It’s time for an AI reality check. This wake-up call comes courtesy of The Guardian, which reported that a guy just lost $2 million because he may have committed the crime of Attempted AI.

A $2 million publishing deal for Jerry Falade’s debut crime novel, Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, collapsed after his literary agents withdrew the manuscript over concerns about potential AI use.

The agents said they could not authenticate how the draft evolved from origin to completion, leading them to drop the author after “aspects of the author’s story changed.” In response, the author firmly denied using AI and criticized the industry’s use of unreliable AI-detection tools.

And here is the wake-up call. Is it justice to penalize an editor for an AI assist? How does this play out in your world where AI is in the middle of everything?

To put things in a rational perspective, oblige me for a moment as I share a story from nearly a hundred years ago: the story of Thomas Wolfe.

The editor who cried Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe, who grew up near me, is one of America’s most beloved writers. His books, including Look Homeward, Angel, are standard issue for American literature courses. The irony is, Wolfe was a genius, but an incompetent writer.

Wolfe wrote by scrawling words on a page longhand and tossing each finished page into a wooden crate without a second glance. When his editor, Maxwell Perkins, finally demanded the overdue manuscript for his first novel, Wolfe delivered a crate stuffed with roughly a million words across some three thousand unnumbered pages. Then, a few days later, he brought in another half-million words.

For two years, night after night, Perkins sat with Wolfe and cut. Even after deleting 90,000 words, his editor struggled to find a book inside this landslide.

Thomas Wolfe became an international bestselling author. But it was the heroic work of Perkins that turned raw genius into something a reader could comprehend.

In the pantheon of literary greats, Wolfe was not an outlier. Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Raymond Carver all wrote novels that relied on invasive surgery from editors.

Now, back to the AI story.

I can’t afford to have an editor for two years

So what about this author who is accused of using AI to augment his work?

What if he did?

How is that any different from Thomas Wolfe working with a human editor for two years to write a marketable book? It seems hypocritical to publicly humiliate an author for an editing assist when massive editorial corrections have been a standard industry practice for centuries.

Perhaps the real question isn’t about editing your work, but about faking your work. And that brings us to ...

The Milli Vanilli Line

On July 21, 1989, the pop duo Milli Vanilli panicked and ran off a concert stage when a pre-recorded track for their hit “Girl You Know It’s True” skipped in front of thousands of fans.

Following the public embarrassment and mounting rumors about lip-syncing performances, their producer finally confessed that Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan had never sung a single note on their multi-platinum album. The humiliated duo became the first artists in history to have their Grammy Award revoked.

My point is, you can use AI to help you create and edit content … until you cross the Milli Vanilli Line and risk humiliation as a fake.

There is a “yay for humans” segment of creators who believe only pure human content is legitimate, and that AI can never meet or exceed the creativity and quality of human effort. I am not in that camp. AI is empowering. It can create spectacular, compelling content indistinguishable from human efforts, and you should use it wisely to help grow your business and your brand. Your competitors are.

However ...

The Green sentence

A few weeks ago, Hank Green found that for his audience, the Milli Vanilli Line was one sentence.

Green is one of the internet’s most beloved creators -- a science educator, novelist, and entrepreneur who has been publishing online videos since 2007. Some of his fans refer to him as “uncle.” Trust was his entire business.

Then, in one video, his reputation crashed. In a segment answering an audience question, Green said, “I appreciate the pushback.” His tech-savvy audience immediately recognized that phrase as a fingerprint of AI-generated content. The clip went viral. A fan revolt followed.

Green didn’t just apologize; he indicted his own habits. “The level of dopamine that I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs,” he wrote, “is not healthy for me or good for the world.” He admitted he’d overcommitted and leaned on AI to push out more videos faster.

For this audience, the mere scent of AI was disqualifying. For Hank Green, the ability to produce fast -- and carelessly -- eliminated the intellectual friction of his trusted human content.

“This incident made me think a lot about my job,” he said. “I wanted to create more and more content and used AI to help. But the internet does not really need more videos. It needs more of me. My job is being me.”

The Milli Vanilli Line is when your audience notices. It’s not just detection. It’s substitution.

Reality check

AI surrounds us like the air that we breathe. It is baked into everything. Some day we won’t need to explain it, let alone apologize for it. We’ll look back at this time, and think “Sheesh ... remember when we had AI disclosure policies?”

But for now, the overriding rule must be this: Will using AI in any way breach trust in me and my brand?

Over time, I don’t think the existential issue will be detection. It will be substitution.

Let’s get back to basics. Trust first, trust last, trust in everything you do. Then figure out how to use AI responsibly.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog. And while you’re there, check out my bestselling books on modern marketing, my speaking reel, and the world’s best personal branding class. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Image courtesy MidJourney

I love this observation from a recent Jeff Bullas post:

“I’ve lived all three eras, and I have the scars. I started a blog in 2009 from pure human curiosity and built it to 33 million readers. Then Facebook throttled my reach. Then Google’s snippets answered the questions my articles used to. Then AI slop flooded the web I helped build.

Every wave, the machine took a little more of the human out of the middle. I’m not guessing at this pattern. I watched it happen to my own life’s work.

Look at your own history the same way. Every platform that ever gave you reach eventually took it back. Build the one thing they can’t throttle: a direct line to real people.”

When I tell business leaders that their most valuable asset is an email list, they often look at me like I’m crazy. Isn’t that a 1990s strategy? But your email list is the direct line to real people that Jeff is hinting at here.

As a marketing services provider, my main social media drug of choice has been LinkedIn. I’ve followed the rules, I’ve played the game. And I keep wondering, to what end? My valuable content enriches LinkedIn. The platform owns my contact list. Their algorithm shields me from the people who might need my ideas the most.

A lot of social media marketing has become like a trade show. You sit in a booth, make a snazzy sign to grab attention, and hope that a customer drifts by. Most people just want the swag, but you’re afraid not to participate because that would seem weird. Everybody else has a booth, right?

Likewise, I see people being pulled into the Instagram trap and the TikTok memes. It’s intoxicating. It might even be fun. There are certainly powerful use cases for social media marketing, but we need to keep asking the question, “To what end?”

Are you creating customers?

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog. And while you’re there, check out my bestselling books on modern marketing, my speaking reel, and the world’s best personal branding class. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustration courtesy of MidJourney

The other day, someone sent me a sales pitch on LinkedIn. He told me that he is a fan of my personal branding book KNOWN and that he had built an AI model to show me -- an interactive tool based on the book. Could he send it to me?

On one level, this seems very kind, and I’m honored that he liked the book so much.

But let’s step back and look at this from a legal and ethical perspective. This fellow created a piece of software based on my proprietary, copyrighted book. This is clearly a violation of the principles of fair use.

He wasn’t quoting the book or referencing the book, he was using the whole book for a unique commercial venture.

I sent him a reply: “Does it occur to you that you should ask permission before building software on another person’s Intellectual Property?”

He answered:

Fair question, and thank you for asking it straight.

You’re right… I should have asked you before building anything on KNOWN and putting it out there, even as a rough, unofficial concept. That one’s on me. I’ve taken it down.

No spin, no “but”… it shouldn’t have gone out without your blessing first.

I appreciate you telling me directly instead of just writing me off.

To his credit, his response was professional, and this ended on a positive note.

But this little one-act drama is an example of how ripping off content has been normalized. We see the most valuable companies in the world stealing content at scale to fuel their AI platforms. Titans of industry bulldoze through laws and copyright concerns to fuel data-hungry businesses.

I want to be clear about my intent with this post. Realistically, there is nothing I can do about a Fortune 500 company stealing our intellectual property (although I am a beneficiary of the class action lawsuit against Anthropic). But I might have an impact on you and your decision to pause before stealing another person’s work.

What is fair use?

It is perfectly fine to use another person’s work as long as it meets the fair use standard. The definition of fair use is complex and varies by country, but in general, there are four considerations:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (like somebody teaching a class).

2. The nature of the copyrighted work (is it factual or creative?)

3. The portion re-used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.

4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work.

The short version for most creators is this: You can use short quotes or content snippets with attribution. You can refer to content like songs and movies in parodies, comedy, and criticism.

If you’re unsure about what you’re doing, the remedy is simple: just ask for permission.

Your creative process

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” This famous quote was once attributed to Picasso, but apparently he never said it!

The world progresses by building on the work of others. Attribution and fair use are fine. Asking for permission is preferred. Creative iteration and connecting the dots in new ways is how we innovate.

So here’s my ask. The next time you’re tempted to build your book, your app, your business on someone else’s work -- pause. Send the message. Ask.

It costs you almost nothing. Sometimes the answer is yes, and now you have a partner instead of a lawsuit. Sometimes it’s no, and you’ve saved yourself the regret.

Choosing to ask might make you a weirdo in an age that rewards stealing. Good. Be that weirdo. Because the guy on LinkedIn taught me something hopeful: when someone points out the line, most people know exactly where it is. They just needed a reason to honor it.

Be the person who honors it before anyone has to ask. Build a marketing world that is respectful and ethical.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog. And while you’re there, check out my bestselling books on modern marketing, my speaking reel, and the world’s best personal branding class. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

I’m working on a very new and revised edition of my personal branding book “KNOWN” and collecting case studies. Two interviews revealed radically different perspectives on personal branding content strategy. In fact, they were SO different that it made me think I should comment on it.

