If your reach is down, your opens are flat, and your engagement feels like it’s talking to a wall, I want to tell you something that should actually be a relief: your skills did not get worse. The environment changed underneath you, and the playbook that used to work was built for a world that no longer exists.
I came across a video from strategist Alex M H Smith that put language to something I have been watching happen with clients for a while now. The argument is sharp and worth sitting with.
The ratio that explains everything
Here is the core problem in one line: the ratio of stuff to attention has flipped.
Smith uses a striking data point to illustrate it. There are 2.4 million apps on the App Store. The average person has maybe 40 or 50 on their phone. The Financial Times published a graph showing app production booming while app downloads actually declined slightly. Supply exploding, demand staying flat.
That same pattern is playing out across every marketing channel you are running. Email. Social. Ads. Content. There is simply more of everything than any human being can process, and the human beings on the receiving end have made a very rational decision: they stopped listening to most of it and retreated to a small, trusted set of sources.
This was already happening before AI arrived. Smith makes the point that 20 years of technology progress is essentially a war on friction. Email, templates, one-click checkout, automation, no-code tools, AI. All of it removed barriers that used to slow down production. The problem is that friction was also the filter. It forced people to commit only to what mattered. Remove the friction and you get the flood.
AI did not start this. It finished it.
The one law worth taking from this
Here is where it gets uncomfortable. The entire industry has been pushing you toward speed, volume, automation, and efficiency. According to Smith, that is exactly the wrong direction.
His core principle: if it is not difficult, it will not work.
Not “difficulty is helpful.” Ease is disqualifying. Whatever is easy, everyone is already doing. And when something is abundant, it loses value regardless of quality. There is now so much good marketing that in practice there is no good marketing. That is the hole.
So what does actually work?
Three moves that still have traction
Make it unfair. Stop competing on what anyone can replicate. AI commoditized writing, design, ideation, and production at scale overnight. What it cannot hand to everyone simultaneously is your specific track record, your title, your real relationships, your genuine expertise, your name attached to outcomes people can verify. Smith’s framing is useful here: ask yourself what is true about you that nobody could fake, then build your marketing around that. Unfairness cuts through because most people are competing on terrain that is now completely level.
Make it tedious and expensive. This one is the hardest sell, and that is precisely the point. Original research. A properly published book. Fifty speaking engagements in a year. Events where people meet you in a room. Handwritten letters to prospects. A serious video production budget. None of these are guaranteed to pay off. They are slow, costly, and uncomfortable. That is why they still work. The market has been trained to expect free and frictionless. The moment you are willing to pay the price most people will not pay, you have already left most of your competitors behind.
Smith offers a useful test for any marketing idea: would you still do it if it cost ten times more? If yes, it probably has scarcity built in. If no, it is heading into the noise pool.
Replace, do not add. Your audience’s plate is full. Their inbox is full. Their attention is full. Asking to be added to that is an increasingly hard ask. The smarter move is to think about what you displace. What does your offer replace rather than supplement? If someone adopts what you are selling, what stops being necessary? That displacement mindset changes how you position everything, from your pitch to your content to your product framing.
What this means for your decision-making
As a CMO, the pressure is always toward more: more output, more channels, more testing, faster iteration. Smith’s argument is that this instinct is now working against you.
The decisions worth making are the ones most of your competitors will refuse to make because they are too slow, too expensive, or too uncertain. That resistance is the signal, not the warning. It also means prioritization stops being a mood and becomes the job: three to five moves this year that are genuinely hard, not the forty that are merely possible.
The everyday content, the posts, the emails, the basic presence work, Smith does not say kill it. But he is clear that it is not your growth lever anymore. It is practice. It is how you stay sharp. It is table stakes, not strategy.
Your growth lever is the thing that is genuinely hard to do and that most people simply will not attempt.
Find out how to grow your marketing with the professional marketing minds at Ambient Array.
Original source: Why marketing isn’t working anymore (strategy pro explains)