por Ber | Abr 3, 2026 | Uncategorized
In the beginning was the channel. Then there were channels, plural, and they were managed separately, by separate teams, with separate KPIs, and they didn’t talk to each other, and that was called “multichannel,” and it was fine, more or less, in the way that most things that are somewhat disorganized are fine. And then came the consultants, and they looked upon the channels, and they said: “What if the channels were not separate? What if the customer experience were seamless across all touchpoints? What if we called it ‘omnichannel’ and charged accordingly?” And lo, the omnichannel age began.
That was approximately fifteen years ago. In the interim, the word “omnichannel” has been used to describe approximately every possible combination of marketing activities, from genuinely integrated customer experiences to a company that has a website, an Instagram, and a newsletter they send out on alternating Thursdays when someone remembers to log into Mailchimp. The word has traveled so far from its original meaning that it now functions primarily as a signal of seriousness rather than a description of capability. Saying you have an omnichannel strategy is like saying you have a strategic approach to breathing. It sounds important. It is impossible to disagree with. It commits you to absolutely nothing specific.
What Omnichannel Was Supposed to Mean
The genuine version of omnichannel is straightforward and genuinely hard: a customer’s experience of your brand should be coherent and continuous regardless of which channel they use, and the channels should share information so that the experience improves with each interaction rather than resetting to zero every time the customer moves from your app to your store to your customer service line. If you called your bank last week and explained a problem, you shouldn’t have to explain it again when you open the app. If you put something in your online cart and then walk into the physical store, the store associate should know, or at least the system should.
This is technically achievable and organizationally catastrophic. It requires shared data infrastructure across systems that were built at different times by different teams and frequently don’t communicate. It requires breaking down the organizational silos where the digital team, the retail team, the CRM team, and the customer service team each own their piece of the customer and protect it from the others. It requires someone with enough authority and enough persistence to force these teams to coordinate, and that person either doesn’t exist or is currently stuck in a steering committee meeting about the omnichannel strategy deck.
The Omnichannel Strategy Deck
Most companies’ omnichannel journey begins with a strategy deck. The deck outlines the vision: a seamless customer experience, unified data, integrated communications, consistent brand presence across all touchpoints. The deck is beautiful. The vision is compelling. The roadmap at the back of the deck has sixteen workstreams and a three-year timeline and a budget that gets cut in half during the next planning cycle.
What actually gets implemented, typically, is the visible layer: the same visual identity applied consistently across channels, a content calendar that tries to coordinate messaging across platforms, a CRM system that is technically integrated with the website though the integration works less well than the vendor implied. This is not nothing. Consistency of appearance and message is genuinely valuable. It is also not what the omnichannel strategy deck promised, which was a fundamentally different customer experience powered by unified data and seamless transitions between touchpoints.
The gap between the deck and the reality is explained, in subsequent decks, as “Phase Two.” Phase Two will address the data infrastructure. Phase Two will break down the silos. Phase Two is always eighteen months away and has been eighteen months away for four years. In the interim, the company publishes case studies about its omnichannel approach that describe Phase One as if Phase Two had already happened.
The Omnichannel Meeting
The organizational reality of omnichannel is a meeting. Usually a recurring meeting. The Digital team presents their metrics. The Retail team presents their metrics. The CRM team presents their metrics. Everyone’s metrics look reasonable in isolation. Nobody can explain the customer who appears in the Digital data, the Retail data, and the CRM data as three different people with three different histories. The meeting ends with an action item to “align on attribution,” which produces a sub-meeting, which produces a shared document, which is last edited eighteen months ago.
The meeting exists because the organizational structure hasn’t changed to match the strategy. You can declare yourself omnichannel all you like, but if the incentives still reward each channel team for their channel’s performance in isolation, the coordination will be perfunctory. The channel managers are not being obstinate — they’re being rational. They are optimizing for the thing they’re measured on, which is not “contribution to a seamless customer journey” but “channel revenue” or “channel engagement.” The omnichannel strategy sits above the incentive structure without changing it, like a banner hung over a building that is structurally exactly the same as before the banner went up.