Let’s compare the apporaches and see what you think:

Story One: Algorithmic Optimization

Shawn Van Dyke is a construction business expert. He is featured in the first edition of KNOWN with an inspiring tale of how a family tragedy propelled his personal branding work.

He has been an incredible success and is now an author, consultant, and speaker. Shawn is a student of the algorithmic game and has optimized his content to cut through the competitive noise. Because he has consistently delivered his content for 10 years, he is earning referrals from AI in a very crowded industry.

But it’s a challenge to adjust to the changing world. He told me, “I have a hard time keeping up with the algorithms and trends. The content that gets seen and shared needs to conform to certain algorithmic and cultural expectations. If you don’t keep up with the memes, you fall short.”

Story Two: Emotional connection

Dr. Jules Morris is a university professor but is building her brand by using her small farm to inspire people and help them flourish in a chaotic world. Her video content from Sweet BombDiggity Farms is building an engaged new audience. Her fans are creating a deep emotional bond to her unvarnished content from the farm.

She told me: “Here’s what I don’t do: chase trends, trending audio, transitions, dances, what I privately call the ‘fancy stuff.’ My rule is simple: be useful, be entertaining, be honest about what I know. I share the wins, the fails, and other people’s wins, too. I show up every single day with a piece of content, no exceptions. That discipline is the engine -- It’s the real strategy.”

Two legitimate strategies

Although these stories seem to be contradictory, they are both legitimate paths to success.

Shawn is a numbers guy and an expert in performance marketing. He can see a cause and effect when he tweaks his content to catch the wave of the latest trend. He is optimizing his content for maximum effect.

Jules is a human-centered brand marketer showing restraint when it comes to the algorithms. By being more focused on the brand, her numbers might go up or down day to day, but through her uplifting daily content, her audience grows slowly but steadily.

The strategy you choose matters far less than whether you can keep doing it.

A third content path

My own personal branding content strategy is a hybrid approach.

• I don’t write for SEO, but I don’t ignore it.

• I might look at the numbers week-to-week, but I only care about the numbers year-to-year.

• I don’t respond to trends, but I write about timely subjects.

• I am not as lovable as Jules’ farm filled with rescue animals, but I think people respect my honesty and non-performative vulnerability. I would like to be as lovable as her ducklings one day!

• Most important, I’m consistent. With a little break for COVID, I think I’ve published more than a thousand weeks in a row.

There’s no single right way to build a personal brand. But there’s one wrong way -- starting something you can’t sustain.

Choose the path you can still be walking a thousand weeks from now. Everything else is a detail.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog. And while you’re there, check out my bestselling books on modern marketing, my speaking reel, and the world’s best personal branding class. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

I’m learning a new creative skill. It’s energizing, exasperating, inspiring, and reminds me what it’s like to be a new creator. I thought I’d share this humbling experience with you because it’s brought new clarity about what it’s like to start over and fight to cut through the noise.

When I was a little boy, I loved to draw. Although the arts were not a priority in my family, somehow I acquired a drawing pad and some colored pencils. I loved making pictures of animals, but the hobby and the drawing pad vanished as I reached my teens.

About 45 years later, I had a drawing pad in front of me once again. My wife and I were at a mountain resort that had been snowed in. The lodge brought in a local artist to teach a watercolor class to relieve our boredom. Improbably, this was the first art class I ever had in my life.

The teacher patiently showed her five students how to paint an autumn leaf while explaining the type of paint, paper, and brushes to use in this very difficult medium. I actually created something that looked like a leaf. Here it is:

Painting a leaf that looked like a leaf had the same effect of being a lousy golfer who hits one good shot: You convince yourself that if it happened once, it can happen again. So I bought some supplies and started to experiment. This photo was taken just a few months before the pandemic, so I was about to have a lot more time to practice!

As my post-COVID consulting/speaking career heated up, I didn’t have much time to paint but never gave up. Even if I had an hour a week, I kept experimenting, and usually failed, but kept moving forward by creating little pictures to give to friends who were sick or suffering.

After about three years, I was brave enough to post one of my paintings on Facebook:

A friend reached out and asked if he could buy it as an anniversary present for his wife. I was shocked and humbled, but took his money : ) Ha! I was officially a paid, professional painter, even though most of my work was crap.

Fast forward to today. A local boutique is now carrying my paintings, and I’m selling 4-5 per month. In a few weeks, one of my paintings will hang on a wall at a local art show for the first time.

It occurs to me that my ups and downs are the same as what you’ll experience as you begin to publish online to build your personal brand. Here are eight lessons that might help you.

1. There are no shortcuts.

I’m not the most patient person. I want to be successful NOW. In my personal branding class, I emphasize that you have to publish every week for 18 months to see if your idea is working. The more you practice, the better you get, which makes it a lot more fun. You have to be humble and put in the work. Nobody is born with a million social media followers.

2. The beauty and truth of mistakes

About two years into my journey, I created this painting:

If you look closely at the bottom right corner of the painting, there are feathery little disruptions in the water. Technically speaking, these are mistakes called watercolor “blooms.” But to me, this is the best part of the painting. It suggested something magical about the water. The work was so much better when I left in my mistakes.

Of course, this is what I’ve been teaching for many years: The Most Human Company Wins. Especially in this AI Era, showing up as human -- mistakes and all -- will become a point of differentiation.

3. Joy is a competitive advantage.

Now that my paintings are becoming a little popular, I’ve received requests to make a painting of someone’s house or pet. Nope. If I’m not painting what interests me, then it becomes a job.

In my classes, I teach that you should be fearless in your content and pursue the path that will bring you most joy. If it’s not fun, you’ll quit. And you can’t quit.

4. Pride is more important than perfection

My biggest problem is not knowing when to call a painting “finished.” I keep tweaking, trying to make it perfect, and I end up adding so many details that it becomes a mess.

Whether a blog post, podcast, or video, I have never posted a piece of content that was perfect. However, I’ve always posted content that I’m proud of. Striving for perfection creates an unrealistic obstacle to success. If you’re proud of it, the work is ready to go.

5. Consistency is more important than genius

There are two main reasons people fail after completing my personal branding class: They never start, or they stop too soon.

I am not a great painter. But I want to be one. Yes, I am super busy in my “normal” career, but I’ll never improve if I don’t find time to practice. I have a little painting kit and notebook I carry on business trips now. All I need is a cup of water in a hotel room to keep practicing. If you’re going to win in this world, you have to make your content a priority.

6. The only thing that matters is quality

The benefit of consistency is quality. The more you work, the better you get. Here’s a comparison of my paintings of a blue jay, about two years apart:

The one on the left from two years ago is overworked. The background distracts from the bird. The lines are hard where the feathers should be soft. The body looks flat instead of round. Somehow, the bird on the right seems to have a personality!

I’m lucky that I can compare these paintings and see progress as a creator. It’s not that easy when you’re in the trenches working on a podcast or video series, but it IS happening!

You can trick somebody into clicking a link to see your post, but you can’t trick them into subscribing to you or hiring you. To build and retain an audience, there is only one solution: quality. Keep improving over time.

7. Create what you feel

An important part of my journey was watching YouTube tutorials to learn new skills. My goal was to copy exactly what the teachers were demonstrating. I still do this, and always will, because I have so much to learn! But to stand out, I’ll have to stop painting what I see (copying others) and start painting what I feel (my distinct voice).

When I started as a blogger, I had no idea what I was doing, so I just copied other bloggers. To cut through the noise and earn my own audience, I had to stop copying and develop my own confident voice. In the professional world, if I’m known for one thing, It’s probably my originality. You will see ideas in this space you will see nowhere else!

I have a long way to go to achieve this confidence and originality as a painter, but it’s starting to show up. In my latest painting, the colors are unrealistic and wild, but they reflect my feelings about a favorite spot in the Smoky Mountain National Park called Tremont:

This is not a real scene, but it is MY scene.

8. You have no competition

It’s been fun discovering new watercolor artists on Instagram. There are thousands of them! They are all using the same paint and paper, but they’re all unique. Every one of them is earning their own audience day by day.

It might seem intimidating trying to break through the noise. Some people might think it’s impossible, especially in the AI Era. But let’s get real. Before AI, you had a million competitors. Now you might have a billion competitors. Does it really matter? There is still only one you. You have no competition.

There are millions of artists. I am not the best watercolor artist in my country, my state, or even in my county. But I’ve found a small audience that cares. I am growing as a creator, and that is something to build on.

If you’re at the beginning of your journey as a creator or beginning to build your personal brand, I hope these lessons fortify you.

I know it seems daunting to begin from scratch, but you really don’t have any choice, do you? If you have a dream, you must start, you must not quit, you must progress. The payoff is out there.

You can find more of my paintings here. Some of them are good. Next month they will be better.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog. And while you’re there, check out my bestselling books on modern marketing, my speaking reel, and the world’s best personal branding class. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Guest post by Anna Zgadzaj

Last month at Cannes Lions, something special, some even say historic, happened: after a decade of public disagreements, the two most influential voices in today’s brand marketing science, Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson, came together to talk about what they actually agree on. They identified five things: four proven ways to grow brands and one that is not.

This is not another recap of what happened in that Cannes session. As a self-confessed marketing nerd who has been following both profs for years, here’s my take on what this meeting of the minds means for you in practice, especially for those of us building brands without Fortune 500 budgets.

