With every mistake - We must surely be learning

Still my guitar gently weeps.... - The Beatles

Hello friends! Happy Friday! Seen the new Superman movie?

It’s everything a 12-year-old hopped up on gummy worms could dream of.

We’re talking: melodramatic speeches about “being human,” rifts in the fabric of the universe, and a million monkey-bots flooding the internet with takes that make Elon’s shitposting look like a calm, curated museum exhibit.

Also? Superman gets his ass kicked more times than Linda Yaccarino failed at fixing Twitter.

It’s chaotic, shiny, and noisy enough to make you forget there used to be a pretty good story there. “But it was fun, fun, fun when we were drinking…”

No. Seriously. Get a few drinks before you see it. They certainly had a few as they made it.

Anyway, speaking of drunk content creation... I’ve been thinking a lot about AI and content - specifically how the things we published way back aren’t just resurfacing, they’re being reinterpreted. And not always in ways we’d want. What once felt like a throwaway post or a half-baked idea might now be training an algorithm to confidently misrepresent us.

I have….. well, thoughts…

So, let’s take a minute to make sure that if our old content’s going to keep talking, it’s still saying something we’re happy to stand by…. and not talking like it’s trying to get us kicked off The View.

In this episode of LENS (we have a new recommended reading section - woot!):

• Zoom Lens: Remembering What You Forgot to Remember

• Wide Angle Lens: Maybe the Problem Isn’t AI - It’s Us

• Lens Flare: What I’m reading this month...

• Macro Lens: Rewriting the Record Before AI Does It for You

• Let’s roll….

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ZOOM LENS:

Remembering What We Forgot To Remember

There was a time when your dusty old blog post from 2016 could hide in peace on page 12 of your sitemap. Maybe it aged poorly. Maybe it was a hot take that fizzled out. Maybe it was written in the golden age of keyword stuffing and whitepaper PDFs.

We’ve all written them - those blog posts with titles like “What Justin Bieber’s Haircut Teaches Us About Customer Experience”. Yeah, I’ve done it. I have plenty of cringe-worthy content out there. And, no, I will not link to it thank you very much.

Usually, you can just smile, and rest assured that Google safely obscured your ridiculousness to the bottom of page 78 on search engine results.

But in 2025? That post may be back. And it’s bringing receipts.

Welcome to the era of teaching the AI, where large language models are scraping your legacy content and remixing it into the next AI-search-powered customer interaction, search result, or thought leadership summary.

Here’s the insidious part. It’s not just what your content was. If it were just that, it might be okay.

It’s what your content teaches. In other words, what did AI LEARN from your content that it’s now going to confidently try and explain to your customers.

What are we teaching AI?

You see, GenAI isn’t just consuming your content - it’s absorbing it. It’s interpreting your brand’s worldview. And unlike humans, it doesn’t understand that, ha ha, you don’t reallllly mean that any more. It doesn’t care that your blog post about “customer loyalty in a post-pandemic world” was written before the pandemic. Or that your current CMO’s post in 2018 on how to do the Fortnite dance was when he was still a marketing coordinator at a gaming company, and isn’t really meant to be a pillar of your brand voice.

It will “learn”. And then speak. For you.

That’s not just a future potential branding risk — it’s a reputational liability.

Okay - so what’s the answer? Well, it comes back to one of the least sexy projects that have come back in a big way: Content Audits.

Content audits have now graduated from boring best practice to brand preservation protocol. You’re not just cleaning up broken links and outdated CTAs. You’re doing a narrative version control.

Because your content - even the old, crusty stuff - is now a possible live input. It may shape what AI says about you, for you, and instead of you.

Think of it like this: If a stranger asked ChatGPT who you are, what would it say?

And are you OK with part of that answer being pulled from a forgotten microsite from 2017?

You can’t stop LLMs from learning. But, you can decide what they learn from.

So yeah, soon you will need to reboot your content. Not just for SEO or branding, but because AI is going to use it whether you like it or not.

This is where you can shift from defense to offense.

Put This Into Practice

So - here are a couple of practical tips on this:

• Reframe, don’t just republish. Do more than update the date and publish that 2019 article again. Add a timestamped preface. Call out what’s changed. Link to newer thinking. Show the evolution - make it clear this piece is part of an ongoing story, not a standalone statement frozen in time.

• Add context and structure. Don’t bank on machines inferring nuance - assume they need signals to follow. Use clear metadata, canonical tags, and internal links to help AI systems associate your old content with your current thinking.

• Audit for dissonance. If AI search summaries misrepresent your brand, assume there’s a vacuum you haven’t filled. Patch it with new content. Clarify what you stand for now and make that content easy to find, link to, and quote.

