Every few days, a marketing manager posts a version of the same thing: "You think webinars are dead? They're not. Here's my playbook."
What follows is the mechanics of the channel, the kind of thing you could've pulled out of Claude in an afternoon. But on one point, they're right. Webinars work. Newsletters work. YouTube works. Outbound works. Content works. Everything works.
Which is exactly why none of it is a moat anymore.
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Because before, there was a skill gap.
A good video required someone writing the script, someone shooting, someone editing. Paid and SEO meant an expensive specialist. Producing content at all meant a team you had to hire, train, and keep. Not every writer could turn out a 3,000-word whitepaper and a LinkedIn post that stops the scroll (and that's before we get to newsletters people actually open).
That gap is mostly gone, because AI got good enough. Doing it really well is still a skill, but most companies aren't aiming for that bar of quality. Acceptable is enough, and now free.
So anyone can produce the video, the landing page, the month of blog posts, which means execution isn't worth anything.
A channel stopped being a challenge the moment everyone got the same tools on the same Tuesday.
The challenge now is what you do with the ingredients you have.
Dave Gerhardt put it perfectly well: everything in marketing works, and the challenge is figuring out which channels can work for you with the ingredients you have. You don't always get the product, the budget, the POV, the talent, or the wind at your back. Sometimes it's two eggs, a slice of bread, and an onion.
Can you work with that?
That's the part I still love about this job. Machines can't do it.
Subtract everything a model now handles on its own: the ideation, the writing, the posting, the best-practice checklist.
What survives?
You can call it a point of view, a unique idea, creativity, expertise, taste. At the end of the day, it's craft. People keep thinking craft is "nice to have" even now, when it's the only thing left that makes a difference in marketing.
At my previous company, Kaiiax, my business partner and I never agreed on it. To him, craft was small, down-to-earth, beneath the real thing. Great businesses, he'd tell me, don't get built on craft. And while he wanted a great business, I just wanted to do good work. In the end, he took the company, and it was gone within a year.
I started Zmist & Copy, still betting on the thing he thought was beneath him.
Craft isn't only talent or effort. It's also the judgment and the courage to pick a channel, define the narrative, believe in it, and be able to defend it, even when there is no clear return within a specific timeline.
Marketing in a lot of companies is turning into a slop factory. Which means craft is the only thing left.
And here's where craft stops being an internal virtue and starts being an asset. Every piece of good work leaves a trace in someone's memory. Slop leaves nothing, because there's nothing in it worth remembering. Stack up enough of those traces, from the same company, saying the same distinctive things over years, and you've built the one thing your competitors can't clone.
That accumulated memory is what we call brand.
Brand is the asset everyone underfunds. Follow the stats below.
Companies with strong B2B brands are valued 65% higher. B2B buyers build their shortlist before they ever take a sales call, and brand is the only thing that gets you onto that list in the first place.
Now look at where the money actually goes.
Marketing budgets have flatlined at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, and most CMOs say that isn't enough. Of the money that does exist, the single biggest slice goes to paid media (30% to be exact). These means, marketers are more focused on capturing existing demand and not creating future demand (or building a brand).
Binet and Field have flagged this imbalance for years when they argue B2B grows best at something close to a 46/54 split between brand-building and activation.
This year, the fastest-growing line item in the marketing budget allocation is AI. The 2026 CMI B2B trends report surveyed over a thousand marketers on where they'll invest next. AI tools came first at 45%. The people who build the brand came dead last at 9%.
Robert Rose, writing up those findings, put it plainly: companies keep buying more machines to push more buttons and churn more content, but they won't fund the people who make any of it mean anything.
"Organizations pour money into more buttons to push, more algorithms to serve, and more content to churn, but hesitate to invest in the people who make the strategy real." -- Robert Rose
Marketing budgets get spent on AI and paid. But the lowest customer-acquisition cost in B2B SaaS comes from thought leadership (around $647, for comparison: CAC from basic SEO is $1,786, CAC from AMB is $4,664).
Thought leadership is often poorly defined. But the distinction is straightforward: content marketing focuses on what buyers need to know; thought leadership focuses on what we believe that competitors don’t.
The first produces how-to guides and best-practice lists. None of that is something competitors can't do. The second produces arguments, frameworks, and opinions only your company could publish, because they come from your experience and your point of view.
One is replaceable. The other is the brand. And brand is the whole job.
Hit reply and tell me the one marketing or brand bet you're afraid to defend to your CFO or your client.
If you want to go deeper on this:
Kateryna
P.S. If we aren't connected already, follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram. If you like this newsletter, please refer your friends.
P.P.S. Need help with quality content? Zmistify your content with Zmist & Copy.
What's the difference between copywriters and a whole bunch of other creative specialists that have something to do with writing and marketing? Time to figure it out!
When it comes to attracting leads to your business, there’s no substitute for content that teaches your audience something valuable. Read on to discover how you can share valuable knowledge through different types of content.
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