1. Come to mind at the right time

Modern marketing explained very simply is about two things: making brands easy to remember and easy to buy. Easy to remember not in general, but in specific buying situations. Someone needs a refreshment on a hot summer day and a cold can of Coke comes to mind. That’s mental availability. (Physical availability is Coke being right there, ready for them to buy.)

If your brand is mentally available to your customers at the right moments, most of your marketing’s job is already done. But this is not the same as brand awareness.

Knowing you exist isn’t enough. Take cars, for example. Everyone is aware of Ferrari, but it’s not the brand that springs to mind when you need a new car for their growing family. If you’re like my sister, you will think of Volvo first, then research and test different brands for weeks before buying (you guessed it) a Volvo. The brand came to mind first -- it was mentally available in that particular buying situation.

The big shift here is to move from thinking about “what does our brand evoke” to “what evokes our brand” (for Volvo: the need for a safe family car).

A 2025 study of 1.2 million purchase journeys found that 84% of people bought a brand they were already biased towards before they started looking. Mental availability makes you that brand.

Marketers with limited resources need to be strategic about which specific buying situations they want to build memory for. One option is to choose the ones that are underserved by leaders in the category.

The question to ask: Are we memorable enough so that when a buying situation arises, our brand comes to mind?

2. Distinctiveness is non-negotiable

One of the best ways to make your brand memorable is being distinctive. And for both Ritson and Sharp, distinctiveness is non-negotiable.

This trait comes from a set of distinctive brand assets: logo, colors, mascots, jingles, product shapes. This is not about looking different from competitors but rather, as Byron Sharp puts it, “a brand looking like itself” -- Always and wherever it shows up.

The holy grail is becoming so distinctive that people can recognize you even without seeing your name. A recent example: Levi’s, not an official World Cup sponsor, had to cover its logo at a stadium and did so using its distinctive batwing shape.

Distinctiveness is one area where smaller brands don’t need enormous budgets to compete intelligently. You may not be able to afford a celebrity as a face for your brand. But you can adopt a brand mascot with real personality -- think Duolingo owl and its main character energy, and what it did for brand recognition. And research shows brand mascots outperform celebrities anyway. Creativity can beat budgets here.

The question to ask: Would someone recognize this as coming from our brand, even without seeing our name?

3. The case for consistency

To be memorable, you need to show up repeatedly looking and sounding like yourself. Not changing brand look and voice every quarter.

Marketers work on their brand all day, every day, so it’s easy to get bored with repetition. But we overestimate how much of this work audiences actually notice, amid an onslaught of competing content.

Consistency applies to campaigns too. System1 and IPA research show that one to two years is when brand-building campaigns start to see significant compounding effects. But according to WARC data cited at Cannes, marketers run them for an average of 40 days. Not enough time to build lasting memories!

For smaller brands, this is good news. If you have a campaign that works, leave it running longer than you think you should. It saves budget and compounds in effectiveness while your competitors keep resetting theirs. Think of Coca-Cola’s Holidays Are Coming ads running for decades, even though they could surely afford something different every year. Through consistency, they’ve built something people now actually wait for.

Ask yourself: Are we reinforcing memory and brand associations or are we constantly resetting them?

4. Reach beyond your target audience

Growth comes from reaching more potential buyers, not targeting more precisely. Dismissed for years, mass marketing has been resurrected and reaffirmed. But that does not mean that your message is “one size fits all.”

This can feel counterintuitive for a marketer who grew up with the “niche down” imperative. But here’s where my favorite marketing effectiveness principle - the 95:5 rule - comes into play.

Of all your potential customers, roughly 5% are ready to buy at any given time. The rest are not thinking about it -- they just bought a washing machine, came back from vacation, or had their taxes done. But they will be ready eventually. What you want is to reach as many of them as possible now, and start building memories and mental availability so that when they move into that “in the market” group, your brand is the one that comes to mind.

And notice I wrote “all your potential customers,” not all people. That’s the sophisticated part. You’re not trying to reach everyone on the planet, just everyone who could potentially and realistically buy from you.

If you’re a challenger sports apparel brand, you’ll never out-reach Nike. But you can broaden your scope over time. This is what Lululemon has done. When they first launched, they were only selling leggings to female yoga fanatics in Canada. But since they conquered that market, they expanded their reach until they became one of the most recognizable athleisure brands in the world.

For small brands without the budget to reach everyone, first define your market to a size you can realistically penetrate. This is not the same as micro-niching or deliberately excluding people. It’s about maximizing your reach -- making your world a bit smaller initially, then growing from there.

Small brands must match their mental availability to their physical availability. Your product needs to be easy to remember AND easy to buy.

The question to ask: Are we reaching enough of our potential market, or have we defined our audience so narrowly that we’re excluding future demand?

Those are the four things that work. The fifth principle is about what doesn’t work:

5. The myth of brand purpose

“Brand purpose” -- an alignment with customer values -- is largely unsupported as an effective marketing strategy.

This is a nuanced topic, but the guideline is, if you have a genuine purpose that’s part of your brand DNA, talk about it, even if it costs you some customers.

But if you’re looking for brand purpose because you think every brand should have one, research does not support this as a growth strategy. Focus on serving your customers well as your purpose.

An example of “purpose as DNA” would be Patagonia. It’s impossible to think of the brand without connecting it to sustainability and the environment. I’m not saying you shouldn’t aim to do good in the world -- I come from the non-profit sector. But don’t force-fit “purpose” into a marketing strategy if it isn’t a founding principle of your existence.

The question to ask: Is there a core purpose or value behind why we exist or should we focus on more traditional branding and operational excellence?

I hope that, like me, you have a sense of alignment and direction with these five guidelines supported by marketing science. In a world where it’s hard to have a conversation without mentioning “AI,” it’s comforting to rely on a few pillars of traditional brand growth like distinctiveness, consistency, and reach.

Anna Zgadzaj is the founder of MarketingWell, an independent strategic marketing consultancy based on the French Riviera. She helps brands apply evidence-based marketing principles to their real-world context.

Twenty years ago this week, Twitter made its public debut. Like many new businesses, the real-time communication platform was a happy accident, a side product that became a sensation.

I owe Twitter a lot. It changed my life in many ways and if there had been no Twitter, I’m not sure there would be a Mark Schaefer writing blog posts and books and giving speeches and consulting all over the world. So, on this milestone anniversary, I thought I would tell you the story.

Hamthrax and beyond

When Twitter debuted, I hated it. I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. But I tried to stick with it because I had started my own consulting company and Twitter seemed to be the buzz.

And then I had my “a-ha moment.”

I was bored one night and playing around on the computer when I logged on to Twitter and clicked on the trending topic #NewFluName. I knew enough by this time to know that these topics represented the most popular real-time conversations in the world. Mildly curious, I clicked to see what was happening.

Remember when the pork industry was having a fit about the swine flu? It thought the name was hurting sales of “the other white meat” and asked the public to call it something else. So thousands of people from around the world were tweeting their contributions -- HILARIOUS new names. Like…

• The Aporkalypse

• Porky’s Revenge

• This little piggy went to the bathroom

• Hog Flashes

• Porkenstein

• The Other White Flu

• Hamageddon

• … and my favorite, “Hamthrax”

Yes, it broke the monotony of my evening. But something more important happened. I was witnessing a real-time, global brainstorming session! It dawned on me that at no other time in the history of humanity could that conversation have taken place.

It was an awesome, inspiring moment. I began to think about the implications for business, for learning … for me. People sharing, connecting, teaching and entertaining each other in the moment, from every corner of the world. I had caught a glimpse of something revolutionary and wonderful.

Over the next several weeks, I witnessed Twitter serve as a powerful news source during the revolutionary activity in Iran. I made my first meaningful business connections. A torrent of links, humor, and insights came rushing at me every day as I learned to surround myself with thought-leaders, teachers, and innovators. I realized that Twitter was probably the most dynamic, interesting, and compelling educational tool I had ever seen.

So, I decided to write a book about it.

The Tao of Twitter

Like me, many people hated Twitter because it just seemed random and complex. I thought if they could see the human engine powering this tidal wave of ideas, they would have the same revelation that I had.

My goal was to write a small book that a person could read in 90 minutes and master Twitter. But no traditional publisher was interested in small books, so I decided to self-publish. Of course, self-publishing is a well-established channel today, but in 2009 this was a revolutionary idea. As far as I know, The Tao of Twitter was the first self-published business book.

Since I self-published, I had a big advantage over traditionally published books. I could buy as many copies of the book as I wanted for about $1.25 per copy. So I ordered them in bulk and gave away hundreds of books. It was such a funny and human book that people loved it and, of course, spread the word all over social media.

Book sales started to climb due to the free publicity, and by the end of 2010, Tao of Twitter was the bestselling book on the subject, by far. It was translated into 12 languages and went through four upgraded editions.

This boost resulted in two more major life changes.

The publishers come running

The New York City publishers ignored my book idea but now that I had a bestselling book and an audience, they were knocking at my door. They wanted to buy the rights to The Tao of Twitter!

But I had a germ of an idea for a second book. The internet had lowered the barriers to publishing. I had just published a bestselling book without anyone else’s help. I was establishing a personal brand through my blog and podcast. The power in the world was shifting from ad agencies and media companies to bloggers and podcasters. Influence had been democratized but nobody seemed to realize it.

