As Content Marketing World 2024 kicks off today, I’m sharing my opening remarks on our beloved practice’s current state and future direction.
Marketers are living in extraordinary times. Every day, we have the opportunity to reshape how people think, work, and connect with the world.
But too few of us do.
It’s not just that marketing is more complex than ever. It’s that too many of us miss out on essential, nourishing experiences, the “valuable friction” that comes from doing difficult work.
Over the last quarter century, we’ve ridden wave after wave of technological transformation. Consider these milestones:
- Broadband internet and search engines redefined how to find information (25 years ago).
- Professional social media platforms changed how we engage with customers and build communities (21 years ago).
- The iPhone put the internet in everyone’s pocket — disrupting the frequency and context for reaching customers (17 years ago).
- Generative AI turned the world of creativity upside down, altering the speed and methods of expressing ideas.
These transformational innovations have given rise to many functional tools that shape our marketing activities.
We’ve all witnessed the rapid adoption of internet-based software such as digital content management, e-commerce, CRM, marketing automation, analytics, and on and on.
We created these tools. Then, they shaped what our profession became.
How the medium became the message
Sound familiar? It should. I’m echoing the famous quote (wrongly) attributed to Marshall McLuhan: “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”
But this phrase helps explain McLuhan’s more famous and often misunderstood saying, “The medium is the message.”
“We shape our tools” describes the start of a new medium (innovation). And “then our tools shape us” describes the “message” (effect) of that medium.
The effect of innovation (whether electricity, the internet, social media, or generative AI) is how it ultimately shapes us.
And there’s no doubt that innovations have shaped us.
- Instead of remembering specific new knowledge, people now remember how to retrieve it through online searches.
- People and brands now share and connect in ways that don’t necessitate personal interaction due to social media.
- Buyers can now enter the information layer from anywhere to get more product details and conduct price comparisons, thanks to mobile and e-commerce technology.
What does this have to do with content and marketing in 2024?
Peak tools are keeping marketers trapped in their ‘meh’ era
CMI’s recently released B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Outlook for 2025 research revealed that too many content marketers produce underwhelming results:
- 58% of marketers rate their content strategy as only moderately effective.
- 53% describe their content as average, fair, or poor.
- Nearly half struggle with unclear goals.
- Only one in three has a scalable content creation model.
We’ve become what Monty Python might call the Knights of Meh. Too many of us are stuck in a loop of incremental improvements, perpetually tinkering with tools to make things more efficient — but losing our creative spark in the process.
Marketing teams are trapped in an endless cycle of fixing things. The CMS was never fully implemented. Marketing automation still doesn’t work. No one can access the right data, but we’re all looking for it. Analytics are broken. The new CMO is reorganizing and auditing everything. And we’re all playing with AI like it’s a shiny new toy, but no one knows where it fits.
No wonder making progress feels like trying to run a marathon in quicksand. Companies are stuck on the hamster wheel of optimization instead of seeking out innovative ideas.
Why are so many marketing teams playing defense instead of playing to win?
We shaped our tools. And then they shaped us.
Organizations have plugged each tech innovation into marketing, hoping to make it more efficient or effective.
But they’ve failed to convey the actual purpose or objectives. And they rarely consider how to nourish people so they can improve their skills or build institutional wisdom to apply to the marketing strategy.
Marketing teams are stuck because of the way technology has shaped brand management, lead management, and the customer experience.
We’ve reached peak tools. We gather data that we can’t access and expend all our efforts to drive incrementally more clicks, views, or purchases. Then, we claim we’ve improved our marketing.
But have we?
Instead of freeing us to take bold, creative leaps, technology has mired us in optimizing the mundane. The result? We’ve forgotten how to take risks that may lead to spectacular success or spectacular failure.
We’ve reduced the risk in marketing and also the joy.
Consider these findings from CMI’s 2025 Career Outlook for Content and Marketing research:
- 76% of marketers say they’re satisfied with their roles.
- But 35% are actively looking for new jobs.
- And only half agree that they’d still choose a career in marketing if they could start over.
Marketing is experiencing an identity crisis. We feel siloed and boxed in, with no clear path for growth. We’ve become specialists in optimizing the tools that shape us, and we’re losing sight of the big ideas we could pursue.
Then, right on cue, generative AI entered the scene.
Amplifier or outsourcer?
If there was ever a terrible time to introduce a new tool to tackle marketing’s creative challenges, it was the early 2020s.
But AI is here, and it will change how we work. The question isn’t whether it will reshape us. It will. But how it reshapes us is still up for grabs.
And that’s where the opportunity lies.
AI doesn’t replace creativity; it amplifies what you bring to the table. If your content ideas are mediocre, AI will only churn out more mediocrity. But if you approach it with creativity, strategy, and boldness, you’ll find an opportunity to amplify those qualities with AI.
AI isn’t a villain. People fear a future controlled by robots. They imagine a crazed AI that, given the goal of creating paper clips, starts to make those paper clips out of people and destroys us all.
This is a distraction.
The real threat of generative AI is that it shapes us into even deeper complacency. We may start trusting AI to do more and more creative things without injecting our human spark — diluting the thing that makes marketing an art as much as science.
We may trust AI to generate more and more of our strategy — deprecating our need to understand whether the strategy is sound or not.
By skipping the hard work of creative iteration, deep reading, and storytelling, we miss out on the experiences, knowledge, and empathy that cultivate wisdom.
If we, as marketers and content creators, outsource not just the busywork but the ability to conduct strategic, creative thinking, we risk becoming passive participants in strategies and stories.
The AI available today is the dumbest you’ll ever use, as the saying goes. But that only increases the risk of AI shaping us in negative ways.
The real danger of generative AI isn’t how intelligent it becomes but how complacent it leads us to become.
This is where valuable friction comes into play.
The power of valuable friction
Valuable friction is the deliberate resistance that slows you down enough to think critically, evaluate, and challenge. It’s the tension that forces you to pause and infuse your work with creativity. It’s the mental nourishment you get from reading the book, understanding the details, and working through the process.
Without this friction, people become automated, robotic, and disconnected from the process.
If you aim to move your marketing beyond maintenance mode, redefine your goals and actions, and make marketing more human, where are you in that process?
Are you using technology to amplify your creativity, or are you outsourcing your learning, knowledge, empathy, creativity, and wisdom?
The friction, the effort, and the engagement — that’s where you find value. The more you embrace the challenges of the evolving landscape, the more you’ll unlock your full potential as marketers and content creators.
Where do we go from here?
As you stand on the cusp of the latest marketing shift, you’re not alone. Every content and marketing team is on this journey, too.
You won’t find the answers by looking to technology to automate everything. You’ll only find it by refining processes, applying strategic best practices, and introducing new technologies in ways that cultivate the collective wisdom of the team. (That’s my new focus, too, and I’m standing by to help.)
This approach lets you build institutional strength and create space for your teams to do meaningful, friction-filled work that builds brands, drives revenue, and inspires lasting loyalty.
Go ahead and stir up some serious friction. That’s the only way to spark wisdom.
It’s your story. Tell it well.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute