Your audience ignores easy content

BR36

But we’re going to talk about the antidote in today’s Bright Objects. And throw in a wild associative concept from nature to illustrate my point.

I’m almost never happier than when I meet a concept or a philosophy for the first time. The abundance concept all belongs to Alex M H Smith, a strategist in London who writes a newsletter called Basic Arts (links and sources at the end, as usual). I came across him last week. 

Let’s dig into what Alex has to say.

You've probably got 30 apps on your phone. You use 10 of them. There are 2.4 million and counting on the App Store. Does that mean you'll use more apps? I don't think so.

Email is mail, minus friction. Google is the Yellow Pages, minus friction. AI is fast, easy everything.

And with it we've lost the fruits of the slow and difficult, which is mastery.

Three years ago, being good at writing was an advantage. Now everyone can produce words. Not necessarily good ones, or even sequentially and logically coherent. But we can produce a lot of words now easily.

So if fewer people seem to be noticing you, that's why. Everyone is drowning in the same fast, easy stuff.
For a business trying to be noticed, that leads to an uncomfortable conclusion.

When anyone can make marketing for nothing, the marketing that costs you something is the only kind a buyer has any reason to believe.

I love this bit, so bear with me.

In 1975, an Israeli biologist called Amotz Zahavi published a paper that puzzled his peers. He was trying to explain the peacock's tail. It's enormous, it's heavy, it makes the bird slower and easier for a fox to catch. By every sensible measure, it's a liability. Why would evolution keep it?

Zahavi's answer became known as the handicap principle. The tail is trusted precisely because it is expensive. A weak bird could not afford to carry it. So the peahen doesn't need to inspect the peacock's health. She just looks at the tail, because only a properly fit bird could pay for one that size. The cost is what makes the signal honest.

Rory Sutherland, in his book Alchemy, brings this straight into marketing and calls it costly signalling. Why does a bank build a marble lobby? Why does a company that could email you fly someone across the country instead? 

Because the buyer's brain, without doing any conscious maths, reads the expense and the invested time as commitment. You wouldn't spend this if you weren't going to be around.

That's the peacock's lesson for your marketing. Cheap signals are being ignored, and rightly so. Buyers can smell a template. What still makes a difference is what visibly cost you something to make.

Even this very newsletter is a bloody mission, if I'm honest. 

Little peek behind the curtain: I’m very AI-pilled, and I use tools to help me produce content like this. I have an AI content engine that’s pretty much purring now, normally handing me a series of ideas (admittedly of varying quality), an outline or a first draft. 

I find that useful for breaking the blank-blinking-cursor trap that writing a regular newsletter serves up. (I kid you not: every two weeks I sit down to write Bright Objects and my first thought is “I got nothing”).

But then I go top to bottom writing and rewriting aggressively. By the time I'm finished, very little of the original remains. Then I have to make the images and get the whole thing onto Beehiiv, our newsletter platform.

And it’s not the only thing we do. We have a bigger peacock’s tail. 

I love Slideshow with Dave Hayward, but my commitment to it means Ferris and I still hand-edit it twice a month. It’s a lot of replaying, tidying up filler words, and balancing audio. Descript makes it easier, of course, but you still have to listen to an hour-long podcast several times before you’re (or we’re) happy. 

For a long time I filed all of that under "problems with the format". It’s the sort of thing the AI workflow gurus make you feel guilty about. I've stopped. The effort is what makes it worth opening.

Here's where it connects to the money, because this isn't a philosophical argument. I made this case at a client workshop this week, setting the scene for a brand-building campaign in a room full of people who don’t spend their days thinking about marketing. 

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, working with LinkedIn's B2B Institute, discovered a number that seems intuitively correct. 

At any moment, about 95% of the businesses that could buy from you are not in the market. They're not shopping. They have no reason to click your ad. The 5% who are ready will find whoever they already have in their heads.

So the whole job of brand-building is this: be the name the other 95% remember when their turn comes. 

If brand is a distracting word for you, swap it for “reputation”. It’s your reputation, keeping you top of mind for when one of those 95% shifts to being one of the 5% who are buying. 

And the things people remember are, almost by definition, the things that took effort. 

Nobody remembers the fourth AI-written LinkedIn post of the morning. People remember the workshop, the research nobody else bothered to do, the long conversation, the thing that was clearly a mission to make.

Alex has three antidotes to abundance.

Alex closed his essay with this line, and so will I: 

For us, the newsletter stays a mission, and so does the podcast. Difficult things reach clever people. And I hope we did, with you. 

Cheers, Dave

PS. If you got this far, you're in the 5% who read a thousand words on a Tuesday. Reply and tell me: what are you making that has enough artisan energy to cut through? I read every one.