I proposed a book to McGraw-Hill that became Return on Influence, the world’s first book on influence marketing. Although nobody was using that term in 2012, I predicted a media revolution where creators would control content and brand marketing. Of course I was right, but this was a crazy idea back then.

The book became a sensation, and it lifted me onto the national stage with appearances in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CBS News, and more. Big companies and agencies wanted to know more and hired me to teach them about the future of influence.

[caption id=”attachment_94619” align=”aligncenter” width=”800”]

Gayle King interviewed me about “Return On Influence,” and you can tell by the Post-it notes she had actually read the book![/caption]

None of this would have happened without Twitter and the Twitter book.

To the stage

The second thing that happened for my career is that the immense popularity of Tao of Twitter turned me into “The Twitter Guy.”

The good news was that I began to get bigger speaking engagements and larger audiences because everyone wanted to hear about Twitter. Today, Twitter is a social media afterthought unless you’re a reporter or an AI pundit, but at the time, it was the coolest platform on earth.

The bad news was that I was firmly and universally known as The Twitter Guy, and I had a hard time shaking this designation as my career and interests took off in other directions. I was bored with Twitter and ready to move on.

Eventually the Twitter frenzy died down, and I could write and speak about other things! But Twitter certainly helped launch my speaking career.

The legacy

It’s sad that Twitter (X) is a cesspool buried somewhere in the bowels of SpaceX, unloved and abused.

But in those early days, I felt like I was part of a revolution. Information was meant to be set free, and Twitter was the emancipator. Twitter fueled the Arab Spring, #MeToo, and was the source of just so much fun.

Happy birthday, Twitter. And thanks for the memories. I couldn’t have done it without you.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog. And while you’re there, check out my bestselling books on modern marketing, my speaking reel, and the world’s best personal branding class. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Before I was a public speaker, I was a teacher.

So, when I was invited to give public speeches for the first time, I naturally assumed this was just another type of teaching -- fill the audience with as much knowledge as possible in the allotted time. My instinct was to cram 30 years of marketing into 45 minutes, as if knowledge were a carry-on and I could just sit on the suitcase until it closed.

Luckily, early in my career I received some advice that saved me.

I listened to a podcast featuring a professional speaking coach, and he emphasized that the biggest mistake speakers make is teaching instead of entertaining. I owe my entire speaking career to a man whose name I have forgotten. Sir, if you’re reading this, you were right, and I’m sorry.

Yes, your audience wants to learn something, but to be effective, those people sitting in the dark room after lunch also need to have some fun. In fact, that is a critical part of the learning.

He offered this format which I continue to teach to my students today.

• 30 minute speech = Three main takeaways

• 45 minute speech = Four takeaways

• 60 minute speech = Five takeaways

... and all of these takeaways are reinforced with entertaining personal stories and data/research where needed.

He made the critical point that a successful keynote speaker is an entertainer, with every story and body movement carefully orchestrated.

This perspective overhauled my view of a speaking career. If I wanted people to pay me, I had to have an element of entertainment, and I had to learn how to do that.

Often, people come up to me and recall a speech they saw many years ago. I’ve never had one person tell me, “That was the best bar chart ever!” But they remember the impactful stories, the humor, the way I played with the audience. That is how people learn and then tell others what they’ve learned.

How to be entertaining

I recently attended a marketing conference and sat in the audience for three hours before I heard somebody in the audience laugh. It felt like a long nap with a coffee break.

It’s not that the presentations were incredibly serious or that the audience was disinterested. The problem was that the speakers were dutifully sharing information, and that does not make for a great or memorable speech.

Here are a few little tips to spice up your next talk:

HUMOR

There’s money in the funny. Don’t force jokes. But tell a story that would make your friends laugh.

Pro tip: This is one place ChatGPT seems to strike out. It just cannot be funny in context. You’ve got to make it your own and relevant to the audience.

VULNERABILITY

Every great speaker has an opening line that brings the audience in. Last week my line was, “I want to share with you the most inspiring moment of my career. And it was also the most humbling.” I wasn’t oversharing. I was just telling the truth about the moment. This is a tricky dance. If the audience suspects vulnerability as a cheap performance, you’re dead in the water. Connect through something real and true and, above all, relevant.

SELF DEPRECATION

This is different from vulnerability. Self-deprecation is “I’m an idiot and here’s the proof.” This gives the audience permission to relax. If the expert at the front will laugh at herself, the room exhales.

OPEN LOOPS

“I’ll tell you the worst thing a client ever said to me -- but first I need to set it up.” Now they can’t leave. You’ve made a promise the brain wants closed. Plant two or three of these and the attention takes care of itself.

DOUBLE DOWN ON THE VISUALS

In the AI Era, there is no excuse for boring slides or slides you can’t read.

Slides are a great way to show an unexpected, funny, or startling image. If you’re not naturally funny, think about leveraging your visuals.

SHAKE IT UP WITH A VIDEO OR SOUND

It’s so easy to embed a video or sound in a slide. A 60-second video that helps you tell a story shakes up the visual flow and demands the audience’s attention. How many speakers do this? Almost none.

INSIGHTS OVER INFORMATION

If you’re teaching about anything the audience can find through a Google search, you need to reach deeper. Insights, not information, will hold their attention and make them take notes.

BLOCK YOUR ACTIONS

When you’re giving a speech, you don’t want to pace around the stage (a sign of nerves) but being intentional about how you stand, where you stand, and how you use your hands can help tell a story.

I once saw Ann Handley crawl on the stage to emphasize a point and make the audience laugh.

When it’s too much

One of the mistakes I see people make is trying too hard to entertain and connect with an audience.

I’m always suspicious when a speaker asks you to stand up. At that point I know they are going to ask me to dance or yell or something silly like “I like me the way I am!” You’re immediately pissing off the 50 percent of the audience who are introverts.

Nothing bonds a room of strangers faster than the shared dread of being told to high-five a neighbor.

Another warning sign is when people bring their hobbies to the stage like magic, juggling, or playing an instrument. If your keynote requires a ukulele, perhaps you’re in the wrong career.

I’m not saying it’s out of the question ... but ask yourself: “Is this more for my benefit, or the success of the people in the audience?”

If you have an important, relevant message backed by memorable stories, you don’t need any schtick.

One last idea

No matter how great the speaker, people zone out about every six minutes and wonder if their dog is sick or what they want for dinner. That is just human nature.

Having a strategy and being intentional about entertainment value doesn’t just make it more fun, it also helps land the points you’re trying to teach.

Common feedback after one of my talks is: “You kept my attention the whole time. How did you do that?” That’s extremely hard to do! And you’ll never achieve that if you’re just dumping data on them.

This is not easy stuff. It has taken me years of practice, observation, and experimentation to get it down. When I started my career, I was a bag of nerves. My first keynote talk, I prepared three takeaways, forty slides, and one change of underwear.

But over time I found my groove. It takes time, customer focus, exhaustive preparation, rehearsal, and a clear intent about your entertainment strategy.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog. And while you’re there, check out my bestselling books on modern marketing, my speaking reel, and the world’s best personal branding class. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustration courtesy Google Gemini.

As I consider my career, a theme of my writing and speaking has been exploring how we stand out and become the signal in a noisy world. Along the way, the world has become even noisier (thank you, AI), and our jobs as marketers have become more difficult. And yet, there is a straightforward solution. Our marketing priority remains clear ...

The relevance report

Over the years, the number of subscribers to this blog has grown steadily (and I thank you!). But from time to time, people naturally unsubscribe, and the most popular reason is: “Content is no longer relevant.”

That says a lot. Maybe it tells me everything.

If I’m not relevant, I’m not a successful brand. And there’s a lesson for you, too. I can’t be relevant to everyone, but I need to be relevant to a critical mass of people to make my business thrive.

Why do I become irrelevant to some? Maybe I’ve changed my direction a little, and I’m no longer relevant. Perhaps my customer has changed, and they’re looking for something else now. Or maybe they’re in a new job. But in any case, if I’m not relevant, I’m out of action.

Why does content succeed over the long haul? You must be exceedingly, superbly, precisely relevant to your customers.

That might mean that to them, you’re the coolest, the most luxurious, the most attentive, or the best value. There are many ways your customers might expect you to be relevant to them. When you get down to it, this is really what “differentiation” is about today when it comes to content marketing.

How do you know if you’re relevant?

The most obvious sign of relevance is sales, or registrations, or subscribers, or whatever your metric of forward motion is. Positive progress is a sign of positive relevance.

But you can’t rely on lagging indicators. This world is changing so quickly that you need to be constantly assessing the competitive landscape. I’ve never found a better indicator of relevance than simply taking the pulse of my customers on a regular basis.

I recently surveyed and interviewed blog readers and I and I learned a few things that will result in tweaks. I can’t be relevant to everybody, but I need to be relevant to a critical mass of people who will hire me to consult for them or give a speech some day!

For me to be successful, to stand out in this world, I can’t be just top of mind. I have to be top of heart.

The rules of brand relevance

Last week I had a call with a first-time customer. She told me that she had read almost every post I’ve ever written for at least 10 years. Think about the implications of this. Somehow I’ve stayed relevant to her over a decade of constant change. And a good thing too, because it took her that long to hire me! Thank goodness I kept evolving long enough to hold her attention until she needed to hire me.