The Honest Version
Here is what honest omnichannel communication would look like: “We are consistent in our visual identity and messaging across channels. Our website and app share data reasonably well. Our retail and digital teams meet monthly and have a good working relationship. Our customer service team has access to purchase history. We do not yet have fully unified customer profiles or seamless cross-channel handoffs, and that infrastructure project is in the roadmap for 2026.” That’s a real description of a real capability. It’s also never what appears in the brand presentation, because it sounds like an admission rather than a strategy.
The word “omnichannel” will continue to mean everything until it means nothing, and then a new word will arrive — probably something involving “unified” or “integrated” or “total customer experience” — and the cycle will begin again with fresh slides and the same underlying coordination problems. It’s not cynicism. It’s just how language works in marketing: the vocabulary evolves faster than the reality, and the gap between them is where most of the budget lives.
For those keeping score at home, the NoBriefs shop is itself available across multiple channels. Not because we have an omnichannel strategy — we just have a website and some social accounts and a desire to sell good things to people who are tired of bad words. The KPI Shark does not care which channel you use to find him. He is, you might say, channel-agnostic.
por Ber | Abr 3, 2026 | Uncategorized
Page 23 of the strategy deck. You’ve been in this room for two and a half hours. There have been a lot of charts. There has been a framework with four quadrants. There was a section called “The Evolving Consumer Landscape” that described the internet. And now, on page 23, after all of that, the consultant pauses, looks around the room with the gravity of someone about to reveal something that will change how you understand your business forever, and says: “Fundamentally, your customers want to feel understood.” The room stills. A director writes it down. Someone nods slowly, as if hearing a truth they’ve always felt but never had the words for. You have just paid €85,000 for someone to tell you that your customers want to feel understood.
The strategic insight that isn’t is one of the consulting industry’s most durable products. It is an observation disguised as a discovery, a platitude dressed in the vocabulary of proprietary methodology, a thing everyone in the room already knew, elevated to strategic clarity by being said with confidence in a deck that cost a lot of money to make look expensive. It is almost impressive, as a feat of professional performance. It is also, if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of it, genuinely maddening.
What Makes an Observation Sound Like an Insight
The gap between an observation and an insight is supposed to be evidence: data that reveals something non-obvious, a causal relationship that changes how you act, a finding that would not have emerged without deliberate inquiry. A real insight has consequences — it should change what you do. “Your customers want to feel understood” has no consequences because it applies to every customer of every brand in every category, which is the marketing equivalent of saying “people prefer to be treated well.”
The consulting industry has developed an extensive toolkit for transforming observations into insights without adding actual content. The most reliable method is proprietary framework nomenclature. “Your customers don’t just want a product — they want a ‘Value Realization Journey’™” sounds like an insight because it has a name. The name implies a model. The model implies research. The research implies specificity. None of that chain is necessarily true, but the vocabulary creates the impression of it.
Another method is the counter-intuitive setup. “You might expect that lower prices drive conversion. But our research shows — ” and then what follows is either actually counter-intuitive (rare) or a restatement of the original premise with a slight reframe (common). “Our research shows that customers prioritize value perception over price” means “people don’t only care about cheapness,” which means the original premise was a straw man set up specifically to be knocked down, creating the sensation of revelation without the content of it.
The Confidence Premium
Here is the mechanism that makes the non-insight viable as a business proposition: the people delivering it are very confident, and confidence is genuinely valuable in contexts where the audience is uncertain. When a company brings in external strategy consultants, they are usually doing so because something is unclear, some direction needs to be chosen, some argument needs to be settled. Into that uncertainty arrives someone with a deck, a methodology, and the manner of someone who has seen this situation many times before and knows exactly what to do about it.
The confidence is not fraudulent. Most consultants genuinely believe what they’re presenting. The issue is that genuine belief and genuine insight are not the same thing. It’s entirely possible to be completely convinced of an observation that is completely obvious. And it’s entirely possible for a room full of intelligent people to hear that observation delivered with conviction and experience it as new information, simply because the delivery elevated it above the threshold where they would normally filter it out.
This is the confidence premium: paying for certainty in a moment of uncertainty, regardless of whether the certainty is earned. Companies pay it because the alternative — sitting with the ambiguity, making decisions without external validation, trusting the knowledge that already exists inside the organization — is uncomfortable in ways that a €85,000 invoice temporarily resolves.
The Insight You Already Have
Most companies contain the insights they’re paying consultants to discover. They exist in the customer service team, which has been listening to customer complaints for years and has detailed, specific knowledge of what goes wrong and why. They exist in the sales team, which knows exactly how competitors are perceived and what objections come up in every conversation. They exist in the product team, which knows which features get used and which ones were built for a persona that turned out to be fictional (see: Jennifer).
This knowledge doesn’t get elevated to “strategic insight” because it comes from inside the organization, because it’s messy and specific and sometimes contradicts the official narrative, because it requires listening to people who are not senior enough to have opinions that count. The external consultant’s version of the same knowledge, repackaged in a framework and delivered on slide 23, becomes the strategic direction for the next three years.
There is a version of external strategy work that is genuinely valuable: bringing a perspective that the organization can’t generate internally due to proximity, ego, or politics; structuring a decision-making process that moves faster than internal dynamics allow; providing the political cover that sometimes allows good ideas that already existed to finally be acted upon. That version exists. It is surrounded, in the market, by a much larger volume of expensive restatements of the obvious.
The Test Worth Running
Before commissioning the next strategy project, try this: ask your customer-facing teams to write down what they know about why customers buy, why they leave, and what they wish the product or service did better. Read it carefully. Compare it to what the strategy deck will cost. Ask whether the gap in understanding justifies the investment, or whether the investment is mostly buying confidence and a good-looking deck to show the board.
Sometimes the answer will be: yes, we genuinely need external perspective here. Often the answer will be: we need to listen to our own people better. Neither answer requires slide 23. The NoBriefs shop sells, among other things, the reminder that the most important things in marketing are usually obvious — what’s rare is the courage to act on what you already know. The Spreadsheet Sloth has sat through that deck. It did not change his life. It did not need to.
por Ber | Abr 3, 2026 | Uncategorized
There is a particular kind of meeting that happens in creative agencies and marketing departments every few years, and it is always the same meeting with a different platform name substituted in. You’re in the conference room. Someone senior — usually someone whose media diet skews heavily toward industry trade press and LinkedIn articles about industry trade press — arrives with the expression of someone who has just discovered fire. “We need to be on TikTok,” they say. The room nods. In the back row, the 26-year-old social media manager who has been lobbying for a TikTok budget for eighteen months closes their eyes briefly and counts to three.
The creative director who discovers TikTok in the fourth year of TikTok’s relevance is one of marketing’s most reliable characters. They are well-intentioned, genuinely excited, and arriving at the party at precisely the moment the hosts are starting to clean up. Their enthusiasm is real. Their timing is catastrophically off. And their conviction that the brand’s TikTok presence will be different from all the other brand TikTok presences — more authentic, more native, more genuinely connected to the culture — will survive approximately three content planning meetings before collapsing under the weight of legal approval processes and the Communications Director’s concern about tone.
The Platform Adoption Curve, Explained Through Pain
Every platform has a lifecycle that follows a depressingly predictable curve. First, the early adopters arrive — young, creative, indifferent to brands, building culture organically. Then the culture becomes visible to people slightly outside it, and the clever brands show up: small teams, fast decision-making, willing to be genuinely weird. Then the platform “proves itself” with a case study that gets written up in Marketing Week. Then the budget gets allocated. Then the committee gets involved. Then the brand guidelines get applied. Then legal signs off on the content calendar. By this point, the people who made the platform interesting are doing something else, and the brands are talking to each other in an empty room.
TikTok followed this arc with particular speed, because TikTok’s culture moved faster than any platform before it. What worked in 2020 was irrelevant by 2021. The audio trends, the format conventions, the relationship between creators and audiences — all of it evolved faster than any brand approval process could track. The brands that succeeded on TikTok did so by giving small teams real autonomy and real speed. The brands that failed did so by treating TikTok like television with vertical video: produced, polished, and addressed to nobody in particular.
