Jurassic Marketing: When Distribution Eats the Story
The Stop-Work Thought Experiment
Ever wonder what happens if you pause a “critical” part of your program for six months? I’ve lived it—one-person teams, restructures, lopsided workloads. I’ve also heard it echoed in peer roundtables. It’s not as radical—or as rare—as it sounds.
So do it on purpose. Pick a quarter or two and halt one thing: keyword optimization, negative list building, optimizing your paid media A/B testing, the quote of SEO-driven blog posts—whatever. Stop it long enough to get usable data.
Often, nothing breaks. Sometimes, things improve.
Quiet lesson: if pausing the work doesn’t ding the metrics you care about, that work wasn’t helping. Or you’re measuring the wrong thing.
Bottom line: we can’t keep calling velocity “progress.” Run the test. Use the silence to hear which signals are real.
The Jurassic Park Problem
In Jurassic Park (the novel and the film), Ian Malcolm warns against the seduction of control: complex systems won’t be micromanaged; they’ll surprise you. Marketers fall for a cousin of that hubris—workflows, dashboards, and automations become ends unto themselves.
Before asking, can we? Ask, should we? And start by sorting work into two bins:
Production: creating ideas, messages, assets.
Distribution: moving, multiplying, activating those assets.
When distribution dictates production, the story gets reverse-engineered from keyword lists, calendars, routing paths, channels, and trends. That inversion is wrong.
Automation is neutral. It mirrors inputs; it doesn’t invent them. Speed doesn’t equal meaning. If you’re racing, don’t forget to tighten the lug nuts after leaving the pit.
“Automation accelerates direction. It doesn’t supply one.”
AI is Inevitable. That’s Not the Point.
I’m bored of the anti-AI chorus—especially from writers. Excellent copy is still unmistakable. But in business, AI isn’t going back in the box. Tools now sit at the heart of writing, editing, image creation, and video production. Many enterprises mandate them outright.
Inevitability isn’t identity. Generative AI is prediction, pattern recognition, acceleration—not judgment, taste, or purpose.
Judgment needs a purpose. What is this piece trying to achieve? If your brief starts with questions, your job is to find real answers—in your team, your customers, your market. Tools won’t do that legwork.
“Taste” is what we call the gap between formula and feeling. That’s why you test with real humans. Models need the process; people provide the values.
The practical question: not should we automate, but what truth are we accelerating? 0 x anything—even a billion—is still zero.
It’s People
Shameless Soylent Green reference, yes. But start where the story lives: customers, sellers, product builders, support. Good subjects pass the blink test—they make you lean in and they touch multiple truths at once (your product’s and your users’).
Adopt an ethical, journalistic posture: report before you opine. Name the tension. Solve the Rubik’s Cube. Respect the stakes. If you cram the story into a pre-made box that matches the delivery vehicle, people feel the force-fit.
Tribal Knowledge and the Half-Life of Taste
When we don’t go to the moon for decades, we forget how. Standards change. Missions change. People change. And institutional memory evaporates quietly.
Teams are judged by their best available peers. When experts leave, ceilings lower. Automation can’t catch what reviewers can’t see. If the eyes don’t know, no tool will save you.
Which is why the hard-line anti-AI experts are still essential: craft leaders define the bar, and they train others to see it.
“You only get the quality you feed the machine—and the reviewers can only recognize the quality they’ve learned to see.”
Quality ≠ Scale
Scaling is a tooling problem. Quality is a craft problem. They do not intersect or substitute.
In the wild, we invert that truth. We chase KPIs and start to believe that hitting them is the work. But you can scale anything—sublime or mediocre. Tools are faithful to both.
The AI wave will expose who scaled mediocrity. When those teams turn inward to rebuild quality first, they’ll discover the experts are gone—and they’re back at square one.
Knowing vs. Making vs. Teaching
Criticism and creation are different disciplines. Knowing excellence isn’t making it. And making it isn’t the same as teaching it.
Picture a refrigerator-sized block of marble. Without a sculptor’s plan, it’s just an expensive doorstop. Renaissance masters ran studios because transformation takes a sequence of expert steps.
Modern orgs need leaders who know the block at every stage—start to finish—and can execute each step and teach it, building durable teams and shared methods, not hoarded magic.
Content Strategy & Direction for the Modern Marketer
Story first. Format fundamental.
Once you’ve listened to people and locked the story, ruminate on subjects that will actually resonate. Your format choices embed DNA so the story fits the boxes you’ll deploy it in.
Treat long ideas like a well—deep, strong, evergreen. Then outline. Let your H2s and H3s be the scenes that feed ads, one-sheets, podcasts, videos, and sales copy.
In this model, assets inherit tone, proof, and point of view. Keywords, length, or holiday-of-the-week hooks do not form them. In B2B, beige conversation is brand death. Save the weather talk for the elevator or the Zoom call.
When the core is honest, volume becomes a byproduct, not the goal. That’s when you pour on automation—without hesitation.
Checklist to operationalize:
Start with five customer conversations. Mine the tensions.
Draft one long-form piece per segment.
Break it into scenes (H2/H3).
Map scenes to channels and formats.
Define leading KPIs (are we reaching the right people?) and lagging KPIs (did it change revenue, churn, sales velocity?).
Automate only after the signal.
A Short Closing Meditation
AI is here. Learn it. Use it.
Metrics clarify, but they aren’t the story. If you want to connect with people, begin with people. Work remembers its origin.
Everything else—automation, dashboards, templates—comes after. Get the order wrong, and the machine comes apart. Good luck cold-starting it.