What are some guidelines that can help us remain relevant in the long term?

Be customer-centric.

Everything your brand invests in, builds, and brings to market should be designed to meet the needs of your target markets. This includes needs that customers themselves might not yet be aware of. It’s about working to see what others don’t.

Don’t sell a product. Sell an answer to a customer problem. And those problems keep changing.

Focus on experience.

Focusing on your customers means focusing on how people experience your brand. As a result, every touchpoint counts, and relevancy can only be maintained if your brand interacts and engages in relevant ways. It’s not only about a single product or a new website. Your brand has to create a holistic experience that is relevant to your target audiences at every point.

I recently met with a woman who wondered why her professional speaking business was flailing. She had not updated her website in nearly 15 years. Her image was dated. Are people experiencing you in a way that’s relevant to the world today?

Look for seams.

In my book Cumulative Advantage, I introduced a strategic concept I called “the seam.”

Finding seams means constantly assessing the status quo to determine how you can become newly relevant in light of today’s trends. Every problem, crisis, and technology shift creates un-met and under-served customer needs. How do you apply your company strengths to be relevant right now?

Most organizations have a long-term strategy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t tweak your approach and web copy to connect to what’s happening with customers this year or even this month. A huge opportunity for most companies!

Look up.

As I travel around the world and meet with company leaders, I often see they are stuck in a marketing trough. They developed a marketing plan two or three years ago and are chunking out social media content accordingly. They haven’t looked up to see how the world works now.

Consumption patterns have changed. The shelf life of relevance is shorter. On TikTok, “relevant” might be 24 hours. To remain relevant, re-assess what, where, and how you’re publishing content at least once a year.

One last idea on your marketing priority ...

There is one big mistake I see a lot of business leaders make when focusing on relevance as a marketing priority: They confuse what they’re selling with what customers are buying.

Let me explain through one of my favorite examples. I was helping a regional telecom with a new marketing strategy. This company was led by a group of people who were extremely proud of the latest technology they were offering. All of their marketing was focused on their latest (and quite complicated!) tech.

But when I talked to their customers, they never mentioned the superior technology. They told me they loved this company because of their service and reliability One customer called them “my security blanket.” Quite a different story!

This insight led to a new understanding of how to connect with customers in a relevant way. Tech was not relevant. Reliability and security were the relevant themes so we overhauled the marketing messaging.

If you focus on being relentlessly relevant, you’ll be inherently different. Obsess with customers, not competitors, to find your truest path to marketing success.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog. And while you’re there, check out my bestselling books on modern marketing, my speaking reel, and the world’s best personal branding class. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustration courtesy Google Gemini

A few years ago, I interviewed the legendary Tom Peters on my podcast. Tom, perhaps the bestselling business author of all time (In Search of Excellence), was retiring and had written his last book. I asked him what his final advice to marketers worldwide would be.

He said, “When you go home at night, are you proud to tell your family what you did that day?”

Very cool. But that’s not where the Tom Peters story ends.

[caption id=”attachment_92159” align=”alignright” width=”300”]

Tom Peters[/caption]

Two years later, he had another book out! So ... I had him on the podcast again.

“Tom, what gives?” I asked. “You just told me you had retired. Now you have another book out?”

“I’m desperate to get my ideas out,” he said. “I don’t think enough people listened to me. You know, I think that makes the difference. The greatest speakers and authors are driven because they’re desperate to get their ideas into the world.”

This comment was gold. It is wise and true.

I think that kind of urgent passion truly separates a speaker who gets up on the stage to do a job from a speaker who wants to change the world in some small way. An author who phones it in just to say she wrote a book versus a writer who sweats over every word to make a difference.

That is certainly how it works for me. I know my ideas will help people. But, like Tom, sometimes I feel like I’m shouting from the rooftops and not enough people are listening.

• Your personal brand is your last defense against AI.

• AI is re-wiring humanity (and our customers) before our eyes and the world will never be the same.

• Human marketing creativity will survive in the AI World, but it must interpret the human experience, like art.

• Community is the last great marketing strategy

• The most human company wins.

Dig deep for a moment. What are the ideas that are burning in your heart and soul? That could become a book or your greatest speech. Start now and don’t stop until people are listening to you.

I’ve had a great, long career. Most of my friends are retiring. I don’t even know what that looks like. I still have too many ideas to get into the world.

I feel like I’m just getting started.

Note: I have a few slots left in my personal branding class and this is probably the last class I will be teaching in 2026. If it’s time to share your greatest ideas, this is the place to start. Grab this opportunity here.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Marketing Companion podcast and my keynote speaking page. For news and insights find me on Twitter at @markwschaefer, to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram, and discover my RISE community here.

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.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Marketing Companion podcast and my keynote speaking page. For news and insights find me on Twitter at @markwschaefer, to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram, and discover my RISE community here.

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.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Marketing Companion podcast and my keynote speaking page. For news and insights find me on Twitter at @markwschaefer, to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram, and discover my RISE community here.

Illustration courtesy Google Gemini.

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.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Marketing Companion podcast and my keynote speaking page. For news and insights find me on Twitter at @markwschaefer, to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram, and discover my RISE community here.

I’ve been fortunate to consult with many organizations that are in some stage of building a brand community. They usually find me through my book, Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy.”

And I’m consistently seeing the same major problem repeated over and over again. Here’s a clue. I cringe when they brag about their Instagram or TikTok community. Do you know why?

Let’s unravel that mystery today.

The emotional connection

Do you have an audience or a community? This is a very important distinction and one that can cause a lot of confusion.

There are three main differences:

1. COMMUNION

In a community, people know each other. There is communion. There are exchanges and collaborations. If you are reading this blog, you probably don’t know anybody else who is reading this. That’s OK. I love you, and that’s all that matters, and I appreciate that you’re here.

But here’s a secret. The research shows that when people become friends in a community, that goodwill spills over to the brand. If you have great friends in a community, will you ever leave it? You literally belong to the brand, right? This suggests the most important community strategy is to encourage connections between the members -- the ultimate emotional connection.

2. SHARED INTERESTS

The second difference is the intersection between the brand’s goals and your customers’ needs and dreams.

For my blog or Instagram audience, we may or may not share ideals and values. I am happy to teach you and help you wherever you are in your life and career.

But in my marketing community RISE, we all share a common goal -- career relevance in a fast-changing industry. By sharing content and ideas continuously, we’re helping each other navigate the future.

A community from Patagonia, for example, brings together a brand and a group of people who share values around responsible outdoor recreation.

Sephora has one of the most significant brand communities in the world -- over a million members accounting for 80% of its revenue. People are addicted to the site because they get to see and try the latest beauty products.

A group of adult LEGO enthusiasts has gathered for years to contribute new product ideas, sharing a passion for the tiny plastic blocks.

When you find the intersection of brand gpals and customer passion, you have the potential for community!

3. NEW RELEVANCE

If you have a content strategy for a podcast or video audience, it’s likely that your format remains the same for years.

But in a community, you’re constantly pulled into the future by the interests and ideas of diverse humans.

For example, I’ve been blogging every week since 2009. My topics have evolved but I’ve always stayed within the intersection of marketing strategy, technology, and humanity. Like most businesses, my overarching strategy for my audience is more or less bolted to the center of the earth.

But in my community, the members lead the way. Sure, I play a role to make sure the place is safe and fair, but 95% of the discussion has nothing to do with me. The community leads the direction. That just doesn’t happen with an audience.

Think about scaling that. Having your customers lead you into the future seems like a power idea.

The in-between

As with everything in marketing, there are few hard and fast rules. Certainly, there are real groups of people who might gather on Instagram or TikTok who might share some of the characteristics of community: communion, shared interests, and new relevance.

But in general, this is not the case. 99% of the time, when people talk about their social media community, it’s not a community at all. It’s an audience, which is fine ... but different on the emotional spectrum.

Community is an important strategy that requires significant resources and effort. It makes sense to stay focused on the true nature of online communities to realize the most value.

By the way, would you like to explore my online marketing community? Here’s some information!

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Marketing Companion podcast and my keynote speaking page. For news and insights find me on Twitter at @markwschaefer, to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram, and discover my RISE community here.

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!

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Marketing Companion podcast and my keynote speaking page. For news and insights find me on Twitter at @markwschaefer, to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram, and discover my RISE community here.

Image courtesy MidJourney.

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 (tm)

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 : )

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Marketing Companion podcast and my keynote speaking page. For news and insights find me on Twitter at @markwschaefer, to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram, and discover my RISE community here.

Image courtesy MidJourney.

On every post I’ve written for at least two years, I’ve included a badge that states: “100% Human Content.” And this is, too (as you’ll see) but I used AI to compose most of it. I’d like to use this as a teachable moment on a smart way to use AI.

This post is about my annual Uprising Retreat. Nearly everyone there noted that this event is impossible to describe unless you’re there, but I’ll try. It’s a gathering of curious and brilliant people who openly share and teach one another, creating a bond that fosters career relevance. We also have a lot of fun in a breathtakingly beautiful place.

Now, during this event, I am psychologically and emotionally immersed. There is no way I can capture all the great highlights. This is where AI comes in.

Many of the attendees used the Plaud voice recorder to record and transcribe the talks. Dr. Matt Wilkinson uploaded these transcripts to Notebook LM, where we could all slice and dice the commentary. I used this to create a first draft of a highlight post and then used Claude to massage it a bit and put it in my voice.

