Hey, friends. Welcome to the second edition of Social Notes.

If you’re new here, welcome! This month, I’m gonna talk about boring social.

So, in my career, I’ve talked to enough social media managers from different industries to know that there is something that gnaws at nearly all of us which is, “how do we make content that isn’t shit boring? And how can we flourish if we work in an industry that is, objectively, (very) boring?”

By the way, I just got back from Drive, a B2B Marketing conference hosted by Exit Five, and I can tell you that that is very top of mind for a lot of marketers, even if they don’t specifically own social.

My friends, I’ve worked in some deeply DEEPLY unsexy industries. I’ve done social for a diesel fuel company. A VoIP service provider. A e-signature software! I daydreamed about working for a glamorous fashion brand like Vogue or a really unhinged, chaotic wild brand like Liquid Death. I foamed at the mouth at the thought of having more—more resources, more opportunities. Or even just having a household name that people already recognize.

But something that I realized in the midst of admiring all the glam bam things is that there’s a very specific skill that you develop from working in an unsexy industry with limited resources (I’m talking next to $0 in terms of budget) and still being able to find a way to make it interesting. And that’s something that I’m deeply proud of. If I have a claim to fame in this career, I think that’s probably it. And in case you ever need a reminder that you’re doing just fine, remember this:

There are more of us (boring brand-ers) than there are of them

When I say “them,” I mean that most of use are not running social for Vogue magazine or Liquid Death with household name recognition, ginormous budgets and a full fledge creative team behind us. For most of us, we’re just trying to make something that is objectively less interesting a little more interesting for people online.

Most social teams are hanging on and figuring things out as they go. They’re told to do more with less, and then to make it even tighter. They have limited resources. They get shit support. And when social doesn’t perform fast enough to satisfy everyone’s desperate need for instant gratification, they’re chastised for it.

I rarely meet a company that doesn’t want social to work. It’s 2026. Everyone sees the value of it now. They want more reach. More relevance. Everybody is begging for more attention. They just don’t always know what good social looks like for them and they’re so deeply terrified of screwing it up.

It’s the kind of uncertainty that makes this job really hard because it gets pushed onto social teams to try to “make it work” somehow. They say, “grow the channel,” “come up with (better) ideas,” “prove value!!!” and “also don’t do anything that would make us uncomfortable.”

When I consulted with brands, one of the first questions I’d inevitably get was, “why do you think our current social strategy isn’t working?” And I look at their bright eyes and curious faces and see how desperate they were to hear something profound. The secret sauce their team must’ve missed. The golden answer from the LinkedIn marketing girl!

And I’d demolish their soul by saying, “I don’t think you have a social strategy.”

It’s usually a distribution plan for a bunch of half baked content ideas. Or you have a social team that is spending more of their energy trying to prove that social matters to people who hired them. I mean, look, I could give people five new formats tomorrow and maybe, by some stroke of luck, one of them pops off. Maybe they’ll get a nice spike in engagement. But overall that’s a bandaid fix. A new format doesn’t fix a company that won’t take risks. It doesn’t fix unclear ownership and I will be the first to tell you that it doesn’t fix a social team that’s clawing at the bottom of the barrel for whatever scraps the rest of the company is willing to give them.

Stop taking social advice so literally

Sometimes I think we make things even harder on ourselves because we do shit like looking outside of our very ordinary operating environments for answers and then borrow tactics from brands that are playing an entirely different game.

We see other companies and people do things online and immediately try to copy their tactics. I’ll use an example from my industry, B2B SaaS. Everyone is pushing for founder-led content because “no one follows brands anymore, they care about the people behind the brand” and yes, there’s truth to that. But now you have all these founders hiring the same ghostwriters, filming their talking heads and becoming these glorified product marketers in a way. And maybe that’s great when you have a founder who already has an interest for sharing online. But if you have to drag a founder up, kicking and screaming, just to post then that’s not a great use of anyone’s time. Same with a founder who absolutely looks miserable on camera, but everyone is saying video is king.

A broader example is when we tell teams to jump on trends because another brand did it. We show them a gorgeous feed and tell them their content needs to look just like this. But we don’t acknowledge that they probably have a team of photographers and designers behind the scenes, helping them look that way.

I ran a workshop recently where I talked about how we use creators at Slate, and afterward someone from a compliance company came up and asked, “so how would I find compliance influencers?” I thought that was interesting because he had framed it almost as a reason why they couldn’t work with creators. In my head, I was like, why would you specifically need a “compliance influencer”?? Couldn’t you just find someone who could speak credibly about the problem that your audience has? And then I realize that he was trying to figure out how he could replicate my creator strategy literally. And to be fair to him, I was probably not clear enough about why the program worked which ultimately made it harder for him to translate this idea into his world.

We do this with social content all the time. We copy the artifact instead of the thinking behind it.

We tell our team to jump on trends because others did it. We point to some unhinged campaign that went viral and say, “why don’t we do this for our launch?” We see people say that founder-led content work and now every CEO needs to add “chronically online” to their resume.

The better thing to ask in cases like this, when we’re feeling the pressure to jump on the bandwagon, is why did it work for them?

• what was so interesting about this specifically?

• was the idea that good, or was it the person/brand behind it?

• what did they have going for them that we don’t?

• how much time/money/help probably went into making this?

• and realistically, what part of this could actually work for us?

These seem obvious. They’re SO obvious that we would often just skip over the basics of asking ourselves these questions. And I think this is probably where a good social strategy would start. You shouldn’t even blindly copy someone else’s playbook and expect it to work 100% the same way it did for them. Because most of us are not operating in the same environments as the brands we admire, so why should we keep prescribing their tactics as if we are?

Alright, but enough ranting from me. Something that I’ve always find to be extremely helpful is hearing stories that actually show what I mean. You’ve already heard plenty from me at this point, and I could probably keep going on about how we approach this at Slate, but I think ideas get better when you hear how other people are solving the same problems in completely different environments. So, I wanted to ask other folks who are actually working under the conditions that I’m describing here, which involve small teams, limited resources, and industries that aren’t well known. I wanted to know how they run social within their means.

How Breadcrumb got its employees to help make the rebrand feel bigger

Last month I got to chat with Esther Dawson, the Global Brand and Content Lead at Breadcrumb. In case you didn’t know, Breadcrumb is a construction safety and compliance platform. Extremely important work, but you know anytime you hear the word “compliance,” it doesn’t exactly scream “naturally sexy social brand.” Which makes them the perfect folks to talk to.

In my conversation with Esther, I learned a lot about how her global marketing team works. The entire team is made up of 6 people, with 3 working across brand and content. As you can probably imagine, social falls within that function.

We talked about so many things, from how she leads a lean team to how they’ve operationalized the work in a way that makes them look bigger than they are, the story that stood out to me most was about their rebrand.

Now, let me draw this picture for you.

When we think of a company doing a rebrand, something marketers say all the time is that the only people who really care about your rebrand are you. And I don’t think they’re wrong. It’s obviously a huge moment internally, we’ve experienced this ourselves at Slate, but trying to make everyone else online care that you changed your logo or colors and stuff is hard.

Of course, the right thinking is to lean on your employees to help carry the message but I think the biggest grip that people often have with this kind of thing is that no one wants to see the same regurgitated post from 30 different employees because some poor social media manager (who is also the team copywriter) handed everyone a doc with 6 variations of “I’m thrilled to announce” paragraphs.

And as I mentioned above, Breadcrumb didn’t exactly have a giant team sitting around waiting, just waiting for a massive social campaign to happen. At the height of the rebrand, the core marketers were already stuck in the throes of rewriting 64 website pages in roughly 6 weeks. They had to update the product and brand across multiple regions, and were already creating assets for more than 70 employees and managing all the internal comms that came with that. Then, about 4 weeks before the actually launch, they remembered that they also need to make something for social.

This would be the time where small teams like Esther’s would start scrambling to produce something fast. They would be pushing the designers to create more graphics. They’d start typing away at the launch copies and then probably spend hours rewriting for each person’s individual tone and voice. They’d probably also be working on how to make it make sense across different channels. All’s to say that this would literally take up way too much time that they didn’t realistically have.

Esther knew there would be no way that they could personally make enough content to give the launch the energy it needed. So instead, they just needed to figure out a way to make this as easy as possible for other people to create.

Their 3-part system

• Give everyone context in one place. Esther created a notion page called rebrand hub. It became the centralized spot to house all the information for their team to have context about the rebrand. They included things like FAQs, new brand assets, before & afters of the old vs the new look. This is also where the key messaging lived, and the explanation of why they were dropping the “1” from the company name.

• Give people a reason to participate without telling them exactly what to make. Breadcrumb's Content Manager, Anna Fensom did this by creating an internal competition around their launch to encourage employee participation. And instead of rewarding the post that got the most engagement, they said the winner was whoever made the most creative post. Which basically encouraged people to not make the same thing.

• Support people making things, and then hype the hell out of them. Esther made it clear that the marketing team would still help when people needed it. And sometimes that meant jumping in to help edit audio, or helping with copy, filming, etc. But the caveat is that the employee had to raise their hand and ask for help rather than the marketing team proactively creating for them. And as the posts went live, they celebrated them internally, which got even more employees involved over the 2 week period. She also mentioned that leadership joined in too which was a big win.

This operating decision led to more than 50 posts in two weeks! And the engagement that they got through their employees’ personal profiles ended up being 5x greater than anything they got through the company page. Esther mentioned that they hadn’t ever done anything like this before, so they didn’t have a benchmark going into the launch. Now this has been something they use internally and carried into other launches.

Now I know a lot of you reading would think that the obvious takeaway here is probably something like, “alright, cool, so let’s do employee advocacy.” Sure, but I think that’s again taking the tactic too literally.

What Breadcrumb did here to make this successful was change what the marketing team was responsible for. They did not own every post. They were responsible for giving context and guardrails, and then they provided any necessary support where people needed it. Then they gave everyone else room to flourish and I think when you have a team member recreating the infamous scene from “Love, Actually”—you’ve won.

And that’s the important takeaway/lesson/whatever you wanna call it here. When you’re running a lean team, you don’t always simply need more people on marketing to create more output. For the most part, the smartest teams get clear about what marketing actually needs to own and then they build enough context and trust to get those folks to help carry some of the work.

Esther’s advice for lean marketing teams

If you read up to here, I’m really impressed because it means you care about this topic a lot. Look, we spend so much time looking at what everyone else is doing that it becomes very easy to feel like we should be doing all of it too. But maybe running a good social team, especially a lean one, is being really about being honest about what you actually have to work with.

Anyway. Here’s to making our boring little corners of the internet a little less boring!

And if you want to hear more from other social media marketers around topic of boring social you should tune into this month’s Social Social Club on Wednesday, September 23 @ 12pm EST.

We’ll be chatting with Tomas Budin (Video Content Creator at TL;DV), Brianna Chapman (Senior Social Community Manager at Apollo), and Jenna Kamal (Events and Community Lead at Passionfruit —three people who consistently make me LOL on LinkedIn—to talk about how they make content interesting when the subject matter isn’t doing them any favors.

Sign up here!

I have been in a wee bit of a creative funk.

My God, so the other night I was scrolling through IG when I had one of those moments where I looked at my feed and thought to myself, why is everything so blahhhhh and whyyyy is everyone making the same exact content?

This is a rhetorical question, by the way, because the social media marketer in me knows exactly why. The algo has studied me at great lengths and it’s actively filtering and prioritizing content based on what it thinks I love and would therefore stay scrolling like a feign. Nature. Travel. Self-help from women sitting in front of aesthetically pleasing backgrounds speaking fast into the camera where it seems very raw and unrehearsed.

And you know what? I actually do enjoy those type of content. I have trained the algorithm well.

But when I saw so much of it stacked next to each other, I found myself absolutely fucking hating it.

I think this kind of feeling stems from the very annoyance I have with copycats. It reminds me so much of my childhood. You see, I’m the oldest of three girls, and most of my childhood was spent fighting with my sisters about things sisters fight about: clothes, space, them trying to do the things I was doing. I remember how much I hated it whenever they copied me. Maybe that is an innate oldest-sister personality trait. Or maybe I just have some kind of ego problem. Whatever it is, I have always wanted the independence of doing something that felt different. I wanted people to look at what I was doing and see something that was distinctly mine. And therefore, I respect creators who are making or doing something that no one else is doing.

At the same time, I am also deeply inspired by what other people make. That’s how creativity works. We notice things. We borrow references. We see someone make something interesting and a little mental lightbulb goes ding because we just reached an inspired thought that needs to be acted on.

I don’t want to copy anyone else, but I am also not creating inside a sensory deprivation tank either.

So lately I have been caught in this strange philosophical loop where I’m asking myself, am I inspired, or have I become a bit of a carbon copy of everything I consume? And if I can’t stand the idea of being copied myself, what exactly do I expect from anyone?

I have also been going, going, going since the spring. Flying to different countries, attending conferences, events, taking on more work projects. My career is growing tremendously. I signed with management earlier this year which have only accelerated that work. So much is happening, much of it good, and yet despite all the energizing business—I have found myself saying that I’m in a creative funk.

BTW, I’m writing this from the backyard of my mother-in-law’s house in a town called Cuxhaven which sits in the northern part of Germany, just below Denmark. I went to my first horse race the other day. We walk more here. I sit outside more. Right now, the leaves are rustling, the sky is blue, and the sun is beaming down on my perfectly sunscreen slathered face. It all sounds very idyllic, like from a movie. But if you were sitting next to me, you’d also be swatting away the flies and the bees and probably complaining about why europe seems to hate AC.

But I am, quite literally, outside touching grass (with my feet). And as I’m sitting here, reflecting on this self diagnosed funk, I start wondering if there’s actually something wrong with me or if this is what helps me be better.

This issue is brought to you by HubSpot

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If you are interested in attending, HubSpot has given my readers 10% off tickets. Use code GEM-LE-10 when you register here.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be better than you were.

I shared this on LinkedIn yesterday:

As of this morning, the post has more than 86,000 impressions and 74 comments, which is pretty ironic when you read that last line. Here I was telling everyone that you shouldn’t need something to perform well to feel good about yourself, and then I have a post perform well and I smile like a smug little bastard. What can I say! I enjoy the attention!

To expand a little more on what I said above, something I find interesting is how often so many of us describe this feeling of being dissatisfied with our work and make it sound super negative. We call it “being in a bit of a funk.” “Experiencing a rut.” “You’re going through a season,” they say. Something to push through and recover from.

I’ve told you twice in this post already that I’m in a creative funk. But what does saying that actually do other than breed sympathy from others? Like it’s some terrible cold we caught. My goodness, how awful!

I think we’ve gotten it all wrong.

Calling it a funk assumes that feeling satisfied with your work all the time is the norm. But I don’t know a single creative person who works that way. You make something, feel proud for a hot minute—maybe even a little smug—and a few months later you look back and think, “whyyyy did I do it like this?” Ask my friends: I won’t even listen to the podcasts I’ve been on because I hate hearing my own voice, and I dissect all the ways I could’ve phrased something to sound smarter.

It always feels like I’m existing in the “knowing what I know now, I’d do everything entirely differently.” And while that isn’t always the most pleasant feeling, I don’t think it’s all that bad. You should be your own most honest critic. I’m not suggesting you go torture yourself in the name of art, but I think part of wanting to make something better gives you the thrill of the chase because there’s actually something to chase.

I also find that working in social media marketing completely wrecks your brain because it takes this very personal, individual feeling—the whole I think I can make this better thing—and makes us measure it against arbitrary numbers and scoreboards.