The Brief for the TikTok That Nobody Wanted
When the Creative Director’s TikTok enthusiasm reaches the briefing stage, something fascinating happens. The brief asks for content that is “authentic and native to the platform” while also being “on-brand,” “legally cleared,” “approved by Communications,” “suitable for all audiences,” “aligned with the current campaign,” and “avoiding anything that could be perceived as controversial.” These requirements are not compatible with each other. TikTok authenticity requires speed, rawness, and the willingness to fail publicly. Brand approval processes require the opposite of all three.
The result is content that looks like TikTok and feels like a brochure. It uses the right aspect ratio. It has text overlays in the right font. It might even use a trending audio — though the trend will be three weeks old by the time legal approved the audio license. It is technically a TikTok in the same way that a theme park ride is technically travel. It has the form without the substance, the format without the culture, the presence without the point.
This content gets 200 views. Of those, 150 are employees and agency staff. The remaining 50 are people who landed on it by accident and scrolled away in under two seconds. The analytics are reported in the monthly dashboard with creative framing: “We’re building presence,” says the report. “Organic growth takes time.” It does take time. It also takes content that people actually want to watch, which is the part the brief forgot to address.
The Platform Graveyard
Behind every marketing department with an active TikTok account there is usually a row of abandoned platforms: a Snapchat account that posted six times in 2017, a Pinterest presence that was updated until someone left and nobody learned the password, a Google+ page that outlasted Google+ itself because someone forgot to delete it. Each of these represents a moment when a senior person discovered a platform and got excited, a junior person was assigned to “own” it without resources or strategic direction, and the whole thing quietly expired when the excitement moved on.
The platforms change. The pattern doesn’t. The discovery, the enthusiasm, the underfunded execution, the measured disappointment, the quiet abandonment — it’s as regular as seasons. The question worth asking, before the next platform discovery meeting, is not “how do we do TikTok?” but “do we have the organizational capability to do any platform well, and if not, why are we adding another one?”
The Way Out of the Cycle
Some brands have found an exit from this loop: be genuinely excellent on one or two platforms rather than adequately present on six. Give the people closest to the content — usually the youngest people on the team, the ones who actually use the platforms — real authority and real resources. Accept that being native to a platform means making content the platform’s audience actually enjoys, not content that fits the brand guidelines and happens to be vertical.
It requires trusting people who don’t sit in senior leadership, which is the hardest thing for most organizations to do. It requires accepting that some of the best content will make someone in Legal briefly uncomfortable. It requires admitting that the Creative Director discovering TikTok is not the same thing as the brand understanding TikTok.
If you’re the junior person in the back of that meeting, counting to three while senior leadership catches up to 2020, the NoBriefs community sees you. The Fuck The Brief collection was made for people who know exactly what needs to happen but are waiting for permission from someone who just downloaded the app. You know where to find us.
por Ber | Abr 3, 2026 | Uncategorized
It is the third week of October, and something has shifted in the atmosphere of the office. The finance team is making eye contact. The CFO sent a calendar invite with no agenda description. Your budget tracker — that quiet Google Sheet you’ve been maintaining all year with the careful discipline of someone who genuinely believes in financial planning — suddenly has everyone’s attention. You have money left. In Q4, having money left is not a virtue. It is a problem that needs to be solved before December 31st, preferably by spending all of it on something, anything, fast.
Welcome to the Q4 budget dump: the annual tradition in which companies that have been underfunding their marketing operations all year suddenly discover, in the final quarter, that there is remaining budget, and proceed to spend it with the strategic urgency of someone who has found a €50 note in an old jacket and needs to get rid of it before their partner asks questions.
The Logic, Such as It Is
The budget dump exists because of how annual budgets work in most companies. Budget is allocated at the start of the year based on projections, politics, and whoever argued most convincingly in the planning meeting. If you underspend your budget, there are two consequences: your allocation is reduced next year (because clearly you don’t need what you were given), and you are implicitly accused of poor planning. The incentive structure, therefore, is to spend your full budget every year, regardless of whether the spending produces results.
This creates a fascinating phenomenon in the final quarter: a sudden flowering of initiatives that would never survive a normal business case review. A new tool that integrates with three things you already have. A sponsorship of an industry event that your target audience does not attend but that your VP of Marketing has been to twice and enjoyed. A video production budget for a brand film that will live on YouTube with 340 views, 200 of which will be internal. A content push so aggressive it requires hiring three freelancers in November for work that will be published in December and reviewed by nobody until February.