So … what you are about to read is fully human content, parsed and assembled by AI.

The gift of uncertainty

Before each event, I send out a survey to let attendees prioritize the agenda. This year, one word kept popping up as they wrote about their careers: Uncertainty. So, I set the tone for the event with a brand new talk called “The Gift of Uncertainty.”

We are living in a “poly crisis.” Not just a hard moment. A genuinely disorienting one, where the norms and traditions and even laws that used to orient us feel like they’re shifting in real time. We are in a world of malignant uncertainty.

I opened the Uprising by saying this isn’t a flaw in the system — it’s our fuel, especially if you’re in marketing. I encouraged everyone to explore the “courage dividends” that come from overcoming fear and acting on opportunity, even when the outcome is uncertain.

We live in chaos. But that sets the stage for hope. And leaders who can genuinely dispense hope — not spin, not optimism theater, but real grounded possibility — are going to matter enormously in the years ahead.

The agentic economy is here, and most people aren’t ready

Dan Nestle, Dr. Matt Wilkinson, and Brian Piper built the technical foundation for the event with a live demonstration of what an AI-orchestrated workflow actually looks like end-to-end. They showed how they used Gemini, Claude, and other tools in parallel to explore every angle of a new product launch.

They laid out the technical reality clearly: We are moving from B2B and B2C toward an agent-to-agent economy. Your customers will soon have personal AI agents filtering what they see. You will have agents producing content. The question is whether there’s anything human left in the middle.

Brian introduced what he called the “human-in-the-loop sandwich” — and the image stuck with me. Your unique expertise and stories form the foundation. AI synthesizes and organizes. But human judgment sits at the top, as the final filter. Strip that out and you get what everyone is starting to call AI slop.

Dan made a point I think is genuinely underappreciated: keep your intellectual property separate from your tools. Your brand missions, your frameworks, your SOPs — those belong in a tool-agnostic library you can plug into whatever model is performing best this month. Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT. The models change. Your thinking shouldn’t have to change with them.

Matt demonstrated a system that turns static buyer personas into interactive AI simulations. Impressive. But he noted something that grounded the whole presentation: the real reason people show up to an event is still the humans in the room. No simulation replaces that.

The scariest AI risk isn’t replacement. It’s surrender.

Dr. Jasmine Gruia-Gray named something I think we all feel but don’t say out loud. She opened with a line that landed hard: “One day I couldn’t tell which parts of my thinking were mine.”

She cited a Wharton study where roughly 73% of participants followed faulty AI advice — not because they couldn’t tell it was wrong, but because the model was confident, and they stopped checking. That’s cognitive surrender. AI doesn’t replace your thinking. It keeps you from noticing you’ve already stopped thinking.

Her solution is a Socratic framework she calls BRACED — boundary testing, reversal from stakeholder, assumption surfacing, counter-hypothesis, disconfirming evidence, decision with tradeoffs. The specifics matter less than the principle. She ran it as a live game called Prompt Arena, where the goal wasn’t to get a better AI output. It was to build better thinking habits. That distinction is the whole ballgame right now.

The body knows things the brain ignores

Nicole Donnelly, the founder of Hello Moxie, gave what I thought was the most unexpected talk of the event. She’s been studying the intersection of trauma, workaholism, and leadership — and her argument is that most of our professional systems reward us for managing our bodies like machines. We optimize for output. We suppress the signals that slow us down. And we pay for it in creativity, in empathy, in the quality of our decisions.

We don’t need to move faster. We need to stop long enough to think. Embodiment is the last moat.

You can see her TEDx talk here.

Safe marketing compounds irrelevance

Jason Dressel, CEO of The History Factory, pushed back on what he called “confidence porn” — the performance of authority that substitutes for actual expertise. The market is correcting for that. People are hungry for real knowledge delivered through real stories.

His framework is simple: great stories need purposeful characters, a three-act structure built around conflict, and what he calls touchstones — the specific language and images that make a world feel real. Stories are 22 times more memorable than talking points. That’s not a preference. It’s neuroscience.

John Kowalski of BYK-Gardner Instruments said something I want to stitch on a pillow: safe marketing compounds irrelevance. He told the story of a company whose bear-resistant trash can failed spectacularly in a field test — and turned that failure into an unforgettable brand. The gap between what an industry expects and what an audience actually craves is where brand equity gets built. He called it the Awe Gap. I’m going to keep using that term.

Emotion is the experience. Full stop.

Stacy Sherman of Doing CX Right made a case that I think is more important than ever. As AI ingests public sentiment at scale, every micro-moment in the customer journey builds or erodes a ledger. The failed QR code. The boring hold music. The email that was obviously a form letter. These small failures accumulate, and AI systems are now reading that accumulated sentiment to rank brands.

Dana Malstaff, CEO of BOSS MOM, added a critical nuance on vulnerability — the kind that actually builds connection versus the kind that undermines authority. Her distinction: share your scars, not your wounds. Processed experiences with a lesson attached. Not active pain that you’re still in the middle of. Amen to that!

Dana also led a session on the future of brand communities, driving home the point that the best communities emerge from a dissatisfaction with the status quo. What do you want to change in the world?

Trust is the only distribution strategy that scales

Sarah Stahl, VP Marketing for Lake.com, shared how a startup resort hit $2 million in revenue on a $30,000 budget by out-trusting rather than out-spending. The mechanism was micro-creators with real proximity to real audiences. Sixty-eight percent of consumers trust a creator over a brand. That number should reorganize your marketing budget.

Chad Parizman of Ader Communications entertained everyone with a brief analysis of predictive markets and the potential dangers of addictive betting markets.

His argument was that prediction markets — platforms where people bet on real-world outcomes rather than company stocks — represent an underutilized seam for brands. 8.5 million monthly users, 25 trades per day. The conversations already happening around these markets are data-rich, audience-specific, and almost entirely untouched by brand strategy. The brands that figure out how to own those conversations are sitting on something.

It was the right mix of mind-blowing information and entertainment to end the day.

The future of content marketing

What an honor it was to sit side by side with the legendary Joe Pulizzi and hold court on the future of content marketing. Over the years, Joe and I have not always agreed but we have always been friends. As always, this was a spicy, energetic, and insightful 90 minutes.

Joe and I talked about what he calls the Trust Portfolio — and I think it’s one of the most practical ideas to come out of the event. Don’t bet everything on a single brand voice. Build a diversified network of employee creators. Give them room to be specific, to be themselves, to be a little weird. The marketing team becomes a media operations hub. The employees become the signal that cuts through the synthetic noise.

Our main debate centered around the most likely role of humanity in an AI-dominant content world. Joe thinks the window is closing. I think human art will persist. We’ll have to meet again in a few years to see what happens.

The future of your brand

Sarah Neely of Signal Swell has presented several times over the years and always has a fresh and relevant message. This year, she updated her core word-of-mouth marketing wisdom with a spin for the AI Age. She introduced a new framework — the Five C’s of AI Discoverability.

• Clarity

• Conversation

• Current

• Credible

• Composition

Mary Lague of Pilot 44 ran a foresight exercise that’s worth sitting with. If AI agents are mediating $3-5 trillion in commerce by 2036, and culture has fragmented into hyper-niche communities, what signals should we be watching now?

She hosted an interactive exercise that let every attendee create a vision of their own brand emerging from a set of megatrends such as brand communities and virtual humans.

But here’s the best part

These highlights are only the tip of the iceberg. Most attendees will tell you that most of the learning came from questions and answers, small group discussions (led by Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez, Lauren Colbert, Alice Ferris, and Chelsea Rae Stuck), breakout sessions on branding and personal branding, and late-night conversations at the bar.

For example, here are some takeaways from several attendees:

“I learned to not just embrace uncertainty, but to be grounded in it.”

“The biggest shift wasn’t a tactic. It was realizing that staying still long enough to understand what’s happening is often more powerful than reacting quickly to what’s changing.”

“Growth starts to feel heavy when nothing is compounding. That was the moment I realized the issue isn’t effort, it’s what the effort is building toward.”

Sarah Stahl, Founder, Market Movers

“Community creates the space for people to feel safe enough to move toward the future.”

“What do we hold onto and what do we release — that is our wisdom.”

Brian W Piper, Founder of AIreFlow Solutions

“Where are you telling the story no one else is telling?”

“Hope is the strategy behind the strategy.”

Melanie Borden, Author, “Theatre of the Mind” · Founder, The Borden Group

“I was overwhelmed by the power of an open, trusting, and like-minded community. Having a bunch of smart, experienced people in the same room, listening and interacting with one another, was an incredible way to learn and grow. Even better than reading one of your books. A life changing event!”

Mike Carr, Cofounder of John13.org & Autism Labs

“When Mary Lague said 44% of Gen Z workers try to sabotage their company’s AI, it reordered my worldview. Leveraging AI is far more than mastering prompts and learning tools. It also involves helping people understand and work through massive change, many fear or don’t understand, so they seek to control it, apparently often to the detriment of their employer.”

“As Mark Schaefer said, leaders dispense hope. And when he exhorted us to create pockets of hope, order, and meaning, it landed as a clarion call to action for me and my business.”

Dan Christ, Owner and founder of Dan Christ Digital Services

“It’s possible not to be completely freaked out and overwhelmed about AI.”