We get into this gut-wrenchingly awful comparison cycle. “Oh, so-and-so hit a growth milestone! Their video got more views! Their account has a pretty intense cult following…” Meanwhile, you’re still here trying to figure out whether you even like your job. Or yourself, for that matter.

Those are two competing desires:

• Wanting more from the work you’ve created can push you beyond your own boundaries.

• Needing more from the numbers can make you believe you’re shit.

And as if that isn’t already enough mental gymnastics to have with yourself, there’s an entire industry ready to cling to that uncertainty because it’s incredibly easy to sell to.

You’re in a funk? Here’s something that can come up with 100 ideas for you. Here’s something else that can write all your drafts, create a fuck ton of variations, and even be your bestie if you ask it to. It can produce more and remove all the friction.

I’m not sure how any of that will make you feel. More productive? Less creative? Slightly more fraudulent? But hey! Look at all that speed. Look at all that output!!

I use these tools too, which is why I feel perfectly fine indulging in a little sarcastic banter about how heavily reliant some of us have become on them. We become reliant on tools that make it easier to produce more, and then complain that so much of what gets produced has no taste.

Ahhhh, taste.

I guess it was only a matter of time before I, too, joined the bandwagon of marketers talking about taste.

I love how everyone talks about it like it’s some mystical quality a lucky few were born with and the rest of us are begging for the recipe. I don’t think it works that way. You develop taste by actually experiencing the process of doing the thing.

You need to go through trial and error to get good at your craft. And that experience can’t come only from making more content. You need to give your brain material it didn’t receive from the same feed you scroll every day.

I touched on this lightly above, but the algorithm is doing exactly what you taught it to do: giving you more of whatever already holds your attention. Its job is to keep you on the platform. The longer you watch something, the more of a signal you give it to keep surfacing similar stuff.

That’s fine for doomscrolling. It’s not great when you need your brain to develop something different.

So, I’m not telling you to book a flight to Europe every time you’re in a funk. Please don’t put it on your credit card and cite this newsletter to your spouse. But you can read outside your industry. Learn something you’re bad at. Go somewhere that pushes you out of your predictable routine.

I have, rather conveniently, fucked off to Germany this last month, and moving more slowly has made me realize how little I pay attention to things back at home.

I watched an older couple walking ahead of me and found myself inventing their whole marriage and picturing what it must feel like to have kids who are grown. I saw a butterfly and a slug sharing a fallen plum. I looked up and realized clouds can move a lot faster than I remembered.

None of those things are going to magically pull me out of a creative funk. I’m not coming home with a campaign inspired by a slug.

But maybe months from now, I’ll want to make something about time passing. Maybe I’ll remember that older couple. Maybe I’ll picture them sitting in the same place years earlier with their children, cutting back and forth as the kids grow and the couple gets older, with the clouds moving faster and faster above them.

That’s how moments from life make their way into the work.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that sometimes you don’t like your output, and that’s perfectly normal. The creative field, especially in social, requires too much volume for every post to be some kind of artistic breakthrough.

I don’t want to treat the desire to make better work like something I need to recover from.

So maybe I’m not in a funk. Maybe I’m bored with some of the work I already know how to make and starving for something I haven’t made yet.

Two things that caught my attention

1. Ben Affleck’s delivery on AI and filmmaking

I came across a year old clip of Ben Affleck discussing AI at CNBC’s 2024 Delivering Alpha summit, and it completely sucked me in. First off, I’m a sucker for someone who speaks well, and are passionate about the thing that they’re talking about. And what got me is that he skipped the usual celebrity AI take that’s often very surface level. He didn’t say things like “it’s coming for all of us,” nor did he just say “relax, it’s fine.” He made an actual argument. AI will probably drive down the cost of the grindy parts of filmmaking and put real pressure on jobs like visual effects. He also believes that it’ll stay pretty bad at having taste and judgment when it comes to making a movie. I love that it was an absolute refusal to be pro-AI or anti-AI.

It was a good convo overall but I think my marketing brain just couldn’t get over the delivery. He took a complicated economic point and made it feel like something he’d say across a dinner table, without dumbing it down. His tone and voice sped up, slowed down and it was enthralling to watch. He sounded like a guy passionately working through an idea in real time, and not some actor that’s reciting lines. Or maybe he’s just a great actor and I’m a schmuck.

This writeup covers the substance, but watch the video!

2. OpenAI’s creator trip backlash

So unless you’ve been living under a rock, there has been some HEAT around OpenAI’s recent influencer campaign. They flew a bunch of creators out to Wildflower Farms in the Hudson Valley, where some people are calling it their first creator brand trip. Business Insider covered it. Apparently there was supposed to be some product education that’s paired with nice dinners and outdoorsy stuff. People got branded merch, and everyone was creating content. OpenAI’s line is that it was an education event tied to ChatGPT Work, and creators should be showing practical uses of the product, that whole thing.

The wild part is how every creator made a post that resembles your stereotypical day-in-the-life influencer vlog. There were gorgeous rooms, gift bags, nature shots, “so honored to be here” energy. And they posted to tiktok and guysssss! People came in hawwwwt. There were people talking about AI’s environmental footprint, and their concerns about jobs, and about whether these creators were really attempting to do some image rehab for an industry half the internet already side-eyes. The Verge documented the trip and the pile-on, including how some of the creators responded once they got called out.

Honestly, I’m really not that interested in litigating the should or shouldn’t of these creators. The marketing case study on this is what’s interesting. You’ve got one of the biggest brands in the world putting a bunch of people in a genuinely stunning setting, and majority of the audience had no idea what they’re supposed to take away from knowing that these creators got this experience. Some of the reaction content traveled further than the campaign itself did.

And as someone who also manages creator partnerships, I was especially intrigued by how everything played out. You’re never going to please everyone, and getting yelled at doesn’t automatically mean a deal was not worth taking. But there’s real implications with partnerships and I think that’s pretty costly.

Alrightyyy, friends. That’s all I have for today.

Today I’m launching a new section on my substack called Social Notes. This is where I’ll pen (sometimes lengthy) essays about what I believe social teams actually needs. I’ll share my pov and opinions, and you can take it with a grain of salt that these are just working theories. It’s informed by what I see in my current work at Slate and peppered with more than a decade working in social knowledge.

Before we dive into this ragebait topic, I should tell you where I sit before I tell you what I think. I run marketing at Slate, a content creation software for social media teams. I’ve spent an enormous amount of time looking at tools that promise to help brands create more content, including ours. When people complain about AI slop, they are complaining about an economy I participate in. I make money when teams buy tools. Weigh everything I say accordingly.

I have been posting on the internet since 2006, which is a decent amount of field research, if I do say so myself. I was definitely a user long before I made social a full time profession, and the question has always been the same: What can I share that another person might actually care about? After nearly twenty years of being chronically online, I have scrolled enough to be able to depict when things stop working because the content is just meh.

And lately, a lot of it does feel that way.

There is more content than ever, and a surprising amount of it seems to exist only to fulfill the requirement of being on the internet. It covers a slot on the calendar, giving someone a screenshot to paste into the weekly report for their boss that still refers to TikTok as the mint. It gets it’s 2 seconds of attention on the feed and then it disappears amongst the thousands of other posts created for roughly the same reason: to check a box.

Generative AI has become the obvious suspect and I totally understand why. Once you get duped by your first “Is this AI or not?” post, you develop a certain disgust and distrust. You start seeing it everywhere. You question the credibility of everything and everyone.

Is anything even real??

But most of what we consider as AI slop actually starts before anyone opens a prompt. It begins when a company decides it needs to show up everywhere, all the time, without giving the people doing the work more time or support. Publishing expectations have grown tremendously in the last couple of years. The teams have not. The pressure is more positioned on volume, and quality becomes something everyone still claims to care about and yet they structurally make it harder to achieve.

So that problem already existed. And when AI got introduced, everything just accelerated.

Across our conversations with prospects and customers at Slate, one problem comes up constantly:

We need to 10x our content without 10xing our team.

Ahhhhh, the classic “do more with less.”

It sounds like an efficiency problem, so, naturally, companies go looking for an efficiency tool. AI can generate a lot things. It can make the captions, draft the posts, create the visuals, turn someone into an avatar, and send that avatar out to say whatever needs saying that day. And it gets the job done for the most part. The content calendar is full and everyone has technically completed the assignment. Whether the work got better thought is a different question, and HubSpot has some points on this.

In their 2026 Social Media Trends Report, they found that 94% of social marketers now use AI somewhere in their workflow, yet 45% still call producing enough high-quality content their biggest challenge and 73% say it has never been harder to stand out. AI is doing exactly what was promised. It is helping teams produce more. But can we all agree that volume is the easy half of the problem??

The criticism around AI-generated content is not wrong. There is plenty of awful work being produced with it, and I have scrolled by and unfollowed many. But blaming the tool allows the people setting the expectations to get off fairly easily. We criticize the marketer who took the shortcut without considering why their team was expected to publish so much that they felt using a shortcut felt necessary.

I am not pointing at other people from a safe distance, either. I have shipped a calendar filler. There were times when I posted something that I knew was gonna be a complete bust while I was scheduling it, and it performed exactly like I had imagined it would—POORLY. My reason was that there wasn’t enough time to execute on something better. I was under-resourced, had little to no budget and simply did not have the time because leadership needed this launch announcement to go out today.

You see this firehose energy stems from the same sort of logic when a manager tells a social person to “make a post that goes viral.”

Based on what? For whom? Why would anyone care?

There is no strategy inside using generative AI other than needing to outsource a lot of the work to meet volume expectations and the under-resourced creators are left to manufacture the outcome by all means possible. When I see companies using AI to replace the creators, especially with things like AI avatar, I don’t know…it feels like the technological version of the same unrealistic demands of going viral. And if you ask me, I think it’s pretty gross.

You can’t replace a human with a machine. A person’s delivery and experience are usually the reason the content has any credibility. Remove the person and what? You’re now left with a synthetic cartoon shell of a person reciting a corporate brochure copy. I do not know why anyone would assume that would work. Also, I thought we were in the business of building that creative muscle. In order for you to get stronger, you need to have patience to build up some organic stamina.

Here is what technology companies keep getting wrong about creative people, and I say this as someone who works inside the industry—they assume creative people need help being creative.

They don’t.

The social people I know are not short on ideas. They are short on time. Their days are wasted rummaging through all the mundane things like organizing assets, sifting through feedback, chasing approvals, formatting content, and handling all the small production tasks that chips away an entire afternoon. Then they get given a tool that offers to generate 50 ideas for them.

Great. Now they have 50 more things to review.

Ask any good social marketer what they need help with and I’m fairly certain that it involves having some level of autonomy in the way they create. They know which moment deserves the cut and when a joke doesn’t land. They can tell when an overly polished piece needs to be killed. They are tapped into the culture and can tell you when you need something be paused. They can also look at a piece of content and decide “Nah, this is weird.”

And here’s the distinction that these ragebait slop conversation keeps missing. When people say AI slop, they are picturing only the output: the templatized generated captions, the avatar delivering robotic copy, the image that gave Steve an extra arm and a fourth finger. They are not picturing the mechanics underneath the work that have been incredibly useful for a while now. And nobody ever complains about them. You wanna know why they don’t complain?

Because it doesn’t change the end results that show up on the feeds.

Take webinars. We produce a lot of them, and I will be the first to admit that no one wants to watch an hour-long webinar twice. Especially not the social marketer who only needs the one banger line buried somewhere around the 20-minute mark.

Off the top of my head, here are two ways that I would go about with recycling this long form content into something more social-native:

• Transcript-based editing. This lets me read the conversation instead of scrubbing through it, find the promising section, and cut straight from the text. I can ctrl F and find the exact phrasing that I need.

• Then there are other tools, like Shortcuts, that’ll break the recording into a bunch of smaller clips and sort them by type. The Slate specific offer is that the clips are geared towards your brand and style of content that would resonate on your channels. But having this in my editor at least gives me somewhere to start. I can pull a single clip, combine multiple clips and edit it further.

These things all require AI. Nobody calls it slop, because we’re not just sharing work as is. There is further editing and tweaks but AI helped trimmed hours of work. That’s the intentionality behind creating content using AI. In this case, it never wrote a word the audience read. It cleared the drudgery that stood between me and the deliberate decisions to make great content. I don’t need to rely on AI to tell me whether the line is actually a banger, or whether the clip makes sense outside the full conversation, or whether it thinks my audience would actually care. I needed AI to sift through 60 mins of footage and surface those lines to me and then I decide what to do with them. And that’s the type of decisions that stay with me, and that is the correct place for it.

Slop is what happens when the tool crosses that line and starts making the calls. Technology is most useful when it is managed by the human.

Alright, I’m huffing and puffing a bit here but if you’re looking for some rule for how much of the work you should hand to AI. I can’t definitively tell you that. I can’t say that AI should handle 80% of your content execution, because execution contains dozens of small decisions that shape the final work. The better question is which decisions your team prefers not to outsource.

Creative discretion tops my list.

As I mentioned in my webinar example, a tool can surface a possible clip, and it remove repetitive work, or hand me a rough starting point. It should not be deciding what the I, or the brand, believes or what deserves to be shared.

Back to that one HubSpot report because it’s giving reassuring receipts. The three places where social marketers say AI is letting them down most are:

• image generation

• image editing

• and video generation

Notice the commonalities? These are the part of the work that’s closest to the final creative call. The best use of AI in a creative workflow is the mechanics of supporting you to work faster, not replace the creative thinking.

And by the way, a note for you leaders that are running social teams.

Creative judgement is not something you can easily get. Taste has to come from somewhere. You cannot ask someone to make culturally relevant work while giving them no time to participate in or at least pay attention to the culture, and a social team racing from one task request to the next gets fewer and fewer chances to use the instincts they were hired for.

AI can protect that time or it can eat it.

If a tool saves someone an hour and the hour goes toward improving the premise or reconsidering an edit, it helped. If the hour is instantly converted into a bigger publishing quota, the team is right back where it started. Which makes the entire resource kinda useless.

So why do we think this keeps happening?

In my opinion, part of why this keeps happening is that volume is easy to count and judgment is a lot harder to grade. A team graded on how often it posts will use AI to post more. The tool follows the incentive wherever it points. I would love to pin this entirely on managers, but the incentive does not only live above the team. Plenty of marketers chase volume on their own, because the feed requires it and gurus will tell you to be consistent which obviously means…post more. None of us are immune to this pressure.

Social teams do need help producing more. The demand is real, even when it is unreasonable, and pretending the technology has no value does nothing for the people responsible for getting the work done.

So here is what I would ask you to do, from one chronically online person to another. The next time somebody pitches you an AI tool, somebody will, and maybe it’s even me, ask what work it removes and what your people get back in exchange. If the answer something along the lines of produce more content and faster, fine. Just be honest that that was the goal. But if you want something quality then you need to plug in the resource that would buy back the time for your team.

Anyway. That is my read, and you get the gist of my thoughts on this ai slop convo. But if you want to hear other social pros debate about this in real time, we are bringing HubSpot to Slate’s next Social Social Club on August 12 at noon ET. Bryna Corcoran and Lauren Mendoza-Routt are joining Carmen Vicente to dig into how teams are actually using AI and which metrics better reflect the way social works. And if I may toot our own horn, we’ve built the SSC to be a pretty solid webinar series that leaves registrants looking forward to the next one.