The Speed at Which Strategy Evaporates
What makes the Q4 dump particularly beautiful, from a clinical observation standpoint, is what it reveals about strategic discipline under pressure. Throughout the year, the marketing team maintains the appearance of rigor: proposals go through a review process, campaigns have KPIs attached, new tools require a business case, partnerships are evaluated against audience fit. The whole apparatus of modern marketing governance is in place.
Then Q4 arrives and the apparatus folds like a paper crane in the rain. Proposals that would have taken three weeks to approve are green-lit in an afternoon. Initiatives that failed the cost-per-acquisition test in Q1 are revived because “we have the budget and need to move quickly.” KPIs that were attached to campaigns in January are quietly decoupled from Q4 activities because, well, it’s Q4, the attribution model doesn’t work cleanly in December, and honestly everyone is just trying to clear the number.
The speed is the tell. Nothing that needs to happen urgently is happening urgently for good reasons. The urgency is entirely financial. The deadline is not the market opportunity closing — it is December 31st, which is the same deadline every year and somehow still catches everyone off guard.
The Legacy of Q4 Decisions
The most expensive Q4 budget decisions are the ones that create ongoing commitments. The SaaS tool you signed up for in November because it was a quick way to spend €8,000 before year-end — that has an annual contract. The agency retainer you started in October to use up budget — they’re still on the books in March, working on projects nobody quite remembers commissioning. The conference sponsorship that seemed affordable when you had excess budget looks different when you’re in Q1 trying to justify every expense.
There is also the question of what Q4 spending displaces. The campaigns that should have been funded in Q2 but weren’t, because budget was being conserved. The hires that were delayed because headcount was frozen. The tools that would have made the team more effective all year, requested in April and denied, that somehow become available in November because the alternative is returning the money. The Q4 dump is often just the Q2 wishlist, delayed by six months and stripped of the planning that would have made it useful.
What a Sane System Would Look Like
A sane budget system would reward underspending when underspending reflects efficiency, allow budget to roll forward when initiatives are delayed for legitimate reasons, and evaluate spending on output rather than on whether the number hit zero by a specific calendar date. A sane budget system would not create a structural incentive to spend money quickly and badly in order to protect next year’s allocation.
Nobody works in a sane budget system. Everyone works in the system that exists, which means Q4 will arrive, the budget will need to be spent, and someone will make a decision in October that they’ll be explaining in March. The only real choice is whether to spend it on something with a plausible strategic rationale or something that has no rationale at all except that it was available, it fit the budget, and the CFO needed the number cleared.
If this hits differently every autumn, you’re in good company. The NoBriefs shop is full of people who have signed off on Q4 purchases they didn’t believe in, for deadlines that didn’t make sense, for budgets that were allocated badly from the beginning. The KPI Shark sees through the vanity of spend-for-spend’s-sake. Wear it as a reminder that clearing a budget line is not the same as building something that lasts.
por Ber | Abr 3, 2026 | Uncategorized
You have been running this company for eleven years. You built it from a freelance operation in a spare bedroom to a team of sixty people with a real HR department and a coffee machine that requires a minor in engineering to operate. You know your customers better than they know themselves. You know which campaigns worked and which ones died quietly, which product lines carry the margins and which ones exist for strategic reasons that made sense in 2019. You know everything. Which is why it’s so refreshing when the agency shows up and tells you they need six weeks to discover your business before they can begin work.
The discovery phase is the consulting industry’s most elegant invention: a paid period of time during which external parties learn basic information about your company, ask questions whose answers are already in the documents you gave them, and ultimately produce a report summarizing what your team has known since approximately the third month of the company’s operation. It costs between €15,000 and €80,000, depending on the agency’s day rate and how many post-it notes they use.
The Workshop and Its Rituals
Discovery typically begins with a workshop. The workshop is held offsite when possible, because breakthroughs require a different conference room than the one you use for regular meetings. The agency arrives with a facilitator, a notetaker, a deck of questions they’ve asked every client since 2017 with the logos swapped out, and a large supply of differently colored sticky notes — because insight, as everyone in consulting knows, is color-coded.