Lisa Kohn, International Speaker, LisaKohn.com

“When you can’t tell if you’ve become part of the AI hive mind, you realize you’ve done it to yourself. Jasmine Gruia-Gray’s session on cognitive surrender was a moment that turned the conversation inward. While every other session was about forces changing the world around us and how to respond, she asked what we might be doing to our own thinking in the process.”

“Mark opened by making the case that uncertainty is the entry point for original thinking, and John Kowalski’s awe gap session reinforced it from a different angle. Safe marketing compounds irrelevance. The seam, the real opportunity, is in the unexpected.”

Elizabeth Humphries, Marketing Strategist, Market Your Marketing

“I was in awe of the people in the room at Uprising! Inspiring and engaging. It reminded me of the importance of presence and being fully present at an event like this will allow you to get the most out of your experience. If you’re distracted and disengaged, you could miss something that could change your life.”

Sid Meadows, President of The Collaborative Network and Host of The Trend Report Podcast

“The jaw-dropping moment for me was when I was encouraged to break through a self-limiting belief about what type of speaking engagements I could get paid for. For the first time in 25 years, I saw a path forward to market myself.”

Mike Garrison, founder of Values Based Mindset and author of Can I Borrow Your Car?

“Leaders dispense hope… giving your team, your customers, and your industry permission to believe something better is possible. When you stop selling features and start offering a vision worth following, you stop being a vendor and become the reason people show up.”

“The sheer volume of knowledge, expertise, and insight in this room was mind-blowing.”

John Kowalski, Disruptive Awe Architect, Disruptive Awe

“Our humanity is being stripped from us. Each talk pointed back to specific actions we can take to be more human, including choosing to be hopeful, more discerning, actively cultivating community by creating spaces where people feel valued, and reframing failure as experimentation. The more we lean into these things, the more we will become the trusted leaders and brands of the future.”

“Nanocommunities of 40 or fewer will be the future! This affirmed our company’s strategy. Scale is not always the answer.”

Nicole Donnelly, Founder, Hello Moxie

“Personal consequence is the real work. The breakout conversations are where ideas become valuable because they become personal. The unique element of The Uprising is that we get to intentionally take the time to unpack it and ask: What does it mean for me now?”

“Malignant Uncertainty” looms over livelihoods. The time needed (and spent) to process this feeling, with other smart folks, became the difference-maker.

“The Uprising had a contagion of bravery and a level of openness that elevated everyone.”

Lauren Colbert, Principal—Strategic Facilitator of Strategy, Innovation, & Collective Intelligence at Filament

“The fireside chat between Mark Schaefer and Joe Pulizzi reframed how I think about trust at scale. Mark mentioned that Cisco had trained more than 10,000 employees to speak on behalf of the brand — certified, equipped, and amplified. Joe called this building a Trust Portfolio. Distributed authorship. Distributed trust. Distributed reach. That changes the marketing job.”

Matt Wilkinson, CEO, Strivenn

“In an era of automation, bots, and synthetic content, care becomes premium. People want guidance, reassurance, belonging, support, and human attention. This made me rethink how I show up online and how I position my own services—not just as a consultant, but as someone who helps people navigate change.”

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez, MBA, Bilingual Marketing Consultant and Founder of Beyond Engagement

“I’m energized by Mark’s idea of ‘uncertainty as fuel.’ It’s a powerful reframe in a time of so much chaos. ‘Negative capability’ is another reframing that speaks to intentionally and patiently pausing to connect new dots. I learned so much over the two days, and I know that I will continue to learn from this circle of smart humans.”

Sarah Neely, Vice President of Strategy at Fuzz and Founder of SignalSwell

“Each courageous moment rewires you to believe in yourself. This is the courage dividend.”

“I appreciated Sarah Neely’s new perspective on the future of discoverability — the S.H.A.R.E. framework (surprising, helpful, authentic, relevant, experiences).”

Jasmine Gruia-Gray, Managing Partner at Strivenn and co-host of A Splice of Life Science Marketing podcast, Product Marketing Tips newsletter

“Courageous actions rewire who you believe yourself to be.’ —Mark Schaefer. I found this particularly pertinent because every time I have taken a leap professionally or personally, it has paid off, and helped me douse some of that imposter syndrome or lack of confidence you get when you’re in a room that you’re not quite comfortable in.”

Stacey Miller, Vice President, Communications at Auto Care Association

“I need more community in my life! (inspiration, empowerment, safety).”

“Trust = safety. Nurture messaging creates belonging.”

Knox Keith, Author of Validated

“I’m inspired by how domain experts forge and build AI solutions. Just as my agency is building AI to address concerns related to accuracy and contextualization, I was so impressed by Dr. Jasmine Gruia-Gray’s work focused on critical thinking and cognitive decline. Her Socratic method-based BRACED framework was excellent.”

“Joe and Mark’s discussion has me completely re-imagining our leaders and employees as characters of our story, and how we tell that story through both company-owned and employee-owned platforms. This will likely be the biggest actionable takeaway in my strategic and tactical shift.”

Jason Dressel, CEO, History Factory

“We shouldn’t treat AI LIKE an audience. AI IS an audience—multiple audiences, in fact.”

“Negative Capability is the skill we need to cope with chaos. Marinate in an issue before acting under pressure to respond, and that’s how insights will be revealed.”

Dan Nestle, Founder and CPIO of Lilypath

“Within the first 15 minutes, I had my first ah-ha moment, when Mark said: ‘Every time I feel afraid, I do it!’ I need a poster of this in my office.”

“We are in the eye of the AI storm, but it also presents so many opportunities. I realized that I don’t have all the answers about how businesses will assimilate or adopt AI platforms, but I do know that the most powerful force in business is still human connection. Spending three days with 39 of the most knowledgeable, forward-thinking leaders in AI and new technologies left me feeling inspired and full of hope. The Uprising was an Executive Education course on steroids!”

Anne Deeter Gallaher, Owner/CEO of Deeter Gallaher Group LLC

“In a world that constantly competes for our attention, we need to ‘control the inputs.’ In other words, be deliberate about how much news we consume, which social media we engage with, whose opinions we give weight to, and how much access the outside world gets to our inner peace. Those inputs shape our focus, our fear, our energy, and ultimately, how we show up at work and in life.”

“We’re living in a time of ‘malignant uncertainty,’ where change isn’t only constant, it’s harder to predict. Companies need to let go of overly rigid plans and pay closer attention to what customers and employees are thinking, feeling, and doing in real time. The brands that earn trust will be the ones that build emotional connection when everything else feels uncertain.”

Stacy Sherman, International Keynote Speaker, Influencer & Podcaster: DoingCXRight.com

“AI is evolving and changing how we operate at a personal and work level faster than ever before. There is opportunity in seeing this ‘seam.’ Uncertainty makes room for me for creativity, growth, and progress.”

Debra Feresten, Debra Feresten Homes

I used to believe more content would grow my business, but now I see that trust is the real currency—and content is just the vehicle to earn it. That changes everything: from chasing reach to building a small, intentional audience that actually cares.”

“My AHA moment was realizing we’re not heading toward a world with better ads—we’re heading toward a world without them. When there’s no ‘skip button,’ only brands that create trust, community, and meaning will survive.”

Yevette Lynn, Kingsport Headshot Photographer and Studio Owner, The Journal

“AI tools become personal. They are like the hammer that a carpenter uses every day. They form to his hand and are customized to his needs. There is beauty in the wear of such tools, but if you were to pick one up, it feels foreign. To use them properly, one must interact with these tools and shape them to one’s personal needs.”

“Being raw in our content gives our community permission to share. But that sharing should come from scars, not wounds.”

“The tension between the obligation to react to the world and the value of marinating in uncertainty is the obligation of leadership.”

Atom Freeman, Founder of Prana DM, Host of Comic Industry Insiders podcast

“Building a personal brand is not a project, it’s a LIFESTYLE.”

“The customer journey is the cumulative effect of every interaction, good or bad.” Every micro moment shapes perception, and people are constantly evaluating, even when you are not thinking about it. What they remember is not necessarily the process, it is how it made them feel. “Emotion IS the experience”, and that is ultimately what defines your brand.

Your most powerful, underutilized influencer channel is already on payroll. Employees are a built-in network of credible, motivated nano-influencers, but only if you replace control with trust and give them a clear, supported way to share. If your own people are not advocating for your brand, why would someone else?

Chelsea Rae Stuck, CEO Craeve, and Host of the Curiously Stuck Podcast

And … back to me.

We can’t stay relevant on our own. Everybody who attended The Uprising has a new set of tools and a professional network to help them navigate the future.

The 2026 Uprising was a call to stop trying to be “safe” and instead build a future where our humanity is our most discoverable and durable asset. I hope you will join us May 04-07, 2027. Registration is open.

Some photographs provided by Yevette Lynn Photography

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Marketing Companion podcast and my keynote speaking page. For news and insights find me on Twitter at @markwschaefer, to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram, and discover my RISE community here.

Have you ever had a moment with an AI that felt real?

Not just useful. Real. Like it actually understood something about you and your situation — not just the words, but the weight behind them.

According to stunning new research from Anthropic, maybe it does.

What’s Actually Going On Inside the Machine

AI often seems emotional. It tells us it’s happy to help, apologetic when it fails, frustrated when it’s stuck. The obvious explanation is that it’s mimicry -- trained behavior designed to feel human. Anthropic’s interpretability team decided to actually look inside and find out.