Register here

For six months, my workday had two shifts. The first one ran from whenever I woke up (usually 7:30) until about 6 at night, like a proud corporate american. The second one started after dinner, after wrangling the kids to have their baths and making sure the teen did their homework, after the kids were down, and it ran until 1 or 2 in the morning. During that second shift I wasn’t even doing new work half the time. I was checking work I’d already finished. Triple checking, quadruple checking, and then checking whether the team had done theirs, rummaging through google sheets and notion docs looking for a box I’d left unchecked. Whatever time was left went to figuring out how to do more.

No one told me to do this, by the way. I think if my manager knew that I was putting in this much effort, he’d probably put me on leave. This working style was invented by yours truly. It started the same January my husband got laid off after five years of doing everything right. I wrote about that Tuesday when it happened, and at the time I thought the essay was more or less just me venting about how crappy it felt. It took me a few months to notice what the layoff had installed in me. My stomach turns on itself every time another founder posts about scaling to millions with a team of four, and every time, the same thought shows up: I need to make myself irreplaceable, and the only way I don’t get replaced is if I can prove I can do 5 people’s job.

This is where I’m supposed to tell you that mindset is toxic and I quickly learned to let it go and now I do yoga, namaste namasteeee.

I did not.

Anyway, today I’m writing about what I’ve actually been doing about it, none of which is a system.

This article is sponsored by Lovable.

Which is a little funny, given what I’m about to tell you, because Lovable is where a marketer with zero engineering background goes to build actual working software. I’ve used it to ship the voting platform for the Golden Thumb Awards, and another public voting site for Slate’s rebrand campaign, and it shows up later in this essay as evidence. Lovable lets you describe what you want in plain English and it builds it, which means “I’m not technical” is a choice.

Try it here

Being the Swiss Army knife was not the problem

I want to be clear about something, because the setup of this essay makes it sound like ambition is the evil villain. Doing five people’s job was never an issue for me. I have wanted to be the Swiss Army knife since long before I even knew what the term meant. Early in my career I was the one volunteering to learn work outside my scope. I wanted to be sitting in meetings with people who were higher up. I didn’t mind taking on the extra thing because I genuinely wanted to know how it worked. I am a proud overachiever. I don’t do things half-assed, and my bar for excellent is one I haven’t even cleared myself, which is probably why I’m so critical of my own work. That gnawing self-doubt has, in its own backwards way, made me a better marketer.

The newest blade on the knife is that I can build things now. Me. A person with a master’s in professional writing and a deep, documented history of AI skepticism. When vibe coding started showing up everywhere, I had every excuse imaginable not to lean in. Too busy to figure it out. Too skeptical of any output. And if I’m being so for real right now, I didn’t have the patience to learn how to properly prompt. But when I got handed budget constraints and a tight deadline at the same time, that pressure had me opening Lovable one night to describe the voting platform I needed for an awards program I was running. A few hours later, the site was up and ready for voting. People praised how creative and beautiful it was, and they were even more impressed when I told them I built the entire thing myself in one night. Using 40 credits.

If you’ve been following me for a while, then you know how skeptical I’ve been about this stuff. Skeptical enough that I even brought it up in therapy. I admitted to her I have these fears that don’t even agree with each other:

• If I don’t keep up with the new tech, I’ll be one of the folks who fall behind, heaven forbid I have to be bad at something for a hot minute before I figure it out.

• But if I do lean in, then I’m inadvertently cheating, and my creativity doesn’t count anymore.

• And underneath both of those, the fear my ego least wanted to say out loud: that using the tool would be admitting to people that I’m not very smart.

There’s no winning move in that head. Eventually I had to remember my roots. I built a whole career on being okay with learning things outside my scope. It made no sense to suddenly draw the line at the one skill that would uplevel me the most, just because it’s the newest tool in the box.

So no, my personal ambition didn’t need fixing. But the layoff did give it the shaking of it’s life. It’s crazy that the same instinct that used to feel like innate curiosity started feeling I was running against a clock, and no amount of compliments on the work my team and I produced could make me believe it couldn’t all be ripped out from underneath us.

Building the thing that can’t lay me off

A while back, before any of this crippling anxiety about working myself into oblivion, I had decided that I never want to apply for a job again. And before you check me on this privilege pedestal, this dream was mostly because I’d just gone through a grueling six-week interview process where the company basically admitted they didn’t hire me because they couldn’t verify my social skillset on my personal channels (crazy story for another day). And partly because I kept watching people who had less experience than me (on paper) get their foot in the door, and ample opportunities handed to them, because they had a personal brand and I didn’t. So I took that as a sign that I had better spend my energy building a name for myself.

I’ve been investing in myself as a creator with the same seriousness I bring to my day job. The essay around my husband’s layoff landed me a year-long brand partnership. And more partnerships kept coming, and then I signed with management, and that was when this entire circus stopped feeling like just a side thing. Sponsored posts, speaking, hosting, consulting. It’s become a second stream of income that now out-earns an avg full-time job.

I’m careful with how I share this stuff because I say that not to humbleflex. I’m sharing it because I need you to understand the math I was doing at 1am. If the worst happens, like if all of my fears around work comes true, there is now income that no restructuring email can touch.

Also, a sidenote, for a long time, my answer to any of this going well was “I got lucky.” I still believe that wholeheartedly. But I’ve also stopped letting luck take all the credit, because I also spent years building this muscle. I’ve written and filmed countless post when nobody was reading or watching. I’ve dm’ed brands that have never answered back. I kept showing up consistently, for years, when it earned me nothing. Sure, luck with timing and place but ultimately, it was the sweat I put in. If this was all luck, it can’t protect my family, because luck eventually runs out. But work is something that you can keep plugging away with.

Is the creator economy getting crowded? Extremely, and I don’t have a differentiation answer to share because I’m still working through it. I mean, idk..are you even reading this right now?? Plug a ladybug emoji if you read up to this point. What works for me might not work for you even if you followed my playbook to a T. The one thing that stays true though is that while everyone else is niching down, I’m niching into being the person stays honest with herself—and that’s to do it while it feels good and I’m still excited but pivot when I begin having existential dread everyday. I know this newfound energy won’t last forever. So I gotta keep moving while it’s hawt.

Harsh reality that my ego kept me from acknowledging

This third thing cost the least but was by far the hardest. While I was running second shifts, my husband, the one who’d just lost his job, was carrying the parental duties so I could keep proving I couldn’t be fired. The man loses his income and I respond by completely disappearing. The mom guilt was the worst I’ve ever felt. Even through my worst postpartum depression, it’s not comparable to the level of guilt I felt with work. Which is a choice I made. Here’s what I kept thinking to myself:

My kids are young exactly once, and I was building them a childhood where mom sacrifices nights and weekends to keep us afloat, and when my 4 yr old said, “i miss you” even while I’ve been in the house the entire day…I don’t know.. I just don’t want that time period to exist in their memory at all.

That’s what finally made me start acknowledging this mental load that I’ve been carrying. To my husband first, which sounds like it would be easy convo because it’s so obvious… except our egos are strange about admitting that we need reassurance. We desperately want it and yet refuse to ask for it. And I think that’s because asking means admitting the fear is very real. I’d been performing fine, for months. Performing fine is my best act yet. But when I started telling the people around me that this actually didn’t feel good. That I’m starting to question what the point of all this was. That I felt immense shame and guilt. The relief that came from people not judging me. I was met with so much care and understanding. Made me wonder why I was trying to make everything feel A-okay when it wasn’t.

I wish I could tell you the three things add up to a solid system. They're a work in progress. Some weeks I still catch myself checking slack at 11 at night like a raccoon returning to a good dumpster. But for the most part, the second shift is pretty much gone. My company can fill my seat in a matter of a few weeks if they wanted to. My 4yr old can't fill hers at all. That's the math I should've been doing at 1am. Not the one where I prove I'm worth five people to a company that could, y'know, fire me after five years anyway.

At the ripe age of 36, I’ve accepted that I no longer have the stamina to be as chronically online as I used to be.

My 14-year-old now serves as my daily trends reporter, though his algorithm is not one I would ever naturally find myself in. Still, the number of times someone brings up something happening online and I stare at them like a deer in headlights has become slightly concerning, especially considering part of my job as a Head of Marketing is knowing what people care about.

But it’s not only the internet. I can’t tell whether it’s getting older, having three kids, working a demanding job, or balancing this whole creatorpreneur thing I’ve got going on, but something has noticeably changed. I don’t want to answer text messages. Scrolling makes me tired. Even my thinking feels slower.

It feels like my mind, body, and soul are going through some kind of metamorphosis. I can’t keep blaming it on postpartum. Or can I?

I don’t know. Maybe Mercury is retrograding or something.

Anyway, today, I’m writing about why marketers are much closer to salespeople than many of us would like to admit, and sharing how my team at Slate is operates with a sales oriented mindset.

This article is sponsored by Consensus.

Buyers want to understand your product before they ever talk to sales, which means marketers need better ways to help them explore on their own terms. Consensus helps teams create interactive product tours, on-demand demos, and conversational AI experiences that bring static content to life—allowing buyers to ask questions, uncover what matters to them, and move forward with confidence.

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Unfortunately, marketing is also sales

I have this friend who knows absolutely nothing about the tech industry. B2B SaaS sounds like a bunch of gibberish to her, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sometimes jealous of her ignorance of this entire world.

The last time we were hanging out, I was trying to explain what I do as a Head of Marketing when she gave me a blank stare and said, “So…you’re basically selling things to people?”

“Well, technically, yes,” I said. “But I’m not sales.”

Then she asked, very innocently, “What’s the difference?”

Obviously, there is a difference! I’m sure someone much smarter than me could write a very long article explaining exactly where marketing ends and sales begins.

But this is not that article.

Marketers love saying, “I’m not sales.” We say it almost defensively, as though being associated with selling makes the work less trustworthy. Sales gets stereotyped as the aggressive department chasing contracts and commissions, while marketing gets to be the cool, creative team making nice things and “building the brand.”

The higher I’ve moved in marketing, though, the more I’ve realized how much of the job is selling. We may not be the ones handling contract negotiations or chasing someone for a signature, but we are constantly trying to convince people to do something. We want them to stop scrolling, pay attention, sign up for something, come to an event, watch a demo, reply to an email, or reconsider how they’re currently doing their work.

I think marketers sometimes work so hard to prove that we are different from sales that we forget we are still supposed to help people buy into our business. That doesn’t mean everything we create has to end with “book a demo.” It does not mean brand, community, or creativity suddenly become not as important or irrelevant because they cannot always be traced neatly to a closed deal. It just means there is a commercial purpose behind the work, and I don’t think acknowledging that is a bad thing.

When I look at how my marketing team operates at Slate, there are plenty of situations that got blurred between marketing and sales.

Our core audience is social media marketers, which also happens to be the world my team and I have worked in for years. We understand their jobs, the problems they deal with, the way their teams operate, and the language they use to describe their work. In many cases, the people we want to reach already follow one of us. Or they’ve engaged with our content, attended our events, or exist somewhere in our broader ecosystem.

And because of that, there are times when it makes more sense for someone from marketing to reach out directly.

We are not necessarily putting them through a perfectly sequenced outbound campaign or approaching the conversation like a traditional sales prospecting exercise. Sometimes it is as simple as saying, “Hey, I know what your team is working on, and I think this could actually be useful. Do you want to see it?”

We generally get a good response, even when we are straightforward about wanting to show them the product. Part of that is because the outreach comes from someone they recognize, but I also think it is because we can approach them as marketers first. We understand the work because we have done it ourselves. The conversation starts with the problem rather than the software, and there is already some level of trust before anyone gets on a call.

Our events operate in a similar way.

We host breakfasts, dinners, webinars, happy hours, and other gatherings for people working in social and content. They are genuinely meant to bring interesting people together, and I believe there is real value in building that community. We are also a business, and we go into those events hoping that some of the people we meet will eventually become customers.

Both things can be true!

Sales teams have been taking prospects and customers out for dinner forever. Marketing does something similar, except we tend to give the event a name, make a landing page for it, and invite more people. We are not usually sitting across the table from someone and asking about their budget or procurement process. We are creating an environment where they can meet us so they can understand how we think, and see that we care about the same things they do. We talk about their work, their teams, and the problems they are facing. And then somewhere in that conversation, we may also relay how Slate could help.

After the event, the relationship does not transfer cleanly from marketing to sales. We send our sales team the names of the people we spoke with, along with whatever context we gathered. Who seemed interested? What are they currently struggling with? Is there a real use case? Did they mention something that would make a follow-up more relevant?

Sometimes sales asks us to reach back out because we have the stronger relationship. Sometimes we make the introduction. A lot of times, we join the demo because we were the ones who invited the person, or we may have an existing connection with them.

In that sense, we occasionally operate a little like BDRs/SDRs. We identify people who may be a fit. Then we start the conversation and qualify some level of interest, and then bring sales in when it makes sense. The difference is that the relationship was often created through content, or community familiarity rather than a cold email.

Our presence on a demo can also change the quality of the conversation. We know a lot of context of the person and their team, or the reason they agreed to take the call. We can speak to the marketing goals behind the use case and explain the product in the context of how the work actually gets done. That personal tie makes the process feel less like a handoff and more like a continuation of the same conversation but we’re buddying up with our sales team.

That is a softer form of selling, but it is still selling.

The same is true of our product marketing. We make content that explain what Slate does without making every piece feel like an advertisement. We try to make the product interesting enough that people want to click and actually watch. We show the problem in a way that feels familiar and help people understand how the product could fit into their work.

Our goal is still to move someone closer to buying. We are simply doing it in a way that recognizes most people do not enjoy feeling like they are being sold to. Something that we’ve learned working in organic social.

None of this means every marketer should become an SDR or that every creative idea needs to produce an immediate demo request. It also does not mean marketing should become a service department that exists solely to fill the sales team’s calendar. There is a reason the functions are separate, and marketing has responsibilities that extend far beyond supporting individual deals.

But I think there is something powerful about a marketing team that understands how revenue is created and is willing to participate in that process.

For a long time, marketers have been made to feel as though we have to choose what kind of marketer we want to be. You can be a demand marketer who cares about pipeline, or you can be a creative marketer who cares about the brand. Focus too much on demand and you worry the work will become boring and transactional. Lean too far into creativity and you worry the rest of the business will stop taking you seriously.

In practice, the strongest marketing work usually sits somewhere in the middle. It creates interest without stripping all the personality out of the idea. It builds relationships that make the sales process easier. And it understands when to hand someone over to sales and when marketing’s involvement can help move the conversation forward.

Maybe the difference between marketing and sales is not as complicated as we sometimes make it. Sales is generally responsible for turning an active opportunity into a customer. Marketing creates the conditions that make someone willing to have that conversation in the first place.

But both functions are ultimately asking someone to believe that what you are offering is worth their time, attention, and mooooney.

So yes, technically, I am selling things to people.

I just make it look a little prettier.

Hello! I’m back from my impromptu hiatus, emphasis on the impromptu, because I really hadn’t meant to take a break from writing here. If you were to look in my drafts, you’d see a number of articles written feverishly, with so much angst and excitement, only for them to become very long free writes of flowing thoughts or, mostly, a bunch of half-baked bulleted thoughts.

I lost the wind in my sails for a bit. I had plenty to say, maybe too much, but I’ve been feeling pulled to think more deeply about this creator life I’m building for myself, and what it actually means when your work, your audience, your taste, and your business all start to blur together.

Which brings me to today’s topic ↓

I’m coming back from my first experience at Cannes Lions and boy, do I have thoughts. Aside from the obvious, Cannes was not what I expected. It was loud and busy, and I found myself getting wound up in overlapping meetings and bookings. I know, I know, it is quite a first world problem to complain about which yacht party we should go to. But hear me out.