The exercises themselves follow a predictable choreography. There is a “hopes and fears” exercise, where stakeholders write their hopes and fears on — you guessed it — sticky notes of different colors, and then place them on a wall. There is a “customer journey mapping” exercise where everyone maps the customer journey they already know onto a large piece of paper, giving it a visual formality that makes it feel like a discovery rather than a transcription. There is an “align on priorities” exercise that reveals priorities everyone present already agreed on before entering the room.
At the end of the workshop, the facilitator takes photos of all the sticky notes. These photos will form the visual evidence of discovery. They will appear in the discovery report under the heading “Key Findings,” even though the findings are, essentially, the things you told them during the introductory call.
The Report That Validates the Investment
Several weeks later, the agency delivers the discovery document. It is substantial — forty to eighty pages, beautifully designed, with your logo on the cover and a table of contents that suggests it contains more than it does. The document is organized around themes that emerged from the workshops, meaning: themes that the facilitation team decided on before the workshops and then found evidence for in the post-it notes.
Section one: Company Overview. This is where the agency demonstrates that they have read your website. Section two: Market Context. This is where they demonstrate access to a market research subscription. Section three: Customer Insights. This is where the personas live — see our previous discussion of Jennifer. Section four: Strategic Tensions. This is the clever part, where the consultants identify genuine contradictions within your business (there are always genuine contradictions within every business) and present them as discoveries rather than as the permanent condition of operating a complex organization.
The document ends with Recommendations, which are either (a) so broad as to be applicable to any company in any sector, or (b) so specific as to be obviously the direction the agency wanted to take from the beginning, with the discovery process serving as elaborate justification. Either way, the Recommendations justify Phase Two, which is the actual work, which is what you thought you were hiring them for in the first place.
Why Companies Keep Paying For It
Here is the thing: the discovery phase often does produce something valuable, just not what it claims to produce. The real value is not the report. The real value is forcing internal alignment — getting people in a room who don’t normally talk, making them articulate things that are understood but never stated, creating a shared document that gives disparate teams a common reference point. That’s genuinely useful, and it’s worth some money.
The problem is the mythology around it. The myth that external parties will discover something about your business that you don’t already know. The myth that the sticky note exercises produce insights rather than document existing knowledge. The myth that the forty-page report is the output of discovery rather than the justification for it. If companies commissioned “internal alignment workshops” instead of “discovery phases,” the same thing would happen at a fraction of the cost and with considerably less pretense.
But “internal alignment workshop” doesn’t have the same ring as “discovery.” Discovery implies something will be found. Something unknown made known. It suggests that before the agency arrived, you were operating in the dark — which is just condescending enough to feel like expertise.
After the Discovery, Before the Work
Between the discovery report and the actual deliverables, there is often a strategy phase. Then a creative brief phase. Then a brief alignment phase. Then, eventually, something resembling work begins. By that point, the market has shifted, the internal champion who hired the agency has moved to a different company, and the original brief — which was actually pretty clear — has been through enough transformation that nobody remembers what they were trying to do in the first place.
You don’t need six weeks and a roomful of sticky notes to understand what you want. You need a brief that’s honest about the problem, a team that’s honest about what they can solve, and enough mutual trust to skip the theater and get to work. The NoBriefs shop exists precisely for the people who believe that creative work should start with clarity, not with a photo of a sticky-note wall. The Fuck The Brief line isn’t anti-process — it’s anti-pretense. There’s a difference, and the difference costs about €40,000.
por Ber | Abr 3, 2026 | Uncategorized
It is Monday morning, 8:47 a.m., and somewhere in a home office with a ring light, a marketing director is composing a post about failure. Not a real failure — a curated one. A failure that taught a lesson, revealed a strength, and ultimately led to the breakthrough that now justifies the post. The failure has a three-act structure. It ends with gratitude. It will receive 847 likes from people who also failed productively and learned exactly the right things. It is LinkedIn thought leadership at its most refined: maximum emotion, minimum information, zero actual thoughts.
