead of freeing us to take bold, creative leaps, we’ve become mired in the mundane. We’ve forgotten how to take risks that may lead to spectacular success or spectacular failure.
We’ve successfully reduced the risk in marketing as we’ve also removed the joy.
Marketing is experiencing an identity crisis. We feel siloed and boxed in, with no clear path for growth. We’ve become specialists in optimizing the tools that shape us, and we’re losing sight of the big ideas we could pursue.
Then, right on cue, generative AI entered the scene.
Amplifier or outsourcer?
If there was ever a terrible time to introduce a new tool to tackle marketing’s creative challenges, it was the early 2020s.
But AI is here, and it will change how we work. The question isn’t whether it will reshape us. It will. But how it reshapes us is still up for grabs.
AI doesn’t replace creativity; it amplifies what you bring to the table. If your content ideas are mediocre, AI will only churn out more mediocrity. But if you approach it with creativity, strategy, and boldness, you’ll find an opportunity to amplify those qualities with AI.
AI isn’t a villain. People fear a future controlled by robots. They imagine a crazed AI that, given the goal of creating paper clips, starts to make those paper clips out of people and destroys us all.
This is a distraction.
The real threat of generative AI is that it shapes us into even deeper complacency. We may start trusting AI to do more and more creative things without injecting our human spark — diluting the thing that makes marketing an art as much as science.
We may trust AI to generate more and more of our strategy — deprecating our need to understand whether the strategy is sound or not.
By skipping the hard work of creative iteration, deep reading, and storytelling, we miss out on the experiences, knowledge, and empathy that cultivate wisdom.
If we, as marketers and content creators, outsource not just the busywork but the ability to conduct strategic, creative thinking, we risk becoming passive participants in strategies and stories.
The AI available today is the dumbest you’ll ever use, as the saying goes. But that only increases the risk of AI shaping us in negative ways.
The real danger of generative AI isn’t how intelligent it becomes but how complacent it leads us to become.
This is where valuable friction comes into play.
The power of valuable friction
Valuable friction is the deliberate resistance that slows you down enough to think critically, evaluate, and challenge. It’s the tension that forces you to pause and infuse your work with creativity. It’s the mental nourishment you get from reading the book, understanding the details, and working through the process.
Without this friction, people become automated, robotic, and disconnected from the process.
If you aim to move your marketing beyond maintenance mode, redefine your goals and actions, and make marketing more human, where are you in that process?
Are you using technology to amplify your creativity, or are you outsourcing your learning, knowledge, empathy, creativity, and wisdom?
The friction, the effort, and the engagement — that’s where you find value. The more you embrace the challenges of the evolving landscape, the more you’ll unlock your full potential as marketers and content creators.
It’s your story. Take Your Time and Tell it well.
WIDE ANGLE LENS: MARKETING SNAPS
Let’s get it all in focus, shall we?
🪜 Nutter Butter Swings For The Cringe
Have you seen the Nutter Butter TikTok Account. Over the last few weeks they have been called “crazy”, “unhinged”, and just absolutely “nuts”.
It’s kind of hard to describe - so you’ll just have to go take a look for yourself.
It might be weird - but is it also just crushing goals? Maybe. But The New York Times certainly seems to think it might be a really interesting idea. Now running upwards of 1.4 million followers - it seems like they’re doing something right.
What do I think? I think this is just the kind of weirdness we need to get back to in marketing.
🗒️ Semrush Acquires Third Door Media
Semrush seems to have missed the conventional wisdom memo that websites and publishing sites are dead. They have acquired Third Door Media, the publisher of SEO leadership site SeachEngineLand, and the event Search Marketing Expo (SMX).
I absolutely love this acquisition as it immediately gives Semrush access to a big, and passionate audience, a thought leadership event platform, and just an amazing portfolio of content marketing experiences.
My only worry. I just hope they don’t mess it up. These things can be tricky. So tread carefully.
LENS CAP: Let’s Finish With A Flourish
As we stand on the cusp of the next four years of our government AND the latest marketing shift, just know you’re not alone. Every content and marketing team is on this journey, too. We’re all in this together.
Just know you won’t find the marketing answers by looking to technology to automate everything. You’ll only find it by refining processes, applying strategic best practices, and introducing new technologies in ways that cultivate the collective wisdom of your team. (That’s our new focus, too, and we’re standing by to help.)
This approach lets you build institutional strength and create space for your teams to do meaningful, friction-filled work that builds brands, drives revenue, and inspires lasting loyalty.
Go ahead and stir up some serious friction. That’s the only way to spark wisdom.
It’s your story. Take Your Time. And Tell it well.
See you soon!