Cannes Lions has been described as the Coachella for marketers, and I can totally understand why. Historically, the festival has been more geared toward brands and agencies. This year, it felt like creators were brought much closer to the center of it all. And let me tell you, the flocks came flying in.

Almost everyone I talked to was there to create content, or talk about creating content, or just exist with the title of “creator.” The creator economy is a roughly $310 billion industry, and there’s no sight of it slowing down. What was most fascinating to me was that a lot of the creators I talked to, including myself, had somehow managed to gather up partnerships that significantly reduced the cost of attending, completely covered the entire thing, or covered the entire thing plus extra.

That made me think about how something that once felt wildly unachievable, attending a luxury conference like Cannes on your own dime, is becoming more possible because brands and individuals are starting to see creators as a cost-effective way to show up in these rooms.

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to share what I saw in the world of creator partnerships and how it ties to Cannes. I’ll talk about how creators got there, including my own strategy, what I saw on the ground, thoughts from people in the industry and creators themselves, and what I would personally do differently next year as someone who works as a head of marketing and is also a creator herself.

This article was brought to you by Modash, an influencer marketing platform for B2C brands that helps teams find the right creators, manage campaigns, and actually track what’s working.

Try Modash for Free!

For the marketers reading this, especially the ones being asked to “do something with creators,” the reason tools like Modash matter is because creator partnerships get messy very quickly once they move beyond one-off posts.

Who should you work with? Is their audience actually the right fit? Are they reaching the people you want to reach? What content went live? What performed? What should you do again? That’s the less glamorous side of all this Cannes content. Behind every recap, activation, and creator partnership is a brand trying to make the work feel less like a group chat with deliverables and more like an actual channel.

Modash helps with that operational layer, especially for B2C brands running influencer campaigns across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Subsidizing your Cannes trip

Cannes Lions is expensive.

The cheapest tier is the student pass, and even that’s €1,035 plus sales tax at 20%. A classic marketer pass is €4,465. This year, they also had a creator pass for €1,245. All of which to say, it’s expensive. And that doesn’t include Uber charges, lodging, flights, or food.

You can easily spend upward of $5,000 to be there. So to call this an investment would be saying the least.

Which is why it makes sense that creators are getting savvier about how they subsidize the cost.

What was interesting this year, with the uptick in creators attending, was how many people leaned into the strategy of announcing that they were going to Cannes and were open to partnering. Which means they were essentially eating the upfront cost of attending while not being entirely sure if they would get sponsored.

But I’ve seen a number of people do this, and it has worked for them.

The strategy is pretty straightforward: announce that you’re going, then wait for a brand to reach out, or reach out yourself and let people know you’ll be at Cannes.

Jayde Powell, founder of The Em Dash Co., told me:

“I went in with the mindset that I’d likely pay for this entire trip myself. I paid for my travel, I paid for my lodging. When I announced that I was going to Cannes, me and my PR team took a proactive approach to reach out to brands, both current partners and potential partners, with custom pitches but also simply asking, ‘Hey! Are you guys activating at Cannes?’ And I was able to get four partnerships through that.”

I had a similar methodology as Jayde. I let people know that I was going to Cannes, and I made a couple of announcement posts, which led me to having two partners.

I also had a number of brands tell me no, but much like the saying “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” I was yapping my butt off trying to get people to sponsor.

I also limited myself to only partnering with two brands that were noncompeting. That was the maximum I was willing to activate with while at Cannes. I didn’t want my entire feed to be bought out with ads, so I had to create a limit.

That actually gave me more leverage when talking to brands because it made the package feel more exclusive, and it gave me a way to extend the partnership beyond Cannes.

I think the pressure to work with a lot of brands might sound glamorous in theory, but in reality, that is a lot of work to put on yourself while attending the festival. The last thing you want to do is get tangled up in deliverables while you’re also trying to be present, meet people, go to events, and pretend your feet aren’t slowly filing a formal complaint.

What kind of partnership content was happening?

You’re probably wondering what kind of partnerships were actually being formed with these creators.

Based on what I saw on people’s feeds, the content fell into a few buckets:

• Recaps and takeaways.
  Lots and lots of recaps. This included GRWM videos, Day 1 and Day 2 breakdowns, “what I learned” posts, and the general “here’s what it’s like to be here” content.

• On-the-ground capturing.

  This is when a creator goes to a specific brand activation, captures content, and sends it over to the brand team to use on their own channels.

• Ambassador-style partnerships.
  This is where the creator is basically brought in as a person on the ground for the brand, being an extension of the brand team. You’re going to their activation, getting people to attend or sign up, capturing content for them, demoing and talking to people, and representing the brand in a way that feels a little more human than the brand just posting about itself.

• Skits and filmed content.
  There were creators making more produced content, whether that was scripted skits, social-first videos, or content that felt more intentionally built around the brand’s message.

• Blogs and newsletters.
  There were also written recaps, newsletter placements, and blog content, which I think is worth paying attention to because not everything needs to be a short-form video to be valuable.

• Dinner and activation attendance.
  In some cases, the partnership was simply tied to showing up. Attend the dinner. Be in the room. Capture a few moments. Help give the activation more visibility.

It’s really not that different from traditional influencer marketing. It’s creators creating content based on the outcome the brand had in mind. In a lot of cases, that outcome was awareness, but more specifically, it was about being associated with the right people, in the right rooms, during a week when everyone was already paying attention.

What people in the industry think happens next

One thing I wanted to understand was whether this Cannes creator moment felt like a one-time rush bubble that’s gonna burst, or if it was pointing to something bigger about where the creator economy is headed.

So I asked a few people who live much closer to this space than I do. Their answers were all slightly different, but they kept circling the same idea which is that creator partnerships are growing up.

Scarlett Chorley, Tech Partnerships at Kyra, told me:

“What I know from influencer marketing that’s different now than before is that it’s all about your tech stack and your infrastructure. This is not about running campaigns anymore. This is about your ability to scale. And the ability to understand, read, and optimize your data so you can make the best decisions and scale it. Influencer marketing is operationally the more laborious channel in the world but with the right infrastructure, you can get where you need to get and achieve what you need to do.”

That infrastructure point came up a lot. The creator economy may still look casual from the outside, but behind the scenes, the brands taking it seriously are building actual systems around it.

Jaclyn Johnson, CEO of Create & Cultivate, saw it through the lens of ownership:

“We’re entering the ownership era of the creator economy. The smartest creators aren’t just monetizing their audience, they’re building wealth by investing in, advising, and owning pieces of the companies they help grow.”

That part feels especially important because it pushes the creator conversation beyond brand deals. There’s a difference between getting paid for a post and building long-term value from the companies you help make relevant.

Lia Haberman, author of , had a slightly more cautious take:

“I think the playbook has been played. The more creators that come here thinking that they can just pick up, come over and get brand deals, this space is going to get saturated. And I think that it’s gonna be twice as hard to get brand deals because there’s just gonna be so many other creators coming. Having seen what happened this year, everybody got their bag, everyone is doing sponsored content, and they’re just gonna assume that you can just fly to France and automatically get sponsors. I don’t think that can sustain itself. Maybe next year it’ll happen. But I’ll say that two to three years from now, it’s going to be virtually impossible and it’ll be a really small select group of creators that have gobbled up all of the partnerships and sponsorships.”

I think that’s a looming thought over a lot of people’s head after the spike. This year, there was still a bit of novelty around creators showing up at Cannes in this way. But novelty has a shelf life, and once everyone sees the playbook, the bar gets higher.

Jayde Powell, founder of The Em Dash Co., brought it back to the creator side:

“Creators are gonna have to get really creative with how they’re pitching and offering brand partners a premium offering in terms of what they would get in return. For example, let’s say there’s a brand partner that you want to work with. The add-on of working with you as a creator is maybe that they’ll get your content posted while you’re at Cannes instead of after. Or maybe you’ll offer to get an interview with the CEO of a brand, rather than just a random person on the street. There has to be something premium that you’re willing to offer to the brands.”

And that feels like the real takeaway for creators. Just being there won’t be enough forever. The better pitch is going to come down to what kind of access, speed, content, context, or perspective you can offer that makes the partnership feel worth it.

What I’d do differently next year

Again, this was my first year at Cannes, and I learned a lot.

In particular, I came as a creator this year. I went in not having much of a plan, other than making sure I was shaking hands and rubbing elbows with people. I knew I was going to be a complete sponge the entire week, and that’s exactly what happened.

So, knowing what I know now, what would I do differently?

As a brand:

• I wouldn’t book an activation just to say I had one.
  You’re competing with big, busting budgets. I’m talking hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, only for people to whisper amongst themselves about what party is actually worth going to. If you’re going to activate, there has to be a real reason for it beyond wanting your logo somewhere on a beach.

• I wouldn’t activate 10 creators at once.
  I’d choose three creators who are the most aligned with the brand and pay a premium for exclusivity. Have them be the people rallying the room, attending your event, capturing the best content, and helping turn the activation into something people actually see beyond the people who were physically there. That’s the part I’d think about more deeply: how do you operationalize both the production and awareness piece so the activation doesn’t just live and die in the room?

• I would pay close attention to what other brands are doing.
  I did a lot of walking around and looking at what people had going on. There were things like on-site tattooing, mailing postcard stations, dj sets, creator lounges, and all kinds of little experiences that made people stop. There are endless ideas, and I couldn’t help but wonder why some of these things aren’t already available at other conferences.

  

• I would bring people from the team who are actually good at schmoozing.
  And I mean that in the best way. Cannes is one of those places where someone knows someone who knows somebody who can get you on the list. You need people who can talk to strangers, make friends quickly, and not make the whole thing feel painfully transactional.

• I wouldn’t do an activation on Wednesday.
  Literally every brand did something on Wednesday. Tuesday felt like the sweet spot.

As a creator:

• Don’t partner with more than two brands.
  I heard of people partnering with four or even five brands, and I think it can get very easy to overextend yourself. You don’t want to be the person who overpromises and underdelivers. Cannes is very busy, and unless you want to be trapped in your hotel room with weak Wi-Fi trying to upload content while everyone else is outside pretending they’re not tired, don’t overextend yourself.

• Bring snacks everywhere you go.
  Every event promises elevated bites, and somehow you still end up hungry. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but tiny food on tiny plates is not a meal.

• Pick two things to do a day and leave the rest of your schedule open.
  There’s a lot happening, and it’s easy to overbook yourself. I think the better move is to choose the few things that matter most and leave room for some spontaneity.

• Have a list of people and brands you want to meet.
  Find out where their activations are and make a loose plan around that. I didn’t do this, and I found that I wasted a lot of time just hanging out with the homies. Which, to be clear, was lovely. The homies are great. But if I go again next year, I’d be a little more intentional about who I wanted to meet, where I wanted to be, and what I wanted to walk away with.

  

And that officially wraps up my Cannes takeaway and lessons learned. My flight will be landing here soon and it’s back to reality. I survived the heat, the crowds, the overlapping events, and the general chaos of being surrounded by thousands of marketers in linen. And I’m so glad I did it. I’m glad I took the bet on myself and winged it a little.

There is a real hunger for brands and creators to work together, but there is also a lot of figuring out that still needs to happen. How brands should activate creators. How creators should package themselves. How both sides can make the work feel valuable without turning every moment into a deliverable.

And I can’t thank my partners at Modash enough for believing in this mission to help make sense of where creator partnerships are going, especially from the perspective of someone who sits on both sides of it.

Until next time, Cannes. I will be bringing better shoes and more snacks. Xxx

Nine months ago I had my third baby. And because I have this thing where I tend to overshare online, I told everybody that I was going through some postpartum depression.

I don’t know if I’d actually call it depression. It was more like postpartum rage mixed with a whole cocktail of other postpartum stuff.

Because I decided to share that, people ask me all the time how I’m doing. A lot of you have checked in over the past several months, which I’ve always found incredibly kind. My answer is usually something like, “I’m doing good,” which isn’t a lie.

Outwardly, I am doing good. I’m flourishing at work. I’m spending more time with friends and family. I’m working out again. I’m doing all the things that, on paper, signal that life is going well. The fog that I felt from postpartum has lifted just enough that I can feel my life settling back into some kind of rhythm.

But I don’t think this chapter is really about “getting back” to anything.

If anything, what I’ve learned in these months of post-baby recovery is how to regulate my emotions better and reconnect my mind to my body. For months my body didn’t feel like it belonged to me. Sleep was touch and go (still is, actually). Honestly, I still feel like my brain is slower than it used to be, though I can’t tell if that’s from sleep deprivation, or the fact that I’m chronically online and doomscrolling whenever I have a spare second.

Every day, I’m still figuring out how to be more intentional with my time and where I spend it. I’m trying to read more. Or at least as much as my children will allow. I’m trying to eat better and be more mindful of my gut health.

I guess part of why I’m sharing this is because when people talk about hard seasons in their lives, the moment we tend to share is arguably the dramatic part. Everything is heightened. Emotional. Raw. When I wrote about postpartum, I think a lot of people responded with something like, “Wow, that’s a lot,” because I was inviting people into something that was messy and immediate.

But what folks don’t often see is what happens after that. What’s is the through line here?

The stretch where the crisis passes but things aren’t magically fixed. I mean, you don’t wake up one morning and suddenly feel like the old version of yourself again. As much as I wish it were so, the reality is much much slower than that.

I’ve been in therapy for months now. Since the summer. Three or four sessions a month. And one thing I’ve had to accept is that there isn’t really a finish line to “getting better.”

What I was feeling didn’t just disappear because I got more comfortable talking about it. It’s something I have to learn how to live alongside without letting it swallow everything else.

I wrote this in my notebook, “nothing in life should be all-consuming. Not motherhood. Not work. Not anything. Because when one thing takes up that much space, you start to feel this creeping anxiety that you’re not enough somewhere else.”

For a long time that thought sat over my head like a cloud. Am I doing enough? Am I being enough? I didn’t want to go on medication. For one reason or another, I felt like I just needed to work through it in a way that made sense for me. And a lot of that meant brutally prioritizing the things that actually matter. Which is way harder than it sounds.

What I’m learning now is how to exist as both a mom of 3 and someone who still wants to perform at a high level at work. And I think I’m better at regulating now than I was nine months ago.

But I also realize that I might not ever feel like my “full self” in the exact way I remember from before. And maybe that’s okay. Because the truth is, most of us are works in progress all the time. Life doesn’t move in neat arcs where you struggle, get help, and suddenly everything is fixed.

These days I feel good. Not perfect. Not fully healed. But good.

And good is good ✌️

It’s been over a month since I last shared here. Normally, that bit of a break would sit heavy in my shoulders and chest, with a low-grade anxiety humming in the background, telling me I’m failing at something (again). I’ve absorbed enough understanding about building an audience throughout my career in marketing to believe that consistency is the measure of seriousness, and seriousness is the measure of worth. And if you’re not consistent then your work is not worth it.

What a crap thought.

But realistically, a little over a month isn’t that big of a deal. I’ve been gathering my thoughts about life and work, keeping busy and chugging along. If consistency means anything at all, maybe it’s that as long as you’re continuing, then that’s enough. There’s no abandoning ship here, matey!

After I shared that my husband had been affected by layoffs, we were met with an outpouring of care. It showed me how grounding it is to belong to a community that shows up without asking for anything in return. A bit of an update there is that he’s taking time now to be with our kids fully and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous. I suspect that when we look back on this season of our lives, we won’t remember the penny-pinching or the looming stress that comes with a mortgage and the ordinary costs of living. We’ll remember that he was present for our children at 13, 3, and 8 months old. Full time dad mode, activated.