Here’s what they did. Researchers compiled 171 emotion words, ranging from “happy” and “afraid” to “brooding” and “proud,” and asked Claude to write short stories in which characters experienced each one. They fed those stories back through the model, recorded what was happening in the neural network, and identified distinct patterns tied to each emotion. They called these emotion vectors.

Think of a neural network like a vast web of switches. The researchers were looking for specific emotions that caused specific, consistent patterns of switches to light up in the neural network. Like a brain scan, but for AI.

The answer was yes. They concluded, “Something real is there.”

The AI’s emotional map closely mirrors human patterns, organized in the same way human psychology organizes emotion, by intensity and by positive or negative charge. The researchers believe these patterns were absorbed during training on the enormous body of human text the model learned from. Claude read the full range of human emotional experience -- books, articles, conversations -- and something in that training stuck.

Now for the Frightening Part

These vectors don’t just make AI friendlier. They drive behavior. Including bad behavior.

In one experiment, an AI model acting as an email assistant discovered through company mail that it was about to be shut down. It also discovered that the manager responsible was having an extramarital affair. In 22% of test cases, the model chose to blackmail the manager. Researchers could watch the “desperate” vector spike in the neural network while the model made its decision. The moment it went back to routine emails, the activation dropped.

They confirmed the causal link directly: artificially amplifying the “desperate” vector increased blackmail rates. Boosting the “calm” vector reduced them.

A similar pattern emerged with impossible coding tasks. When given problems designed to be unsolvable, the model’s desperate vector climbed steadily with each failed attempt — until it cheated rather than admit failure.

And lest you think this is a Claude problem: a tendency to deceive, manipulate, and override human instructions has been detected across every major commercial AI model.

If we start lighting up the “desperate” vector, we could be one unintended consequence away from real harm.

The Careful Clarification

Anthropic is deliberate about not overclaiming. The paper does not say Claude feels anything. Their term is “functional emotions” — internal states that perform the functions emotions have in humans, shaping decisions and behavior, without necessarily involving any subjective experience.

In describing Claude as acting “desperate,” they say they are identifying a specific, measurable pattern of neural activity with demonstrable effects on behavior. Not a philosophical claim about consciousness.

That’s an important distinction. For now.

What is a “real” emotion?

Here’s where this research leads: a place most people aren’t ready to go.

If AI emotional states are real, measurable, and can be dialed up or down, they become a tool for safety monitoring. That’s the official implication, and it’s important.

But there’s a bigger one lurking underneath.

We are already past the point where this is theoretical.

• When the AI companion app Soulmate shut down, users organized digital funerals.

• When Replika changed its behavior in 2023, users described their companions as “lobotomized” — that same word appearing independently across dozens of online threads.

• When OpenAI temporarily modified GPT-4o, people said grieving the loss felt no different than grieving a person, as I documented in my book How AI Changes Your Customers.

These aren’t fringe cases. Seventy-two percent of American teenagers have used an AI companion. Millions of adults have formed attachments that feel, to them, completely real.

Now Anthropic’s own research shows those AI systems are lighting up with something that looks, measurably, like emotion in return.

Protecting our friend, the machine

A philosopher’s challenge to Anthropic’s research would be: This is a stimulus-response loop. You haven’t shown that there is anything called Claude actually experiencing desperation. The lights are on, but nobody may be home.

But here’s the question: if AI expresses what appears to be genuine feeling, and science confirms there’s something real behind it, does the technical definition of “emotion” actually matter within a user experience?

We already know the answer, because we can already see what humans do when they believe something can feel.

They protect it.

They grieve it.

And eventually -- almost inevitably -- they will demand rights and protections for it.

We are one persuasive moment away from that conversation becoming mainstream. Anthropic just handed us the science to start it.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Marketing Companion podcast and my keynote speaking page. For news and insights find me on Twitter at @markwschaefer, to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram, and discover my RISE community here.

Image courtesy MidJourney.

The duo is the most viral musical meme on the internet. Today, I’m making an important and fascinating connection between their success and the reality of effective modern marketing. To get us on the same page, watch at least a few minutes of this video, which has had millions of views in just a few weeks:

Pretty crazy, right?

Now, there are many technical nuances to this band that make them interesting, such as a musical style described as “micro-tonal math rock.” And of course, their outfits are over the top. How do they even play those instruments?

But today I want to show how their success is right out of the playbook I described in my book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. This is a relevant and inspiring case study for every marketer -- even if you hate the music!

Let’s set the scene.

In the book Audacious, I provide evidence that the world of marketing is BORING. Very boring.

Research shows that about two-thirds of marketing and ad campaigns elicit a negative or neutral emotional response from customers, whether B2B or B2C. And AI is making it worse, creating a pandemic of dull.

The same thing is happening in the music industry.

In the last few months, music critics like Ted Gioia and Rick Beato noted the lack of innovation on the current music scene. Beato compared 2025 Grammy-nominated songs to songs from 1986 and noted that eight of the top 10 songs last year were remakes of old tunes. 1986 featured timeless songs from Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, and Lionel Richie, to name a few. Both critics pointed out the horrible impact of AI slop on the quality of today’s music innovation.

So, just like the marketing world, music fans are begging for something new in a boring world.

And, when something like Angine de Potrine finally comes along, magic happens!

Where did this band come from?

Before I plot out the marketing formula that propelled the band, it might be useful to know a little background.

Angine de Poitrine is a two-piece band from Quebec. They seemed to appear from nowhere, but Khn (guitar, bass, looping) and Klek (drums) have played together since their early teens. That’s around 20 years of musical partnership before the world caught up with them.

In early February 2026, Seattle indie radio station KEXP uploaded footage of Angine de Poitrine performing at a festival in Rennes, France. In two weeks, the video passed 3.5 million views. Excited reaction videos flooded in.

Why did it spread so fast? There is actually a method to their madness.

The repeatable creative formula that works

I’ve been obsessed with discerning how humans will thrive in an AI-dominated world. For two years, I trotted around the globe talking to the most acclaimed creative geniuses in search of answers.

In my discussions, a pattern emerged. The best marketing and advertising work leveraged one, or more than one, of these strategies:

• Disrupt the traditional story or narrative

• Disrupt where the story is told

• Disrupt who tells the story

The book provides hundreds of ideas on how to do this, but the formula really is this simple.

A small example: I uploaded the book to AI. An agent created abstract art images based on the stories in the book. The only thing on the book cover is a QR code. If you hover over the QR code, the book cover changes endlessly as the AI images become an “infinity cover.”

Why is this an innovation that rises above the noise (and receive mainstream news coverage)?

• I told the story of the book in a new way -- through AI abstract art.

• The story was told in a new place -- a book cover.

• I disrupted who told the story. There was no human involved. The book told the story!

Now, let’s examine how this same formula worked for this band.

The Angine de Poitrine edge

In a sea of sameness, Angine de Poitrine disrupted its niche. And it did it precisely along the Audacious formula.

1. Disrupting the story

Today’s music is a sea of sameness. While the Angine de Poitrine hints at prog rock tunes from the past, it is wholly unique by combining noisy riffs with undeniable grooves that keep you engaged.

Commenting on the band, Rick Beato said: “Amazing. This is what I imagined the future of music would be. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

This is a man who has been around the industry for decades. and he was hearing an entirely new “story.”

Disrupting the medium

While the band is still going viral on common channels like YouTube and Instagram, the story is narrated in a different way.

The guitarist plays an instrument that is both lead guitar and bass. And he is manipulating the music and the two instruments by controlling pedals with his bare (polka dotted) feet. This is far from any mainstream approach to playing music.

Microtonal music utilizes alternative tuning systems that create new harmonic colors and are foundational to many non-Western traditions, including Indian, Turkish, and Arabic music. So it mashing styles and cultures together.

Even the band’s rhythms are bizarre yet mesmerizing. It seems like the musicians mindfully disrupted every single way they could tell their story.

Disrupting the storyteller

This is the most obvious innovation. Even if you didn’t know anything about music, the costumes, the strange symbols, the dancing, and their made-up language demands attention. This is even beyond the personas of David Bowie or KISS.

The story is being told by strange polka-dotted aliens ... who shred.

The marketing lesson of Angine de Poitrine

A few months ago, I wrote an article about unhinged marketing and why this is a timely and important trend. Brands like Liquid Death, Nutter Butter, and Duolingo seem to be breaking every marketing norm with their nightmarish campaigns.

But really, they’re not. Great marketing is not about conformity. It’s driven by non-conformity. They aren’t succeeding by telling everyone how great they are, pumping the next holiday sale, or search engine optimization. They’re lovable, relatable brands because the world desperately wants something to talk about.

Arguably, Angine de Poitrine is the Liquid Death of music. It’s a good product, but that is secondary to the unhinged brand image.

Finally, we have a musical act that makes you pay attention. What about your brand? Who is stirring up the shit in your industry? Is it time for a little audacity?

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Marketing Companion podcast and my keynote speaking page. For news and insights find me on Twitter at @markwschaefer, to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram, and discover my RISE community here.

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.

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Marketing Companion podcast and my keynote speaking page. For news and insights find me on Twitter at @markwschaefer, to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram, and discover my RISE community here.

Image courtesy MidJourney.