AI is going to start to speak for all of us. We just need to be much more careful about what we’re teaching it to say.

If I can help you with this - we’re performing this new kind of audit quite a bit. Or… Just check out my full post here - and let us know if we can help.

WIDE ANGLE LENS:

MAYBE THE PROBLEM ISN’T AI - IT’S US

Let’s get it all in focus, shall we?

☎️ The Most Protected Place in Marketing? Your Landline.

In a twist worthy of Black Mirror, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act - yes, the ‘90s robocall law - is now the sharpest legal tool for pushing back on AI-generated outreach. Synthetic voice calls, AI text bots, and auto-dialed spam? All potentially illegal without consent. Meanwhile, digital channels are still a free-for-all, where AI can spin up garbage content and slide into your inbox uninvited.

Maybe it’s time digital got rules, too. But this is really interesting for those of you who may use call centers for marketing purposes.

Read more at Reuters →

💸 WPP’s Wake-Up Call: Can We Slow Down, Please?

WPP just dropped a rough profit warning, watched its stock dip, and declared that AI is its future. The message? Legacy brands must move faster or die.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

This isn’t about speed. It’s the continuing fantasy that AI is going to magically clean up disjointed messaging, broken content workflows, and marketing bloat. The real question isn’t “can we adapt fast enough?” It’s “can we slow down long enough to get strategic?”

AI isn’t a panacea. And racing toward it without clarity? That’s just automation at scale — not transformation.

Read the full piece at Business Insider →

🤖 LENS FLARE:

What I’m Reading.

A few things that I’m discovering or revisiting and enjoying very much. FWIW no affiliate links here - just good stuff.

📘 The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin

I’m rereading this masterclass from the man behind Def Jam and Johnny Cash. Rubin strips creativity way back - no labels, no flash - just presence and practice

📕 Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal
I try and pick at least one book per month that I’m pretty sure I will disagree with - and this was the one this month. I missed this when it came out in 17… And, well, not sure about this one. There’s some really interesting points here on unlocking flow, and neurobiology. But the corporate microdosing regimens and clandestine neuro‑experiments feel a bit like Silicon Valley Tech-Bro biohacking bullshit hyped up on ketamine.

📙 The Practice by Seth Godin
This is another book I missed when it came out. I just finished this one as part of my research to my new book Valuable Friction. I love Seth’s point of view, but often find myself disagreeing with some of it. This is a lovely book on creativity, courage and creating rituals. I (have always) disagreed with Seth’s "publish before you’re ready” mantra - but otherwise The Practice is about consistency, shipping, and doing the work even when it isn’t magical. Less about “being creative,” more about showing up for your craft.

MACRO LENS:

A Snapshot From A Recent Project

A new VP at a mid-market SaaS company came to me for help modernizing their content strategy. But when we ran a content audit, what we found changed everything. As a company, they’ve been around in various incarnations for more than 15 years. Like many tech startups, their business model has changed, their value propositions have changed - basically everything has changed. And legacy blogs, old campaign pages, and an outdated vision whitepaper were being quoted - verbatim - by generative search tools. Worse? Those outdated assets were being surfaced more often than their current positioning.

Their brand wasn’t just buried under old content - it was being actively misrepresented by it.

We built an AI-first content audit process that didn’t just flag ROT - it mapped which outdated ideas were training LLMs. That insight led to a full messaging pivot: they tightened their POV, rebuilt their foundational content, and turned their audit into a strategic relaunch.

Way too early to see the full results yet - but we can see it’s already starting to have positive effects in search.

If we can help you with a content audit - let me know.

LENS CAP: FINISH WITH A FLOURISH

🍷 Finishing Notes…

If there’s a takeaway from this week, it’s this:

The future of content isn’t just what we create next - it’s what we already created and forgot to manage. The archive is alive. The machines are reading. And in many cases, they’re quoting us back to ourselves, out of context, at scale.

Whether it’s an AI hallucination of your 2017 whitepaper or a chatbot remixing your pandemic-era hot takes - the risk isn’t just irrelevance. It’s confusion. Brand confusion. Message confusion. Strategic confusion.

And that doesn’t get fixed with more content. It gets fixed with better content - and smarter stewardship of what already exists.

So if your content is out there telling stories, make sure it’s telling the right ones. If your brand has evolved, make sure your old posts got the memo.

Audit with intention. Reframe what matters. And remember: AI is just a reflection of what we’ve fed it.

Until next time -

stay sharp, stay curious, and please, clean up your digital attic.

It’s Your Story. Tell It Well.