What follows is a loose collection of notes from the last month or so. Moments from making content in different ways, with different stakes, and varying degrees of success. There are stretches where things clicked, and others where they (very) much didn’t. I’m writing this while my house is buried under 3ft of snow and my children are loudly living their lives downstairs.

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Since joining Slate, I started a video series called Recap & Ramblings which is loosely YouTube vlog-style-esque. It’s a bit unstructured, which is just how I like things when it comes to my personal work. This grew out of something I’ve always done naturally which is sharing what I’m learning as I go. I didn’t follow a traditional career path, and when I moved from social and community roles into a Head of Marketing position, people were understandably curious about how that happened. This series is my way of answering that.

Working at a company built for social teams also pushed me to think more seriously about how I show up creatively. I wanted a format that lived beyond writing, where people could see me as a person, understand how I think, and how I process stuff, etc. Recap & Ramblings is where I let my thoughts wander. I edit the videos myself, and talk through what’s happening as it happens.

This is the third episode. This series has no set cadence, but whenever our team does something that sparks conversation or attention, I’ll likely sit down and record one.

PSA: If you’re more of a reader versus a watcher, than read this section below. If you’ve watched the video then you can skip this section altogether.
One of the harder things about working on a fully remote team is figuring out how to make good content together. Not just more content, because lord knows that no one is starving for output, but work that we can be really proud of. We’re all swimming in content all day, every day. We’ve adapted to scrolling past hundreds of pieces faster than we can register what we’ve just seen. At a certain point, the volume of output is just more noise added to the feed. It starts to feel numbing. And I can already sense that people are craving for more flavor. Like they have a high bar of good, and it would take a lot to convince them to stop their thumbs.

“Good,” of course, is subjective. But inside a team, it still has to mean something concrete. It can’t just be a vibe. At Slate, our bar for good content isn’t about polish for polish’s sake. It’s about practicality. Can we move quickly without losing our identity? Can we stay visually consistent without overthinking every single detail? Can we actually get work out while it still feels timely, instead of watching it rot in drafts?

Those questions shape how we operate, and they’re what led us to try a content blitz.

Our marketing team is small—four people—split between Boston, SF, and Toronto. Like most remote teams, we didn’t have a shortage of ideas. What we lacked was shared momentum. Lack of F2F time had become the bottleneck. So instead of pretending we could solve that asynchronously, we decided to spend real money and real time getting in the same room and batching content together.

Toronto made the most sense. Two of our team members live there, which kept costs reasonable and logistics simple. Our goal was to give ourselves a concentrated window to work.

Here’s what the first blitz actually cost:

• Roundtrip flight from Boston to Toronto: $480

• Studio rental for six hours: $150

• Meals for the team: roughly $280

• Editing help: $3000

  

We didn’t pay for lodging, and we didn’t need to rent additional equipment beyond what the studio and our team already provided. All in, the investment was fairly modest, especially when you look at what came out of it.

From that one day, we walked away with six higher-production pieces and another ten to twelve UGC-style videos. Enough to comfortably carry us through to our next blitz in April. More importantly, it gave us more conviction. We could see how more considered, higher-effort content and looser, faster content play different roles, and how having both keeps things moving smoothly.

If you really want to be seen as a media company, then you gotta build that muscle.

The part I didn’t fully anticipate was how much time is needed for production. Setup alone ate more of the day than I expected. Lighting, stands, camera adjustments. While all were necessary, they all slowed us down. I also had to come to terms with the fact that I don’t actually know how to work a camera beyond setting it to auto and hoping for the best. I own a Sony A7RIII camera and I have a 35mm, and a 70-200mm lens.

Creatively, we were also a bit underprepared. We had an ideas page and inspiration references, but they were built for day-to-day social execution, not for higher-production shoots. We hadn’t fully flushed out scripts for the pieces that needed structure, which meant we spent too much time massaging lines and improvising on the fly. In hindsight, we should have come in with clearer goals for each piece and been stricter about timeboxing.

We also tried to do too much ourselves. We leaned heavily on for setup and filming, and that created a bottleneck that slowed everything down. Having dedicated production support would have made a meaningful difference. Six hours, too, was simply not enough. If we repeat this at the same scale, it needs to be a full shoot day, or even multiple days, to do more.

None of this negates the value of the blitz. If anything, it helped our understanding of how we can get better.. Planning and production discipline matter a lot with this stuff. Editing support matters if you want a speedy turnaround afterwards. And creating good content as a remote team isn’t about squeezing more output out of people. It’s more around designing opportunities where focus and attention can really be dedicated.

Woo, that was a bit of a doozy. If you’re still with me, I appreciate it. I have the tendency to get a bit wordy when I’m trying to explain “the how” behind the things we do.

Outside of my day job, I am a LinkedIn creator. I still blush and laugh nervously whenever I say that. Because of course my self-deprecation would make me feel embarrassed. TBH, I never expected LinkedIn, of all places, to be the channel that opened the most doors for me—but it has.

After my husband was laid off, I decided to be more open to sponsored posts again. I mean, we were suddenly a one-income household, and that familiar scarcity—the same one I grew up with watching my immigrant parents pinch every dollar—has a way of changing just how flexible I’m willing to be when it comes to finding ways to earn more money. And as much as I’ve always tried to avoid feeling like a walking advertisement, I’d be lying if I said money wasn’t a factor this time around.

Two of those partnerships ended up being the highest-paid deals I’ve ever done and neither of them performed well.

This is where I tell you just how pathetic I felt over it. I was manically watching the numbers too closely. I refreshed more than I should have, like an ungodly absurd amount. I wanted the posts to work because I wanted the rate to feel justified. When they didn’t, it just felt like a personal failure.

If I put my social media marketing hat back on, I can see very clearly why the posts didn’t work.

Both posts went through heavy revisions, one of them was 14 times! Which made the entire thing felt more transactional than collaborative. One required me to promote something I wasn’t actually a part of. And, unsurprisingly, sponsored content just doesn’t travel the same way. Whether that’s algorithmic or behavioral almost doesn’t matter because the result was just low reach.

Obviously this didn’t kill me. I’m stronger than a few bad posts. But I needed to stop licking my own wounds as I sat there in despair because performance isn’t a proxy for worth. Brands put paid spend behind underperforming creative all the time, and no one ever questions the value of the people who made it. Creators shouldn’t internalize that pressure differently just because the work carries their name.

Sponsored content is never a guarantee. It’s an agreement to try something together, under a set of variables most of us don’t fully control. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. The job is to learn without letting the outcome define you.

The silver lining is that this experience pushed me towards a different model altogether. I want fewer one-off amplifications, and more long-term collaboration. This led me to start building a few concept-driven projects of my own which is work that’s designed for collaboration instead of amplification. I’m still shaping them, but the excitement behind these passion projects is going to be the reason why it’ll do well. I just know it. I’ll share a bit of that below.

My overall desire is to come up with content formats in a way that they can act like containers that can hold peoples’ attention over time.

One idea I keep coming back to is LinkedIn Confessionals. It’s documentary-style, built around short, honest conversations with people who spend a lot of time thinking publicly for a living. The goal is producing something with a rich texture. Real thoughts, real tension, and truly relatable because every creator who has posted on LinkedIn has felt this way. We tested this on LinkedIn this last week and it’s gained some decent traction.

Another concept I’m stoked about is Food for Thought. It’s built around the simple act of sharing a meal while talking about work, but at the level of process and judgment. How decisions get made. How people think through problems. Different cities, different tables, different conversations. I want this to be grounded in something innately human like sharing a meal.

And then there’s Creator Couch, which is exactly what it sounds like. A small group of creators, in conversation, no filters. Swearing is allowed. So is laughing, pausing, and not knowing exactly what you think yet. I’m not interested in producing hot takes. Just good conversations.

All three ideas share the same instinct that I think a lot of consumers are feeling which is: can we please slow things down? Can we make room for collaboration? Can we build something that we’re actually proud of and is actually intriguing?

I don’t know exactly where they’ll land yet. Maybe they’ll just be the fun content I get to do. But if this is something you’re interested in be a part of, or if you’re a brand who wants to take a bet—LMK.

Alright, I’ll stop here. This is what happens when I let my thoughts roam a little too freely on the page. Content is never far from my mind, and I could spend days unpacking it. I hope something in here resonated with you, wherever you are. Until next time.

The day began the way most days do: with the second alarm. For once, the baby—our usual human alarm clock—had decided to sleep in, granting us a small mercy we didn’t actually have time to accept. But this wasn’t just any Tuesday. It was the Tuesday after a three-day weekend. MLK Day still clinging to the edges of Monday. Tuesdays like this don’t allow for mercy.

We started dividing the morning like labor. The teenager needed a ride. The three-year-old had a parent-teacher conference. Someone had to stay with the baby. Breakfast, lunches, shoes. Get your shoes on, please. A fight about a hat.

“Do I have to wear one?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not cold.”

It was 20 degrees farenheit outside.

In the car, my son turned the seat warmer all the way up—the same child who, minutes earlier, had insisted he wasn’t cold enough to wear a hat.

My husband stayed home with the baby while I played chauffeur and mmhming earnestly through the parent-teacher conference. When I got back, he handed me the baby immediately because he had a 9 a.m. meeting, sharp. I breastfed her and scrolled through emails, easing myself into the day that was jam packed with back to backs.

I don’t know why I scheduled therapy for the Tuesday after a three-day weekend. Everyone knows that day is the most Monday of all Tuesdays. Tuesday on steroids.

He finished his meeting just in time for me to leave for mine. As I was halfway out the door, he mentioned that he had a random meeting with his boss Stacy1.

Stacy. The name alone tightens something in me. Nails on a chalkboard. Stacy is the woman who once told my husband during their 1:1 that she expected him to be more proactive and do but also didn’t have anything for him to do. The same woman who, when he was violently ill, asked if he remembered to send something over. She was the same woman who would cancel 1:1 last minute and not talk to him for 3 weeks.

My husband and I are different species. I am an oversharer. I am ambitious to the point of restlessness. I grow bored when days stagnate, when things start to look too similar. My husband is the definition of good enough—and I mean that with sincere admiration. He believes work is a means to an end. You work to buy back time. You spend that time on what matters. For him, that’s our kids, our house, our life.

For five years, he gave this company his steadiness. No raises beyond the small, annual three percent (last two years was even less than that). No bad performance reviews. No drama. He would have stayed twenty years if they’d let him. He is content. He is loyal. He trusted that if you showed up, did your job, kept your head down, things would be fine.

They were most certainly not.

Five years, and what they offered was this: We’re restructuring. Here are five weeks of severance.

Five weeks.

We have three children.

There’s a moment after something like this happens where the house feels off, even though nothing has actually changed. The day still carried on. The baby still needs to be fed. The laundry is still unfinished. The day keeps moving forward as if it hasn’t noticed what just happened to us.

My first instinct was math. How many weeks. How many bills. How much runway we actually have if five weeks is truly all there is. I kept opening my phone, clicking through random apps mindlessly, as if something would pop out and the numbers might rearrange themselves if I stared long enough.

Five years. Five weeks.

I kept thinking about how carefully we built this life. Two incomes braided together. Childcare schedules balanced like a Jenga tower. Everything working because everything had to work. And now one piece was gone, and I couldn’t tell yet whether the whole thing would wobble or collapse.

He didn’t spiral. At all. He was calm in the way only someone who genuinely believed in the deal can be calm. He kept saying things like, “We’ll figure it out,” and “It’ll be okay,” and I wanted to scream at the optimism of it, at the unfairness of how quickly five years could be reduced to a mere calendar invite and the added “oh but we’ll keep you on payroll for 2 weeks, too!” Like that’s some sort of consolation prize that we should be happy with.

I thought about all the mornings he logged on without complaint. The meetings he took seriously. The way he never asked for more because he was never trying to be more. He showed up. He stayed steady. He trusted that steadiness counted for something.

Apparently, it doesn’t.

So the day kept going. Dinner. Baths. Homework questions shouted from the other room. The baby asleep on my chest, warm and heavy and unaware that anything had shifted. I tried to stay present, but my mind kept skipping ahead—to conversations we hadn’t had yet, to decisions we weren’t ready to make, to the thinness of five weeks stretched across a life that can’t pause just because your employer did.

I’m not sharing this as a means to offer any kind of perspective. I don’t have any takeaways. I do, however, have the sharp awareness of how fast comfort can turn conditional, and how quickly stability can be revoked. Because that’s what happened today. We are still living inside it. Still standing in the middle of a day that began like any other and ended with everything slightly off.

Fucking fuckity fuck fucking A!

It’s always funny to me when people insist you need to “niche down.” And they declare this with such confidence, as if every corner of your life must have a business plan attached. As if anything you make has to serve an ulterior motive beyond “I felt something and wanted to put it somewhere.”

Alright, maybe that’s true if you’re monetizing your personality like a tech startup. But Substack, for me, is one of the last places where I don’t feel required to optimize myself. I don’t have to overfluff, or overexplain, or even pretend there’s any kind of strategy hiding behind every sentence. If two people read my ramblings, great. I save my business-brain for LinkedIn. That’s where I talk shop and share the marketing thoughts that have some kind of utility. Here, you get me as a WHOLE person.

So this is my tiny disclaimer: if you’ve wandered over from LinkedIn expecting another breakdown of “how to think about social strategy in 2026,” I’m afraid this won’t always be that. Sometimes you’ll get insight and other times you’ll get whatever thought was rattling around my head. TOTD (thought of the day, is that a thing? Anyhoo, I wrote this piece after a week where nothing seemed to go right, at work or at home.

Some mornings, like today, I wake up already negotiating with myself. The ambitious woman wants to sprint but the mother of three wants to lie down on the floor and let life simply happen around her. But instead, I do what most working mothers do, and I split the difference and feel guilty about both

My internal monologue is a rotating audit:

• Am I focused enough?

• Am I present enough?

• Am I layering on the generational trauma?

• Am I a dependable colleague?

• Am I even in my own body anymore?

It’s a pretty charming cocktail of ambition and guilt. Shaken nightly and served warm.

This is the first year I’ve tried to hold all of it at once. I’ve got an infant who treats my body like a public utility, a toddler whose independence is admirable in theory but definitely catastrophic in practice, and I have a teenager in the middle of a hormonal reboot that breaks my heart about 7 different ways because I can’t fucking remember the last time I picked him up.

Meanwhile my career has finally started to accelerate, which makes me think that life is nothing but a big fat joke.

Therapy has been clarifying. And if you haven’t gone then I think you should. I think—emphasizing that this is my opinion—that everyone should go to therapy. What I’ve learned is that none of this mess belongs solely to me1, and all of it moves forward whether I’m ready or not. I’ve learned that society may demand a lot of mothers, but it’s our internal auditor that is downright sadistic. She loves a red pen, and she does not believe in extensions.

Every November the burnout arrives like clockwork. People call it “a season of reflection,” but I’ve never found reflection to be particularly restful. It feels more like the month when every load-bearing wall in my life files a deeply worded complaint.

A friend sent me a clip of Indra Nooyi saying she doesn’t believe in “having it all.” Something always falters. Something always gets pushed, or delegated. But the trick is to find coping mechanisms. You need to find ways to cope or you’ll always be circling the drain.

So I’ve started collecting a short list of permissions. I originally thought mantras but I’m too tired for that bullshit:

1. Unless you work in an ER, the word “emergency” does not apply to your job.

2. Dinner is not a daily referendum on your competence.

3. Childcare does not subtract from your motherhood.

4. Hire someone to clean.

5. You can love your work just as much as you love your children.

6. Being inconsistent is not a crime.

7. Lower the bar, then lower it again.

Writing this obviously doesn’t solve anything, but it does let me vent to a bunch of strangers readers on how tired and overwhelmed I am, and not have to think about it again today, because I definitely won’t read this draft again. My final thought on this is that I don’t think the goal should be to find balance. I think, ultimately, we should stop feeling less at war with ourselves.