LinkedIn has achieved something remarkable. It has turned professional networking into a genre of inspirational fiction, a content format so thoroughly colonized by performed wisdom and humblebrag vulnerability that reading it has become a meditative exercise in learning to feel nothing. The thought leadership industrial complex is alive and well, and it is absolutely crushing it in terms of engagement metrics.
The Anatomy of a Thought Leadership Post
The classic LinkedIn thought leadership post follows a structure as reliable as a sonnet. It opens with a short sentence. Often a question. Or a bold claim. Then it subverts expectations. Then the pivot — usually signaled by the word “But.” Here comes the lesson. The lesson is universal. Something about resilience, or curiosity, or the importance of asking for help. The lesson was learned through experience, though the experience is described at a level of abstraction that makes it applicable to literally everyone and therefore useful to no one.
The post ends with a call to action. “What do you think?” or “Drop your thoughts below” or “Tag someone who needs to hear this.” The comments fill with people saying “so true,” “this is everything,” and “sharing this with my team.” Nobody shares it with their team. The team is also on LinkedIn, composing their own posts about different lessons learned through similar non-specific experiences.
The images are either selfies taken at conferences (conference selfies have their own sub-genre — the earnest handshake, the panel photo where everyone looks like they’re mid-profound-statement), or black-text-on-white-background quote cards, or photos of notebooks with the first line of the post written in them, because apparently writing the post wasn’t enough and someone needed to also photograph themselves writing the post.
The Thought That Isn’t Leadership
The term “thought leadership” was coined in the 1990s to describe genuine domain expertise — the kind of thinking that moves an industry forward, challenges conventional wisdom, or introduces a framework that changes how people work. It was a useful concept. Then it was discovered by content strategy, and like all useful concepts discovered by content strategy, it was immediately turned into a template.
Real thought leadership is uncomfortable. It requires having an opinion that some people will disagree with. It requires specificity — not “failure leads to growth” but “here is exactly why this specific approach to product pricing fails in enterprise SaaS, and here is the data.” It requires, at minimum, the presence of an actual thought.
What LinkedIn has produced instead is the aesthetics of thought leadership without the substance: the vulnerability without the risk, the opinion without the argument, the expertise without the specifics. It is possible to post on LinkedIn every day for a year and say absolutely nothing of professional value while accumulating thousands of followers who are waiting for you to say something of professional value. The followers keep waiting. The posts keep coming. The engagement keeps climbing. Everyone involved calls this success.
Why Marketers Are the Worst Offenders
Every profession has its LinkedIn voice, but marketing has a special relationship with the platform because marketers understand, better than anyone, how LinkedIn’s algorithm works and what kind of content it rewards. The result is a self-referential loop: marketers post content optimized for LinkedIn engagement about the importance of authentic content. They write about the dangers of vanity metrics while obsessing over their follower count. They discuss the value of genuine connection while A/B testing their post hooks to maximize the click-through on “see more.”
There is a particular brand of LinkedIn post beloved by marketing professionals that goes: “Nobody talks about this, but [extremely common observation in the marketing industry].” Nobody talks about the importance of knowing your audience. Nobody talks about how email marketing still works. Nobody talks about the fact that strategy should precede tactics. These observations have been talked about, relentlessly, in every marketing conference, podcast, and textbook for the past thirty years. They continue to perform extremely well on LinkedIn because the platform has no memory and the audience is always new.
The Exit, If You Want It
There is a version of LinkedIn that is genuinely useful — for job searching, for connecting with specific people you want to work with, for occasionally finding a piece of writing that is actually good because someone decided to write something true and specific instead of broadly inspirational. That LinkedIn exists. It is outnumbered about forty to one by the thought leadership version, but it’s there.
The antidote to thought leadership is simply leadership — having a point of view you’d defend in a meeting, not just in a post. Knowing something well enough to be wrong about it in an interesting way. Writing something that not everyone will like because it actually says something.
If you’ve ever posted something on LinkedIn and then watched the algorithm reward you for it while knowing, in the quiet part of your brain, that you wrote it for the algorithm and not for the reader — you’re already more self-aware than most. That’s a start. Wear the NoBriefs badge honestly: the Spreadsheet Sloth knows that not all productivity is real productivity, and not all posting is real communication. Sometimes it’s just noise wearing a ring light.
