Every few years, someone discovers a marketing channel that works unusually well. They write about it. Other people copy it. The channel gets crowded. The platform that hosts the channel notices the activity and starts charging for access. The channel’s effectiveness declines. Everyone moves on to the next channel. This cycle has been running since at least the invention of email marketing, and probably since someone in ancient Rome figured out that you could pay people to recommend your olive oil in the forum.

AI compressed the cycle from years to months.

In 2019, a well-written cold email with genuine personalization could get a 15-20% reply rate because most cold emails were generic and bad. Writing a good one = a cost of skill and time, which limited competition. Then AI tools made it possible to generate thousands of “personalized” emails per day, each one referencing the recipient’s company, recent blog post, and job title. With the exception of various Nigerian royalty, the output was competent. It was also identical in structure to every other AI-generated cold email, which recipients learned to recognize almost immediately. The channel that worked because personalization was rare stopped working because personalization became universal. The skill premium was competed away in about eighteen months.

This same dynamic played out across channels roughly at the same time. AI-generated SEO content flooded search results, which made Google tighten its quality filters, which penalized everyone including the people writing good content. AI-generated social media posts increased volume without increasing insight, which trained audiences to scroll faster. AI-generated ad creative made A/B testing cheaper, which meant everyone optimized toward the same high-performing formats, which meant the formats stopped performing because they all looked the same.

Running underneath all of this is a structural incentive that has fuck-all to do with AI: the platforms that connect companies to buyers are advertising businesses. Their revenue comes from selling access to the audiences they’ve accumulated, which means their interests are aligned with making organic access harder over time. This isn’t a conspiracy or a failure. It’s the business model working as designed. A platform that gave you free access to its entire audience would have no way to make money, so it doesn’t.

Marketing has never been easier to do and has never been harder to do well. The tools are (functionally) better than ever. The competition is fiercer than ever. The platforms take a larger cut than ever. And buyers, having been subjected to a decade of increasingly sophisticated marketing, have developed defenses that are themselves increasingly sophisticated. They research in private channels. They trust peers over vendors. They’ve learned to pattern-match on marketing tactics well enough that the tactics stop working on them roughly as fast as marketers can deploy them.

The tempting conclusion is that marketing is broken. The more accurate conclusion is that marketing in which the primary advantage was access to tools and channels is broken, because tools and channels are now commodities. What remains scarce is judgment about which problems are worth solving, expertise deep enough to be genuinely useful, and the patience to build trust with an audience over a timeline longer than a quarter. These have always been the things that mattered. They just used to be obscured by the fact that you could also succeed by being early to a channel or clever with a tactic. That’s the part that stopped working.

Working Notes on Software Marketing

Working Notes on Software Marketing