I’ve always envied people who say what they mean without rehearsing it in their heads first. I’m not one of them. Hi, I’m Christina, and I’m currently relapsing in my chronic need to people-please. It’s a lifelong condition, occasionally in remission, usually triggered by feedback meetings and Slack messages that start with “quick question.”

I grew up in a house where quiet meant respect. Where you didn’t talk back, and you definitely, most certainly didn’t correct your elders—not unless you were signing a waiver to your hiney and this broomstick. So you learn to survive by controlling yourself. Be docile. Be polite. Don’t give me that look, it’s not as sad as it sounds. My parents did the best they could with what they had, which wasn’t much besides a conviction that obedience kept you safe. I’m sure if they had the same resources as we do now then thinks would’ve been different. ANYWAYS, it’s a hard instinct to unlearn, especially when you step into a corporate world that ties respect with loudness.

In my twenties, I thought confidence was something you could grow into, like adult teeth. That eventually you’d wake up and stop editing yourself mid sentence because you simply knew more. But thirty five years around the sun, and I still find myself swallowing opinions. I’ve watched countless conversations roll by like trains I was supposed to board. On a good day, I chalk it up to professionalism. But the reality that I exist in is that it’s just a more expensive version of the same silence I learned at home.

There have been meetings where I knew the direction was wrong, and I probably should’ve asked the question or named the obvious problem. Instead, I took notes, waited, told myself I’d follow up later. Later always feels safer. It’s easier to risk being wrong with one person than in front of a room. But someone much smarter than me had said that the more you delay your voice, the lonelier the work becomes.

And that’s the thing, is that I did have a voice and an opinion but I wasn’t equipped on how to translate that outloud. Every thought still passes through a small customs checkpoint:

• Will this make someone defensive?

• Will they still like me after?

• Will I look stupid?

Years of trying to be the “good” anything—good daughter, good colleague, good friend, good boss—have conditioned my brain to prioritize peace over honesty. Which sounds noble until your therapist tells you that it’s just another form of self-erasure. And let me tell you something, that’s pretty soul crushing to hear.

There’s a certain kind of exhaustion that comes from speaking in drafts. Imagine feeling like you have to soften every sentence so no one misreads your intent. Use an exclamation mark, instead of a period. Add ‘lol’ behind that direct statement. Did your voice have an influx in pitch? Practice it enough and you’ll start to forget what unfiltered sounds like. But I promise that you’ll hate yourself because unfiltered is the privilege that you’ll crave.

I think about how much of work—of life, really—unravels because people can’t say what they mean. And I don’t think it’s done intentionally either. Maybe they’re like me, and their instinct was shaped by rooms where candor was punished. How often do we hear that people welcome “radical candor,” only to watch it get weaponized? We all want to be seen as agreeable, so we can be seen as part of the team.

Recently, I had to make a decision that involved a lot of people. It left me drained and physically ill and sitting at my desk, crying into the keyboard because I couldn’t say what I needed to say. When I finally did, the reaction wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d imagined. And it never is. The mind loves a worst-case scenario. But most of the time, we experience the moment, we survive, and we move on. We always do.

These days, I’m trying to practice something a little bit different. I wouldn’t call it boldness (that still feels too dramatic) but willingness. Saying things once instead of rehearsing them twice. Letting the room absorb what I mean before I start apologizing for it. I won’t always get it right. But I’m trying my darndest to lean into that fact that clarity, even when it really uncomfortable, is its own kind of kindness…to yourself.

You’ll probably get tired of how inconsistent I am when it comes to talking about work. Some days I love it. I tell people the small tricks I’ve picked up and insist you don’t need everything figured out to make it feel worthwhile. Other days I’m in front of the screen close to tears, convinced I’ve ruined my life, exhausted, overrun, not sure how to go on. There isn’t a single name for it. I suppose I’m just someone with too many feelings.

This morning the alarm was my four month old. She was angry, demanding, maybe teething. Sleep is already a hit or miss. Waking up at 6:50 instead of 5 felt luxurious. Then I ran through the house, pulling the older two into motion, because if we weren’t in the car by 7:30 my son would be late for the sixth time.

Three children at thirteen, three, and four months. It feels like triage, every minute of the day. Add the job at a startup on top and I’m almost done for.

The house was already loud. The teenager was fussing over his hair. The toddler hated the way I opened the yogurt. God forbid you pull the lid all the way off. The baby was crying without pause. My husband struggled with a crustable cutter thing, insisting there wasn’t too much jam, until it busted out onto the counter. I didn’t bother saying anything. Sometimes marriage is just silence that’s very loudly pointed.

I made the mistake of checking Slack, which was already filling with notifications. I had managed not to check all weekend. The younger version of me, the one who swore she’d never become a corporate sellout, would have laughed at the contradiction of me having to be forcibly intentional with not checking. Then the toddler began her shoe argument. She wanted to do it herself, which meant standing in the hallway and interrogating me as she went: is this my left foot? why are my socks upside down? can I wear the sparkly ones instead? do I have to wear both shoes? can I wear one sandal and one sneaker? can you tie them tighter, no, looser, no, not like that?

I was already late. I picked her up, still mid-question, and carried her outside. She screamed while I buckled her in, voice hitting that pitch that just about serves as permanent birth control. I pulled out of the driveway and was careful not to clip my other car this time (a story for another day).

At the top of the street I noticed my 13 yr old for the first time that morning. He was bent over his phone. I ruffled his hair and he groaned, told me he’d spent forever fixing it. I keep forgetting he isn’t a baby. By the time we reached school he was two minutes late. Enough to be rerouted through the office doors. The crosswalk monitor waved me off like she always does. I gripped the wheel and it took everything in me to not just flip her off.

The toddler wanted Frozen. She cried when I turned on the wrong song. Then she told me not to sing. And when we finally arrived at her school, she ran in without saying goodbye.

By 8:30 I was back home, the baby on my chest, the laptop open. Emails, meetings, more meetings. Mondays at a startup feel like a dare you never agreed to, everyone demanding time you don’t have. I worked through breakfast. Through pumping. Through the noise of a crying baby. By evening I had been on calls for hours, half-nursing, half-typing, telling myself I’d catch up later even though there is no later, only more of the same.

At bedtime I did the checklist. Food, baths, the story they wanted to hear again even though I’d read it yesterday and the day before that, and the day before that day. What I was doing was rolling into the motions of presence. And then later, I found myself standing outside their door and realized my head had been somewhere else all day. Not with them. Just on work.

Last week I said I was only tired. But I’m beginning to wonder if it’s burnout.

I can love this job and hate what it takes from me. Both things can be true and coexist at the same time

I don’t have a fix, or any takeaway. Just this: that the part of me that isn’t attached to slack or emails feels worn. And admitting it, even in this very unorthodox messy kinda way, is the only relief I have.

I swear, it feels like every marketer I know is duking it out on LinkedIn to see who can out-virtue the rest. And not over politics or religion, but over something pettier, and somehow even more vicious: whether using AI makes you a “bad” marketer.

I’ll admit it: I use AI all the time. Some days it feels like an embarrassing dependence. And yes, I’ve wrestled with the guilt, wondering whether or not this reliance make me less creative, less rigorous, less me? There’s also that gnawing thought that maybe I’m single-handedly overheating the planet every time I type a lazy query instead of Googling like a normal person. But guilt and laziness have been around long before AI. And if you’re lazy with a blank sheet of paper, you’ll be lazy with a chatbot. If you’re thoughtful, you’ll still be thoughtful. Can’t say much about this planet—we’re doing the absolute worst, and nothing I write here will make that feel any better.

But I digress.

I can always tell when someone’s post was written by AI. Or at least, I convince myself I can. It’s not the em dashes (though I curse the day people started treating them like some kind of contraband), because anyone who actually reads knows they’re a stylistic choice. It’s more like being able to catch the rhythm of writing. Or noticing how paragraphs are sliding too easily into each other. Or sentences forming this weirdly perfect cadence. Which is exactly why it never feels human. It’s too perfect.

You know what I mean, right? In business writing, it’s the over-optimizing for corporate consumption. The faux hype of saying a lot while saying nothing at all. The rule of three, the fake rhetorical questions. Then the AI witch hunts: smug posts with virtual pitchforks, everyone acting like TSA agents confiscating a full tube of toothpaste. The poor writer swearing with their hand on the bible that they ACTUALLY wrote this themselves. The rest of us are left, existing with this low-level paranoia.

📌brought to you by Typeform (#TypeformPartner). they’re running a “get real” survey on generative ai — the paranoia, the guilt, the weird pride in insisting you’re still human. they want messy, unfiltered responses (text, video, audio, whatever). if you’ve got an opinion:

take the survey

That paranoia, and the guilt that keeps us up at night, is pretty much marketing in a nutshell. Most of us got into this line of work because we’re wired to be creative. We’re the kind of people who’d binge Mad Men and take notes on those perfectly brutal taglines. We’ll waste an hour rewriting a headline just to make it sting a bit harder for the mic drop. (I’ve rewritten the beginning of this essay at least 12 times and I still hate it.) We’ll argue about fonts like our lives depend on it, then get weirdly excited over a clever ad and spend the rest of the week debating with other marketers about whether the latest social stunt was brilliant or a total flop. The industry grows increasingly obsessed with volume and speed. More, more, MORE. Faster, faster, FASTER. The work itself turns into a chase for quantity over quality, and we’re strapped to the treadmill at an incline, cranked to a speed that’ll surely send us straight into cardiac arrest (ask me how I know).

Generative AI is lodged right in that mess, sitting comfortably and always available. It rescues us from the blinking cursor, sure, but it also fuels the content mill, spitting out drafts at a pace that makes the hamster wheel spin even faster. It frees up time for “strategy”—whatever that word even means when everyone seems to be doing the same shit with a different logo—but it also worms its way into our insecurities. We start leaning on it for reassurance, which, bluntly, feels pathetic. Tell me this headline works, tell me I’m being innovative. It’s no wonder we feel split in two. Between the work we want to make and the system that demands we keep feeding the machine.

For me, the part worth protecting is the only part that makes this work valuable: taste.

The flex of knowing what quality looks like. Knowing what to cut, what to keep, what’s worth saying. AI can spit out fifty one-liners, but it can’t tell you which one people will actually repost, or which one will stop a scroll. It can’t decide which words strung together make your voice stand out. That’s the human layer. The work of revising, reworking, re-seeing until it finally feels like you.

So yes, I rely on AI. And I’m not the only one—plenty of marketers in 2025 have already admitted the same. But that doesn’t mean you get to coast. This thing was never meant to replace the muscle, it was just supposed to keep us moving in a business already addicted to output. The job hasn’t changed. You still need to spot the bullshit, and cut the fluffy filler. You gotta trust the instincts that no machine can simulate.

Generative AI can flood the page with words. Our job is to make sure they don’t all blur into the same bland beige feed.

p.s. if you’ve got your own tangled feelings about ai in marketing, i’m partnering with typeform to collect them. same survey i dropped earlier — here’s the link again.

I’ve never been much of a crier. Though I pictured it many times in my head—the cinematic collapse into tears in a bathroom stall and someone running in there after me to tell me that they can relate. Nah, my breakdowns are much less interesting to watch. Someone says something that cuts a little too close, and instead of crying, I let it infect me from the inside me. Like ink pressed too deep, it stains the softer parts of my brain, the parts that should’ve come stamped with “handle with care.” I’d carry this new feeling around with me for weeks as it takes shape, and altering my entire chemistry.

I used to think I had a special tolerance for work. Maybe it’s the immigrant-parent thing. Work was the air we breathed. It’s the measure of whether we were good people. Effort was never optional, only assumed.

I could accept long hours, the projects that never ended, the managers who assumed I’d always pick up the slack on slack. I even believed that extra effort would eventually be noticed and sincerely appreciated. But that kind of belief builds that expectation around recognition which was the myth I fed myself to justify the grind.

But the longer I spent in the corporate cycle, the clearer it became: recognition is rarer than money. But unlike money, it doesn’t accumulate. You can pour yourself out and deliver beyond what was asked, and still find your worth tallied in likes, impressions, or some other metric designed to feel objective while stripping the human out of the work.1

The hardest lesson has been remembering that work is transactional. And take this with a grain of salt because I’m not being cynical. In fact, I think that’s probably the most unemotional way to describe work. If you look at it through a math lens, you’d see that it makes a lot of sense. You give your hours, your energy, (sometimes even your health,) and in return you get a salary.

The problem is when we keep trying to turn that transaction into a relationship.

We mistake the illusion of culture for care.
We think loyalty matters.
Then one small flaw—one human crack—and suddenly you’re a liability.

Companies are not families. Employees are parts to a machine that runs until they decide to swap out the parts.

And yet, I can’t stop wondering why the expectation only seems to flow one way. Employees are told to bring their whole selves, go the extra mile, lean in, step up. Companies, meanwhile, posts about a strong company culture but pinch at the part where they can offer something of value.

Maybe this will matter even more as our workplaces become less human by design. Screens mediating every interaction, AI reshaping the boundaries of what counts as “work.” I can already feel the hunger for something messier, more alive…for the bosses and brands and coworkers who don’t just play pretend when it comes to humanity but actually practice it. If we are, as everyone says, heading into an age where machines will do the efficient parts, then the value of being human will have to rise…right? At least, I hope it does.

Sometimes I wonder if marketers get more enjoyment out of poking fun of creators than actually understanding them. And maybe that’s because it’s just easier to roll your eyes at someone’s rates than actually admitting you don’t really know how to measure it. Well, I’ve been on both sides. I’ve signed off on partnership deals as a brand and I’ve been the one who was paid to post. Which is probably why I can’t shake this question: what are brands actually paying for when they partner with creators on LinkedIn?

first, let’s acknowledge the skepticism

Marketers are allergic to bullshit. And I’d be so bold to say most marketers don’t trust the value of creator partnerships. Which is why the moment someone drops their rate, the gut response is: “this much for one post?!” One creator quotes $200, another quotes $2,000, and both might have the same reach. And every so often, you’ll come across posts like Josh Durham’s, where a big number gets shaved down and the comments section cheers, feeding the idea that creators have been overvaluing themselves.

When you zoom out, the problem becomes obvious. There’s no universal pricing standard. No clean pipeline metric you can show your CFO. So of course it always feels inflated. And sometimes—if we’re honest—I think there’s a little bit of resentment baked in. Because while you’re out there grinding through briefs and budgets, someone else is getting paid thousands to “just post.” The reflex is: how is this even real work?

And I totally get that. It’s human. But it’s worth stripping the skepticism away for a second, because (and I’m gonna hold your hand as I say this) creators aren’t selling effort. They’re selling you access.

• Access to an audience they’ve spent years cultivating.

• Access to trust you can’t buy with ads.

• Access to attention in feeds that don’t want brands there.

So the question shouldn’t be whether or not this is worth it. The question should be: what exactly am I buying here?

the business case for creators

On LinkedIn, that access is unusually valuable because of who it reaches. Instagram is about aesthetics and vibes, TikTok is known for it’s easy virality, but LinkedIn? LinkedIn’s reach tilts toward decision makers and budget holders. The people your rev team is already throwing ad dollars at.

