Everything in Marketing Still Works. It Just Doesn't Differentiate You Anymore.

There is a piece of marketing wisdom making the rounds again, the kind that gets passed around LinkedIn like a trade secret. Dave Gerhardt put the current version of it best: everything works. YouTube works. LinkedIn works. Direct mail works. Webinars, email, events, PR, partnerships, even a $75K check to Gartner. The job is not picking the channel that works. It is figuring out which channels can work for you, with whatever ingredients you happen to have left in the fridge.

We agree with almost all of it. The post is good, and it has been good advice for two decades. But it describes a world that no longer exists, and the distance between that world and this one is the most important thing happening in marketing right now.

It is also the thread running through nearly everything we publish. Every company now sounds like ChatGPT. The slop factories keep multiplying. The AI ROI keeps getting harder to justify. Those are the same story told from different desks. The cost of producing competent marketing fell to almost nothing, and competent marketing stopped meaning anything.

The channel was never the asset

Take the claim apart and look at what was inside it. A webinar could work, but not because webinars are magic. A good webinar was expensive to make. Someone needed a point of view worth an hour of a stranger's afternoon, and the work of building it was the price of admission. A YouTube channel could work because thirty good videos meant thirty real decisions about what was worth saying out loud.

The channel was never the asset. The friction was. Every channel that worked, worked because doing it well cost something real: time, taste, judgment, the willingness to be specific in public. That cost was the entire return. The list of channels was just the menu you spent it on.

The post understands this, even if it files it under common sense. The example it reaches for, the B2B YouTube channel with thirty videos that all land somewhere between 17 and 62 views, is not a story about a weak channel. It is a story about effort spread so thin it stopped carrying a signal. Going deep on one channel beat going shallow on six because depth was the scarce thing.

Then someone removed the scarcity

That whole model rests on a single assumption: that effort is expensive. As of about eighteen months ago, it is not.

The Slop Machine, to borrow the post's own term, took the marginal cost of doing everything down to nearly zero. A team can stand up all six channels before lunch now. The thirty-video channel with 17 views is no longer the cautionary tale. It is the baseline now, what every category looks like at the same time, because everyone got the same machine in the same quarter and aimed it at the same channels.

We have documented this from almost every angle. The data on the flattening turned out to be worse than the anecdotes. Nine in ten marketing teams now run on AI, and fewer than half can prove it returned anything. The pattern holds wherever you look. The supply of acceptable-looking marketing exploded, and acceptable-looking marketing lost its ability to say anything.

This is where "everything works" turns on itself

When effort was expensive, "everything works" was a liberating idea. It meant no channel was closed to you. You just had to bring the work. Now that the work is free and universal, the same sentence carries the opposite message. If everything works and everyone can do everything, the channel tells a buyer nothing about you.

We watched the identical thing happen to a single word. Once every product became an AI "coworker," the word stopped distinguishing anyone and faded into background noise. Channels are doing the same thing now. "We're on YouTube" used to signal a bet. Today it signals a login. The platforms themselves are already pricing this in: your follower count stopped driving your LinkedIn reach, because presence is no longer scarce enough to reward. A saturated channel cannot tell a buyer which of four hundred companies shouting into it deserves an hour of their day.

So the literal claim survives. Every channel can still technically work. The promise underneath it, that doing the work earns you the reward, is the part that died, because the work is the exact thing that got automated.

The postscript was the actual article

Which brings us to the one line in the post that genuinely matters, and Gerhardt parks it at the very bottom as an afterthought: treat the job like a craft, have conviction, ignore best practices, use your brain, be creative. He says this matters more now than ever. That undersells it. The craft does not just matter more, it is the only thing left.

Take away everything the machine can now do, the production, the posting, the competent paragraphs, the best practices, and what survives is the part it cannot reach: taste, a real point of view, the judgment to pick one channel and go deep instead of spreading thin across six, and the nerve to sit across from a CFO and defend a bet that carries no UTM. That used to be the soft residue around the real work. It is now the entire moat.

This is not a hunch on our part. It runs through our reporting. Strong brands command a valuation premium. B2B buyers build their shortlist before the first sales call, and only brand gets you on it. The lowest CAC in B2B SaaS comes from thought leadership, which is the work almost nobody funds correctly. The market keeps paying for conviction. Most teams keep funding everything except it.

The hardest line in the post is now the load-bearing one

The bravest thing Gerhardt says is that good marketing is often bad for the company. It is harder to measure and slower to land, with no obvious call to action and nothing clean to attribute it to. In the old world, that was a tension you managed. In this one, it works as a filter.

The measurable tactics, the ones with tidy UTMs and direct-response CTAs, are exactly what the machine flooded first. They are the most copyable, so they get copied most, so they are the quickest to stop converting. We have written about the decade of gated whitepapers that has finally run out of road, and about the content ROI that most B2B marketers still cannot prove. The marketing that still moves anything is the marketing that was always hard to chart: a point of view, a brand people trust long before they are ready to buy, owned media that compounds instead of resetting every quarter. The patience to back that, and the ability to explain it to a finance team trained to fund only what it can count, is not a nice skill to have on the side. It is the job.

The test changed while everyone was filling their feeds

The chef line was perfect for its moment. Two eggs, a slice of bread, an onion. Can you work with that. For twenty years that was the test, because the pantry was the limit.

The pantry is not the limit anymore. Everyone has an infinite one now, plus a machine at the stove that will cook anything you name, instantly, for free. The test changed while everyone was busy filling their feeds. It is no longer whether you can make something out of almost nothing. It is whether, surrounded by infinite somethings, you have the taste to choose one dish and the conviction to be the only place serving it.

Everything still works, but that was never the hard part. The hard part has always been you, and now it is the whole job.