Last Updated on August 13, 2026 by Ashley Poynter
I’ve watched teams publish forty pieces in a quarter around a message that’s wrong and publish them beautifully.
The level of efficiency teams have achieved at getting things wrong is astounding. Production calendars? On point. Tone and voice? Spot on. Marketing teams have become efficient machines for saying a thing that isn’t landing. The efficiency actively hides the problem; a smooth operation feels like one that works.
Volume Is an Amplifier, Which Cuts Both Ways
How did we get here? The path is pretty typical, actually. A team lands on positioning they love. It sounds sophisticated and everyone who already understands the product loves it. It tests well with those “in the know.”
Now throw in some volume. Crank out content via AI, pump out posts to meet the editorial calendar’s unwavering demands. Distribute widely. This cyclical efficiency means the more they publish, the better they feel, so the more they publish. Pay no mind to the fact that buyers who already didn’t understand it still don’t. Feed them more—and more often! The message isn’t right, but it is loud, and this makes the team happy.
I’m not pointing fingers; I’ve been a part of these teams.
And the humbling part is the one I see playing out again and again: if the message is off by ten degrees, publishing it once is a rounding error. Publishing it forty times is a campaign built entirely in the wrong direction. Cheap production facilitates the latter far more easily than anyone would like to admit. Selling speed as a product is fine. As long as you know where you’re going.
Message First, Then the Engine
The influx of AI tools has put pressure on teams (especially lean marketing teams that often face the brunt of initial budget cuts) to figure it out. Build the machine and produce first. Figure out the messaging later. The second you flip the two, things start to improve immediately, albeit less glamorously.
It feels good to whip together 20 articles in one-tenth the time it used to take. That’s 20 boxes to check. It’s not sexy to do the hard work of positioning—of being wrong over and over again in service to your buyer—because there’s no tangible outcome from that.
But volume can’t come until you get that part right. Do it any other way and you relegate yourself to the inane, noisy pile of slop that has already overtaken the web.
Say it to ten real buyers, in a room or on a call, and watch their faces. Watch for the moment someone repeats it back unprompted, in their own words, slightly better than it was said to them. That’s the signal that the message is load-bearing. Until that happens, more volume is just more surface area for the same confusion.
The efficient machine is wonderful once the message is right, but it’s a liability the second before. The backwardness is hard to catch precisely because everything downstream runs so smoothly. A stuck operation makes you stop and ask why, while a humming one makes you keep feeding it.
Dozens of efficient pieces are still out there somewhere, saying the wrong thing on schedule, and they’re the whole lesson I trust about scale: get it right in one piece before you get it wrong in forty.