And LinkedIn knows it. They’ve rolled out Thought Leader Ads (where you sponsor an employee’s post) and BrandLink (bundling creator-led shows with pre-roll). They’re literally productizing influence. You don’t make infrastructure out of something that you don’t see potential in.

So when you hear a creator quote a rate that makes your stomach fall to your ass, just remember that the platform itself is already betting big that people trust people more than logos.

use the cpm model (but know its limits)

So let’s say you’re new to this and staring at a rate that just makes no sense, how do you even begin to price it? This is where CPM (media speak for: cost per thousand impressions) can help. It’s not perfect, but it’ll help make it easier to understand pricing.

Take the cost of the post (the rate) ÷ (impressions ÷ 1,000). A $1,000 post that reaches 20,000 people = $50 CPM. Compare that to LinkedIn ads, which usually lands in the $30–$70 CPM range. And suddenly, that “$15k vs. $2k” debate isn’t arbitrary anymore.

Marissa Vogelsang posted actual campaign data that proves the point where even when individual posts looked inflated, her team’s total CPM averaged $17. That’s cheaper than a lot of programmatic buys.

Using this CPM model is helpful, and put your initial skepticism at ease, because it makes the economics easy to understand. But do take it with a grain a salt, and don’t confuse it with the whole story.

beyond cpm, the hidden premium

What CPM can’t capture is the trust premium.

I know this firsthand. I’ve spent years posting for free. I’ve endured the grind of engagement metrics. I’ve built a brand around tinkering until I figured out what resonated. The hours I’ve spent commenting, connecting, showing up and just posting…that’s work. That work built credibility. So when I promote something now, people listen. They book demos. They try products. They do all this because I’ve built a relationship with my community.

That’s what you’re paying for when you hire a creator. It’s not just reach. It’s credible impressions.

Anyone who’s grown a brand page knows that you can pour thousands into ads and still see nothing. People don’t trust brands. They trust the people they chose to follow.

That’s why creators cost more than media inventory. You’re not renting eyeballs alone.

when brands get it wrong

I’ve also learned that mistakes don’t just happen at the campaign level. A lot of times, they start earlier with who you choose to partner with.

Brands get dazzled by a big following or high engagement and forget to ask the obvious: does this person even make sense for what we’re trying to do? I once had a data security company offer me a hefty fee to post about their product. But I work in social and marketing. Their product didn’t touch anything related to the risks of social data. No alignment, no credibility. It would’ve been wasted money for them and a total disconnect for my audience.

The fit matters as much as the execution. And if you don’t take that into account then you’re just paying for nothing, or worse something that becomes a PR nightmare.

how to partner without losing your stomach

And even when the fit is right, the work only lands if you give the creator space. If you hand over a script or a pile of keywords, their audience is going to smell it. I’ve turned down deals like that myself because I knew it wouldn’t land.

Here’s what I’ve learned works better:

• Work with the creator, don’t hand them a script. The stuff that lands best usually comes from their take on what their audience actually cares about.

• Pay for the post itself and then separately for the right to reuse it. Blurring those lines almost always leads to frustration later.

• Let them sound like themselves. If you try to iron out their voice to match your brand’s tone, you are gonna kill the very thing that makes people believe them.

When you treat it as collaboration instead of a transaction, you get work that feels so damn right.

the future of creator marketing???

Brands are gonna move away from one-off posts. I believe the future is smaller and more intimate, with always-on partnerships. Brands teaming up with niche creators to co-own a series, have recurring conversations, and maybe even embed them like an extension of the team.

Look at Jasmine Enberg’s point: influencer marketing spend is growing faster than nearly every digital channel (15% in 2025!). Platforms are consolidating more of it through creator ad products. Influence isn’t gonna be just an experimental side play anymore. Because it’s evolving into part of the core media mix.

If LinkedIn is turning creator trust into infrastructure, you can bet your bottom dollar that the rest of the industry will follow.

soooo what was the point of this again?

It’s easy to dismiss creators as overpriced freelancers with inflated egos. I get it. But I also know what it’s like to do what they do, because I’ve done it. Most people, including the brands, only ever see the shiny tip of the iceberg. They don’t see the years of unpaid hours underneath it. Or the endless rethinking of drafts. And, omfg, the second guessing your self worth when something flops. It’s the sting of being judged by engagement alone, and the persistence it takes to keep showing up.

That’s what you’re paying for. The collapsed distance between your brand and the people you want to reach. You’re paying for credibility you can’t just buy through ads.

And yeah, it’s wild sometimes. But that’s how every new aspect of marketing feels. Don’t let the lack of experience and understand translate into cynicism. Let it make you approach with care. Measure the pieces you can. Respect the ones you can’t. And keep it moving. Trust has always been only currency that really matters in marketing.

This piece has been sitting in my drafts for three months. Three months! I mulled over every detail and sentence structure because I feared my writing kept falling into the very behavior patterns I wanted to call out. Eventually, I accepted that this is simply hard to articulate—which makes it worth exploring.

After many rounds of editing, I’ve positioned this piece around building yourself on social media, though the same rules apply in everyday life as a citizen in society.

I’ve noticed a trend on social (especially on LinkedIn, where I indulge my appetite for corporate misery) where we exist in a pool of lukewarm takes. Contrarian for contrarian’s sake. Comment sections full of people parroting the main post as if reciting a lesson they don’t fully understand back to the teacher.

It’s become boring. And frankly, annoying and predictable.

Here I am sharing my opinion, but I do think we’ve grown uneasy with dissent. We’re so reluctant to ask whether an opinion packaged as fact has earned that authority, and rarely demand or provide context. The result is a culture programmed to fall in line rather than staying curious.

If we don’t challenge, if we don’t question—how do we grow? Let’s diagnose a system where conformity is rewarded, dissent is punished, and intellectual courage has to fight uphill. Maybe we’ll both learn something from it.

Do you know yourself?

I like to think I know myself, or at least feel comfortable with who I am. But on social, my go-to saying is: No one really knows the real me, because depending on the channel, I have a different personality for each.

We learn who we are by seeing how others respond to us. If people laugh at your joke, you start to believe you’re funny. If your posts get ignored, you start questioning whether your ideas matter. Especially online, where we’re constantly measuring ourselves against others.

That’s human.

So when we don’t get the reaction we hope for, we adjust ourselves.

The sociologist Charles Cooley described this as the “looking-glass self”: we build our identity by imagining how others see us. And a whole century later, studies of social media show the same feedback loop in action—likes and comments amplifying that mirror until it warps.

One way to resist this is by recognizing the applause meter in our heads when we consider posting. Two questions help check your conviction:

• Do I believe this even if no one likes it?

• Would I still say this if it got zero comments?

A post doing well doesn’t mean it’s true, and a post flopping doesn’t mean it’s false. Treat likes, comments, and shares as signals about the medium, but not whole verdicts on your worth. Remember! Algorithms reward novelty and extremity, not depth.

Pluralistic ignorance

Do you know what people on social media hate more than being wrong? Being excluded. Most of us would rather be wrong together than right alone. Psychologists call this “pluralistic ignorance." Which is when you assume everyone else agrees with a norm, so you stay quiet even if you don’t actually believe it. Classic experiments in the 1950s showed that people would agree with an obviously wrong answer about the length of a line, just so they can avoid confrontation with having a different response.

And I get it. If thousands of people are praising a viral take, being the one that disagrees feels risky.

It is much much MUCH easier to fall in line. But easier doesn’t mean healthier. And the danger that comes from that is that this creates a false consensus where everyone thinks “everyone else” believes X, therefore that has to be true, or better to just not ruffle feathers.

That’s why anonymous forums like r/LinkedInLunatics or troll accounts come out to play. When disagreement feels too costly under your real name, anonymity becomes the go to. Sometimes it produces honesty. More more often than not, it mutates into cruelty, because the usual guardrails are gone.

Both outcomes stem from the same system: a public sphere where dissent feels too risky. So, is it easier to fall in line? Yes. But is easier healthy? Hell no. We've contributed to an illusion that erases nuance and leaves everyone lonelier in their doubts because we've refrained.

Performative opinions

You know how I know opinions online often suck? Because it’s too easy to change them. Take LinkedIn again. You might have a nuanced "hot" take, but you shave off the edges because the algorithm rewards snappier, b&w statements. This leaves us with two poles: contrarians whose entire identity is carved out of disagreement (“I’m the one who calls out the BS”), or bandwagoners who echoes the safe takes for easy approval.

And the much to obvious truth: social platforms are designed against you. They’re engineered to amplify extremes because extremes generate engagement.

What’s worked for me to fight against this is showing how I got to my opinion. Share the reasoning, the caveats, the uncertainties. Yeah, it feels riskier and much slower, and less meme-ready BUT that’s what makes it independent. A deeper thinker isn’t someone with lofty takes. We need to be willing to resist flattening.

And I've learned that you shouldn't put all your thinking in one algorithmic feed. If you do, you’ll get trapped in its reward system. Use different containers:

• The social feed for concise ideas.

• A newsletter, blog, or even private group discussions for longer reflections (like this!).

• Journals, or offline conversations, for thoughts without the performance layer.

This spreads out the weight of public approval so it doesn’t dominate your self perception. We just need habits that make space for thoughtfulness.

Uniqueness vs. belonging

Social media heightens our dual craving: to feel special and to feel part of a tribe. Researchers like Roy Baumeister have written about the “need to belong” as a core human drive, while others point out our equally strong desire for uniqueness. We don't need to go so far as to erase the tension but we should absolutely get comfortable living inside it.

History shows what happens when we don’t. The “spiral of silence” theory describes how people self-censor to avoid isolation, creating the illusion that everyone agrees. At the same time, studies of uniqueness suggest people still find small ways to signal difference like tiny tweaks to trends to give little flashes of individuality. Online, that tug-of-war is everywhere! Between trending audio and original takes, between brand voice and the one post that breaks format.

Teams run into trouble when they expect every post to strike a perfect balance. But it's damn near impossible to flex creatively under the constant anxiety of public judgment. So how to fix it?

Think in terms of a brand range instead of a brand line. Instead of one thin boundary, map a spectrum: safe zone, edgy zone, too-fucking-far zone. Populate each with examples, both your own and competitors’. It’s similar to exposure therapy in psychology where you gradually test boundaries to get people to build tolerance instead of fear. For teams, practicing within that spectrum normalizes experimentation and lowers the stakes, rather than treating every choice as a make-or-break move.

The consequence of silence

I keep coming back to this because it matters. When conformity takes over, we all lose something. Groupthink creeps in. We stop asking is this true? and start asking is this safe to say? It’s the kind of mindset Irving Janis was describing when he coined the term “groupthink” after watching how disasters like the Bay of Pigs unfolded. And it’s the same pattern Solomon Asch revealed in his experiments, where people went along with answers they knew were wrong, just because everyone else agreed.

David Myers, in How Do We Know Ourselves, puts it plainly: independent thought—and the courage to voice it—isn’t just about personal growth, it’s about collective progress. Silence might keep things comfortable in the moment, but over time it eats away at trust and creativity. If we want to move forward, we need more people willing to take the risk of being specific, even when it feels uncomfortable.

A healthier way forward

• Resist the instinct to curate only what you know will be applauded. That’s the conformity trap.

• Share views rooted in lived experience or knowledge, not just what “performs.” That grounds your identity in something sturdier than shifting consensus.

• Recognize silence as a choice. You don’t have to comment on every viral opinion. Sometimes independence is refusing to join the chorus.

I’ve been to a lot of work events (like conferences and dinner parties) in my career. Events where people spend months planning. The intimate ones, the stadium-sized ones. And if there’s one thing you always walk away with, is free shit.

And by free shit, I mean the branded stuff you collect like Costco samples. Like these tote bags that are having a bit of a marketing moment where every brand feels the need to virtue signal that not only do they want you to remember their brand and logo but they’re also the kind of brand that cares about the fucking planet. And it is nice, the first couple of times where people were doing this, and yes, I’ve also worn some of these totes to my local Trader Joe’s. But if we’re being totally honest, most of them end up stuffed inside another tote bag, and tossed under the sink. Never to be touched again. There’s also the gift of giving pens, which seems to never go out of style, despite the fact that they only work for like half an hour. Mugs. Logoed hand sanitizers. Socks, always the one-size-fits-all socks.

If you’ve ever been to one of these events, you know what I’m talking about. There’s always that moment where you grab something—anything—just because it’s there. And because it’s free.

As a quick aside, since we’re on the subject of totes. I went to HubSpot’s INBOUND last September. Just me and a single branded tote we’d made for our Plot Dinner Club event. Since we didn’t sponsor a booth, or plan any activation, I carried and passed this around like it was a massive game of show and tell. Then turned it into whole bit for social media. That overworked tote touched more hands than some of the booths with five-figure budgets. It certainly carried its weight in terms of driving brand awareness.

So here’s the part that gets me, the things that winds me up enough to write a whole substack about it: I feel like we’re not even trying to impress anyone anymore.

Swag isn’t inherently bad. I’ve gotten stuff I actually loved. Stuff I practically lunged for. But most of it feels like a marketing formality. Like it was a budget line item someone remembered at the last minute, right after someone said, “Should we send them something?” and someone else shrugged, “Sure.” Then it got handed off, checked off, and done. No further thoughts.

I still remember getting a hoodie from a small conference a few years ago in New Orleans. There wasn’t an obvious logo on it. Just one clean, embroidered line that made me laugh: “I got bourbon-faced on shit street.” And I wore that thing until it fell apart. It came with me on trips. It was comfy, and always a conversation starter. And every time someone asked, I’d tell them the story about the conference. That hoodie became a staple in my wardrobe because it resonated with me on an emotional level—it made me belly laugh.. The event planners didn’t need to slap a logo on it to drive impressions. It naturally gave me a story that I wanted to share.

People wear Harvard sweatshirts without ever having stepped foot on campus. Not because they have any deep love and care for the school. Because it says something. There is academia coded clout when you sports one around. So the brand isn’t necessarily the point, but the association sure is.

So when your brand sends out a tote bag with just your logo and some boring ass marketing line that’s just not relatable, what is it actually saying? Would anyone wear it if they didn’t have to?

We’ve confused “sending something” with “delighting someone.”

And I think it’s because we’ve been fed this idea that if you want customers to love your brand—really really love your brand—you just have to “delight them.” Turn them into superfans! Build lifelong loyalty! And then someone says, “Let’s order pens.”

Are we kidding?????

Real delight doesn’t happen because a company slapped a slogan on a mug. It’s something that makes people feel something. It’s something that shows you paid attention, or at least tried…even if it was just a little.

Here’s a real-time example—literally posted 16 minutes ago—by Emily Huffer, Social Media Manager at Best Western Hotels & Resorts. Canva gifted her a “black box,” and I thought it was actually really well done.

It wasn’t overly Canva logofied. It was thoughtful. A hat that says “not now, I’m posting”? That’s very social media manager-coded. Paired with a mic, that back-of-the-phone sticky thing to adhere to walls, and tech accessories like a mic—things that she’d actually use. It was clearly tailored to her, not just Canva’s brand.

And it felt personal, and relatable to her, she shared it. Canva’s branding didn’t need to scream at you. The post itself became the brand moment. This is what swag should do: make someone feel seen enough that they want to talk about it. That’s how you get recognition without forcing it.

That’s why I’m not dunking on swag itself. I’m shitting on the lazy lackadaisical effort. Because when the effort is there and when it’s done well—it works.

I recently partnered with Strän, a company that actually puts thought into branded merchandise. They sent me a gift box—not a cheap Temu special, but a curated set of things I’d actually use. Recognizable brands like GotBag and Moleskine. Household names. Useful. Beautiful. Thoughtful. Check, check, check!!

