Every year, I see the same pattern play out with businesses.

Spring gets busy, summer sneaks up faster than expected, and before long, the calendar is full of vacations and all the normal demands of life. Then September arrives, and everyone suddenly realizes the fall communications plan is not quite as ready as they hoped. The website still needs work, social media has lost momentum and the year-end push is still more of an idea than a plan.

Over the past year or so, I’ve noticed something funny happening in organizations. People who never would have opened Photoshop, written a campaign brief or drafted a customer-facing sales piece are now creating “marketing materials” in AI tools and sending them to the marketing team to be cleaned up, branded or finalized.

Wanted: A senior-level marketing strategist, graphic designer, copywriter, web developer, PR consultant, social media manager, project coordinator, fundraising communicator, SEO specialist, videographer and brand advisor.

Must be available immediately. Must understand our industry. Must not require benefits, onboarding headaches, vacation coverage, payroll taxes or a full-time salary.

Sound impossible?

I’ve been in this business for more than 30 years now, and when you do things for long enough, you identify patterns. Today I want to show you a pattern that I’ve seen continually repeat itself.

A company starts to feel stuck, and their immediate assumption is that they need a marketing overhaul.

Sometimes that means a new website. Sometimes it means more social media, better design, stronger campaigns or an entirely new brand image. More recently, I’ve watched companies try to jerry-rig AI into absolutely everything.

Yesterday, Major League Baseball marked Jackie Robinson Day, as it does every April 15. Across the league, players, coaches and umpires wore number 42, honoring the day Robinson stepped onto Ebbets Field in 1947 and broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier. In 2026, that observance marked the 79th anniversary of his debut.

Every spring in the United States, the college basketball tournament known as March Madness narrows dozens of teams into a final handful through a ruthless format: lose once, and your season is over. It is part sport, part national ritual, and it has a way of revealing what people do when there is no time left for recovery.

In August 1914, as Europe moved toward war, Ernest Shackleton sailed from Britain with a crew of 27 men aboard the Endurance. His ambition was immense: to become the first to cross Antarctica from sea to sea.

By January of the following year, that ambition had been arrested by the Weddell Sea. The ship became trapped in pack ice, then drifted helplessly for months until the pressure of the frozen ocean crushed its timbers and sent it to the bottom. The expedition that had set out to make history could no longer accomplish the thing it had been formed to do.

It’s summer 1997. Apple is wobbling, and the conference room has the tired smell of corporate wishful thinking. A new comeback line is pitched: “We’re back.” Heads nod. Then Steve Jobs, newly returned to the company, cuts through it: Apple isn’t “back” yet. A slogan can’t be a victory lap. It has to be a compass.

In the late 2000s, a new kind of newsroom sprang up in Southern California. It didn’t chase scandals or city hall. It chased search bars. If enough people were asking the same question online, a system would spot it, calculate the advertising value and send the assignment out to a freelancer — fast. “How to unclog a drain.” “How to train a puppy.” “How to remove candle wax.” The goal wasn’t great writing. The goal was coverage. The blank spaces of the internet were suddenly treated like farmland and content was the crop.