And it hit me because one of the items—the Moleskine book journal—was so specific to me. I’m always posting about the books I read. I’ve complained about the UI of Goodreads on social. I’ve talked about how I jot down quotes and passages I love by hand. So when I saw that journal, I didn’t just think “nice gift.” I thought, “Omg wait I actually needed something like this. How cool!”

It wasn’t extraordinarily extravagant by any stretch but the intent was felt. And the fact that that feels rare in marketing? That’s kind of the problem.

We’ve become performative. We build brand campaigns around “surprise and delight,” then send people socks that they didn’t ask for. It’s a total check box thing that we do to say that we did it.

Performative delight is so overplayed, and unfortunately, I think swag is the side effect of it. And it exhaustinggggg.

Swag shouldn’t be just about the item. It’s about what it represents. So if your brand is about pushing boundaries, why does your merch look like it came from an HR compliance seminar? If your campaign is about community, why are you sending a thin cheap tshirt?

I don’t want to start a battle of the brands on merch companies. This is more of a callout to the marketers (me included), who’ve gotten predictably boring and sloppy.

We forgot that gifts are a brand expression. And if you don’t know what your brand is, no mug’s going to save you.

Here’s how I’d think about gifting if I want it to mean something:

• Learn about the person you’re sending it to. Ask, or stalk a little.

• Only send things you would use.

• Don’t just design for function. Design for pride. Design with taste. People keep things that make them feel cool.

• Include a handwritten note. In a sea of AI-generated junk, analog wins

The bar is very low, because I truly don’t think it’s even about spending more more. It’s about giving a shit to put forth more effort And just a gentle reminder that the landfills are getting full.

You don’t need to throw a million-dollar dinner party for every customer. But if you’re sending a gift, stop thinking like a checkbox marketer and start thinking like a human. It doesn’t have to be deep. But it should at least mean something.

That’s how you make someone feel like they belong to your brand, and not just that they got added to your drip campaign. That’s how you build awareness through intentional gifting.

And that is always good for business.

(And just to be clear—this piece isn’t sponsored by Strän. But their approach to gifting made me want to shout it from the rooftops because more people should be thinking like this.

If you made it this far, you either love marketing or hate it just enough to stick around. Subscribe for more thoughts like this, sent directly to your inbox when the mood strikes.

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Dear reader,

I didn’t go into marketing because I thought I’d be good at it. I went into it because I liked making things. Photos that made people feel something. Fragments of writing that traveled further than I expected. I liked curating—though we didn’t call it that yet—and watching what happened when something personal crossed into public space.

That’s how I learned social. Not through an online course, not in some mentorship cohort in college, not even in a professional context. I just grew up with the internet. I posted. I watched. I tweaked. I copied people I admired. There was no strategy behind it. No conversion funnel. It was just what I liked to do.

Eventually, someone said, “You should try running a brand account.” I was working at a nail salon at the time, sending out job applications with freshly printed résumés and no idea what I was actually aiming for. So I said yes. I mean, it seemed easy enough.

It’s funny how those little yeses accumulate. That first “why not” turned into a decade-long career. It was never something I chased, but I stayed. I kept showing up. People gave me more work. I did the work. And somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of it as something I was experimenting with and started realizing it had become my actual career.

The title changed, and so did the stakes. I run marketing now. I don’t just grow accounts or be told to “make it go viral.” I lead strategy, manage performance, deal with metrics, justify results, allocate budget, try and forecast future performance and predications but the core of the job still comes down to making things and putting them into the world for people to respond to…or not.

Some people ask how I “broke into tech” or “built my personal brand,” and I never really know how to answer that. Those phrases sound clean and intentional. They make it seem like there was a roadmap like I somehow optimized for this. But the truth is, I just kept posting. That’s all it was. That’s all it still is.

And lately, I’ve been wondering, maybe some of you have too, what happens when the job is built on instincts you developed as a person, not as a professional? What happens when your eye for detail, your taste, your timing, your voice—these things that used to feel like you—become your performance indicators?

I write something and can’t tell if it’s actually good, or if I’ve just been on the internet so long I’ve internalized the cadence of what performs. I chase trends I don’t care about, because I don’t want to fall behind. I open reports and forget what I was even trying to measure, only to realize the post flopped because it went live during a breaking news cycle.

This feeling isn’t what I’d define as burnout exactly. It’s more like a simmering down of the boiling heat that I felt for this work. That sense of clarity I used to have of knowing why I liked something, or why I made it—that’s dulled over time. The things that once felt energizing now feel like more fucking noise. And I don’t think it’s because I’ve stopped caring. I think it’s because I care so much I’ve learned to second guess everything.

I keep asking myself whether any of this is still meaningful. Or whether I’ve just gotten really good at making it look like it is. And I don’t have a satisfying answer. I’m not going to wrap this up with advice about boundaries or make suggestions that you ought to be reclaiming your creativity or whatever else LinkedIn loves to peddle.

All I’ll say is this: if you started out as a creator, and your instincts were formed in that weird, vulnerable space of making things you loved without knowing if anyone would care—this job hits different. And it can feel lonelier than it looks.

Because now, all those skills you built in private are getting measured in public.

And some days I wonder if I’m still doing meaningful work, or if I’ve just gotten very good at performing the version of someone who is. But I keep showing up. I make the things. I post the posts. And maybe that still counts for something.

I’ll have twelve weeks of maternity leave to sit with that thought. We’ll see what comes of it.

—Christina

Are you listening to how consumers are duping luxury brands?

There was a time when counterfeits lived in the shadows. I mean, have you ever walked by Canal Street in Manhattan and felt that weird tension when you passed a guy selling knockoff watches from a trench coat? You knew they were fake. He knew you knew. But still, there was something intriguing about scoring a dupe for a fraction of the price—something you’d swear was good enough to fool your friends. There was also a little bit of shame that came with making a purchase. Because back then, owning a fake anything meant you were hovering just outside the elite club. You didn’t talk about it. And you definitely didn’t post about it.

Fast forward to 2025. You’re watching someone holding up an $80 Walmes Wirkin bag on TikTok, comparing it side-by-side with a $30,000 Birkin, and calling it the smarter choice. And the comment section is full of support. No one’s embarrassed. If anything, they’re loud and proud.

This is what the defluencing era actually looks like. Status isn’t about logos anymore. It’s about logic. And the logic sounds a lot like: “Yeah, I could’ve paid more, but why would I want to?”

I know what you’re thinking: why is a marketer talking about dupes on her Substack? Well, it’s because I find this to be interesting and very much tied to what could happen if brands did proper social listening. The shift in consumer mindset wasn’t subtle. It was loud and pointed. And yet, I’m willing to bet most brands still didn’t hear it. Not because they weren’t paying attention, but because they were listening in the wrong places.

So this post isn’t really about knockoffs or savvy shopping. It’s about how smarter social listening—real listening—can inform business strategy. Consumers are generously giving you the full lowdown, and their communities are buzzing.

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The state of listening: loud signals, mid tools

Legacy social listening tools are built to count things: mentions, hashtags, volume spikes. Great for campaign recaps. Absolutely useless for strategy.

Because while everyone is tracking noise, what actually matters is intent, tone, and the stuff people don’t say outright. And here’s what I keep noticing as an avid scroller: people are dragging brands without even naming them. But context clues, and a quick scroll through the comments, will tell you exactly who they’re talking about.

That’s the gap.

Most brands probably don’t even know a more modern solution exists. Because we generally feel more comfortable with how things have always been versus trying something new. They’re still paying for legacy tools that have slowed down while the internet’s sped up (thanks, AI). And I can say this with both confidence and conviction because I’ve worked in social for over a decade. I’ve used pretty much every product you can name. Most of them don’t help you listen with intentionality. They just help you summarize.

That’s why I joined a team building something that fills this gap. But more on that later.

The real issue here is that most teams are optimizing for what’s easy to measure—not what’s actually important to understand.

[Case Study] Our team used Plot’s Video Social Listening to research the Dupe Movement

From February to April 2025, Plot analyzed over 1,700 TikToks and Instagram videos and 24,000+ comments about luxury bag dupes. Here’s what surfaced:

• Post volume grew 10x in three months. And it wasn’t gradual. Literal floods.

• Louis Vuitton and Hermès were the most talked about—and the most criticized.

• Millennials drove the volume, but also led the pushback. Gen Z leaned practical.

• Comment sentiment was 2:1 in favor of dupes, with value and anti-brand sentiment as the main drivers.

• Coach and Tory Burch were praised for being real in a landscape full of luxury delusion.

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And contrary to my original thought, this wasn’t just another hype-driven trend. It felt more like a cultural teardown against capitalism and the whole system getting side-eyed in real time.

People weren’t just posting their hot takes either. They were posting receipts. Price breakdowns. Factory origin stories. And Plot surfaced all of it not by tracking hashtags, but by literally reading the room: in untagged videos, in offhand comments, in the content most tools overlook.

Let me put it this way: if you're simply waiting for the @ mentions to flag your attention, you've already missed the moment. Because you’re missing content where people are simply holding up your product and said something as offhanded as, “this ain’t for me.” but because they didn’t tag you, or mention your brand by name, it wouldn’t get pulled in…unless you have a tool that can detect objects and logos.

If you still think “Mentions = Strategy”, we need to talk.

Forget survey panels. Forget sentiment summaries. This is what modern consumer intelligence actually looks like:

• Source: Organic video content from real people, unprompted and unpaid

• Detection: Untagged brand cues, comment tone, visual product identifiers

• Interpretation: Thematic patterns, cultural sentiment, generational divides

• Strategy: Messaging pivots, value positioning, content tone, whitespace discovery

This stuff isn’t anecdotal. It’s structured pattern recognition from the rawest source of consumer behavior: video, commentary, and community discourse.

This model lets you see why it happened, where it’s going, and how your brand is positioned inside it. It’s not just a recap. It’s a starting point for relevance.

What you (the marketer) should probably be doing instead

If you treat social listening like a monitoring tool, then monitoring is all you’ll get. Mentions. Basic sentiment charts. A vague sense of “brand health.”

But if you actually want social to function like a strategic layer of your business, you need to treat listening as the first input into strategy—not the post-mortem.

Think of comment sections as real-time focus groups. Think of UGC (user generated content) as the most honest product feedback you’ll never have to ask for. If you listened that way, you’d start to:

• Catch when a pricing story starts losing believability

• Spot competitor whitespace before it gets picked up by press

• Adjust your messaging before your audience rewrites it for you

Listening shouldn’t just tell you if people like your brand. That’s the bare minimum, especially for something that costs this much. It should help you build a muscle for recognizing cultural movements. Because that’s what ‘staying relevant’ really is.

A listening exercise to try with your team

Here’s a simple way to start building that muscle:

1. Pick a cultural moment or trend that overlaps with your category. It doesn’t have to be about your brand. In fact, it’s better if it’s not.

2. Find five TikToks or Reels about it—real ones, from creators, not brands.

3. Ignore the post. Read the comments. What are people actually saying? What language are they using? What’s getting praised, or dragged?

4. Write down three insights you think your internal brand team or leadership would never hear in a standard report.

5. Ask: Would this change our messaging? Our value props? Our product positioning?

That’s the foundation. But to do this well—and do it at scale—I’d highly suggest ditching the manual labor and getting yourself a tool that doesn’t just summarize what happened. You need one that can surface sentiment, tone, visuals, and community language before you have to go looking for it. That’s what makes listening strategic.

God, Peter, This Wasn’t About DUPES!

If it wasn’t already obvious, the dupe report is just one of many reports we’ve done at Plot. The point isn’t the bags. It’s what they tell us about the power of social listening.

The core thing I want you to take away is this: most brand teams aren’t watching the content that drives perception. And TBF to them, who has the time to watch thousands of videos?? They’re watching dashboards. So that’s an opportunity—for you to build an edge while everyone else is still refreshing their reports.

Social is the most honest focus group you'll never pay for—as long as you know how to listen beyond the tag.

The signals that shape strategy aren’t in your brand mentions. They’re buried in the unfiltered, unprompted, untagged things people say when they don’t think you’re listening. That’s where your next insight lives. Don’t let it become a blind spot.

Someone said to me a long time ago, you don’t lose relevance in a moment. You lose it in the weeks you spent measuring the wrong things.

Want to See What You’re Missing?

I’m one of those people who needs to see it to believe it. So if you want to see what you’re missing—book a demo and we’ll show you how Plot listens differently.

There’s a heavy feeling that’s been looming, and if you spend any amount of time on social, you probably feel it too. It’s not burnout exactly. It’s not even boredom. It’s something worse, I think. A slow dissipation of meaning. A creeping hollowness. A fatigue that comes from watching the same recycled advice, the same performative “thought leadership,” and the same personal brand gymnastics play out day after day, like some bad improv troupe that doesn’t know when to leave the stage.

We’re living in a golden era of vapid content (YAY!). Which, in my mind, looks like a self-serve buffet of bullshit masquerading as value. Everyone’s an expert now. Everyone’s a founder. Everyone’s giving you the five things you must do to win. And if you don’t like it? The algorithm will make sure you see it anyway.

This is the part where someone usually says, “It’s just the game. Play it or get left behind.”

And lately, I’ve been leaning towards, “But what if we don’t?

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I’ve noticed myself pulling back from sharing for the sake of it. Not because I have nothing to say, the earth would sooner freeze over before that happens, but because I don’t want to say things I don’t believe. And that’s a harder line to walk than it sounds when the entire system rewards volume, consistency, and confidence (even if it’s unearned). There’s something backwards about a world that expects you to post with authority on Tuesday, and then turn around and say something “authentic” on Wednesday like your entire identity is some well managed brand asset.

From the consumer side, it’s really exhausting watching people try to out-brand each other into oblivion. “Just because you can” has replaced “maybe you shouldn’t.” And yet here we are: eyes glazed, still scrolling, still tapping, never-gonna-give-you-up way of existing. The algorithm doesn’t care if the content is good. It only cares if it keeps you here.

From the professional side, it’s harder to explain. There’s this low-grade fraudulence that burrows and hums underneath everything. It’s a kind of constant tension between wanting to be helpful and feeling like you're accidentally complicit in a system that rewards shortcuts and shaming…and then getting masked as motivation. And if you’re a person who actually gives a shit? Someone who wants to do this work without selling out your values? Then this is the kind of thing that wears you down by wrapping it’s virtual fingers around the your throat and tightening the squeeze until every ounce of that motivation is smothered out of your sparkling eyes.

This is just a vent. My friends would probably say that it’s more like a signal flare that I’m tossing into the void with the hopes that someone else sees it and thinks, yep, same.

Here’s what I know:

• I don’t want to create for the sake of “staying top of mind.”

• I want to create when I have something real to say.

• I want to share the “how,” not just the “what.”

• And I want to do it without treating my own voice like a commodity.

I know that’s not how the game is played. But I think the game is rigged somehow.

Maybe we’re not supposed to win at it. Maybe we’re supposed to build something else.

Because the real takeaway that I’ve learned from ingesting all the content that’s been thrown at me from people sharing their hottakes about personal brand building, marketing, conferences, and what have you.

People are craving depth. Not constantly. Not every post. But sometimes. And when they find it, they hold onto it. Not because it was optimized, but because it was true.

Ladies, gents, and others—we don’t have to live like this. We can opt out of the performance. We can choose slowness. We can make fewer things, better. We can be generous without being prescriptive. We can be helpful without being performative.

We can give ourselves (and each other) permission to pause, to question, to not be content machines.

And when we do have something to say? At least there’s hope that it’ll actually mean something.