Marketing Articles Are Getting Worse. Here’s Why That Matters

Marketing articles have a quality problem. Not a volume problem, not a discoverability problem. A quality problem. The internet is full of content that tells you what marketing is, repeats the same frameworks with different headers, and stops well short of telling you anything useful about why those frameworks fail in practice. If you have spent any time reading marketing content seriously, you already know this.

The gap between what gets published and what actually helps a senior marketer make a better decision has never been wider. That gap matters because bad marketing content does not just waste your time. It actively shapes how people think about the discipline, and not always in useful directions.

I have been writing about marketing for long enough to have strong opinions about what makes content worth reading. But more than that, I have spent 20 years on the other side of it, running agencies, managing large budgets across 30 industries, and watching how marketing ideas travel from conference talks and blog posts into boardrooms and briefs. Some of that travel is useful. A lot of it is not.

Why Most Marketing Content Optimises for the Wrong Thing

The incentives behind most marketing content are misaligned with the reader’s actual needs. Publishers want traffic. Authors want shares and authority. Platforms reward content that confirms what people already believe, because confirmation is comfortable and comfortable content gets engagement. None of those incentives point toward writing something genuinely challenging, commercially grounded, or likely to change how a practitioner thinks.

I spent years as an agency CEO reading industry publications as part of staying current. After a while I noticed something: the articles I found most useful were rarely the ones that performed best. The popular pieces were almost always the ones that validated existing practice, dressed up in slightly new language. The articles that actually made me reconsider something tended to be buried, shared in smaller networks, written by people who were too busy doing the work to build a content machine around it.

This is not a new observation. But it compounds over time. When enough bad content circulates, it starts to define what people think marketing is. Junior marketers read it and absorb the frameworks uncritically. Those frameworks get applied in contexts they were never designed for. And when they fail, the conclusion is rarely “that framework was wrong for this situation.” It is usually “we need a better tool” or “we need more data.” The underlying thinking does not get examined.

If you are serious about growth strategy and want a sharper perspective on how these ideas connect to real commercial outcomes, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub pulls together the thinking I find most useful, without the filler that makes most marketing content frustrating to read.

The Framework Problem in Marketing Writing

Marketing has an unusual relationship with frameworks. They are everywhere, they are often genuinely useful as thinking tools, and they are almost always taught without the conditions that make them work. That last part is the problem.

Take positioning. The concept is sound. But most articles about positioning describe what it is, show you a template, and leave you with the impression that filling in the template is the hard part. It is not. The hard part is the research, the internal politics, the willingness to say no to segments that feel attractive, and the discipline to hold the position when a short-term opportunity pulls in a different direction. None of that fits neatly into a 1,200-word post optimised for a search term.

When I was turning around a loss-making agency, the frameworks I had read about extensively turned out to be less useful than I expected. Not because they were wrong, but because they assumed conditions, a stable team, a clear brief, a client willing to be challenged, that simply did not exist. The real work was messier, more political, and more dependent on judgment than any article had prepared me for. That gap between the clean version and the real version is exactly what most marketing content fails to address.

The best frameworks are thinking tools, not operating procedures. When content presents them as operating procedures, it does a disservice to the reader and to the framework itself.

Performance Marketing Content and the Demand Creation Blind Spot

A significant proportion of marketing content over the past decade has been written by, or written for, performance marketers. That is not a criticism. Performance marketing produced a lot of rigour that the industry needed. But it also produced a particular way of thinking about marketing that has become the default lens for a lot of content, and that lens has some serious blind spots.

The performance marketing worldview, broadly speaking, is about capturing existing demand as efficiently as possible. Optimise the funnel. Reduce cost per acquisition. Improve conversion rates. Test everything. These are legitimate goals. But they are goals that assume the demand is already there. They do not ask where the demand came from, or how you build demand that does not yet exist.

Earlier in my career I was as guilty of this as anyone. I overvalued lower-funnel activity because it was measurable, attributable, and easy to defend in a client meeting. It took me a long time to accept that much of what performance channels were being credited for was going to happen anyway. The person searching for a brand they had already decided to buy was not converted by the paid search ad. They were already converted. The ad was just the last tap on a door that was already open.

The marketing content that reflects this performance bias tends to be technically competent and commercially shallow at the same time. It tells you how to optimise something without asking whether you are optimising the right thing. Market penetration strategy is a good example of a topic that gets covered extensively in terms of tactics but rarely in terms of the structural question of whether penetration is even the right growth lever for a given business at a given stage.

What Good Marketing Content Actually Does

Good marketing content changes how you think, not just what you know. That sounds simple, but it rules out a large proportion of what gets published.

The articles I have found most useful over the years share a few characteristics. They are written by people who have been accountable for outcomes, not just activity. They are honest about the conditions under which the advice applies and the conditions under which it does not. They make a specific claim and defend it, rather than presenting a balanced overview that carefully avoids saying anything that could be disagreed with. And they are written with enough precision that you could actually use them to make a decision.

That last point matters more than people acknowledge. A lot of marketing content is written at a level of abstraction that makes it impossible to apply. “Focus on your customer” is not advice. “Segment your audience by purchase behaviour before you decide on messaging” is closer to advice. “Test your messaging against two distinct segments with different purchase histories before you commit to a channel mix” is advice you can actually act on.

When I judged the Effie Awards, the work that stood out was almost always the work where the strategic thinking was the sharpest. Not the most creative, not the most technically sophisticated. The sharpest. The teams that won had usually asked a better question than their competitors, and the answer to that better question was what made the work effective. Good marketing content should do the same thing: ask a better question than you were already asking.

The Credibility Gap in Marketing Writing

One of the more uncomfortable truths about marketing content is that the people with the most interesting things to say are often the least likely to say them publicly. Senior operators are busy. They are cautious about what they put in writing. They have clients and employers to consider. The people who write the most are often the people who have the most to gain from being seen as experts, which is a different group from the people who have actually accumulated the most useful experience.

This creates a credibility gap. The content that dominates is produced by people who are good at producing content. That is a skill, but it is not the same skill as running a marketing function, managing a client through a difficult year, or making a budget call that turns out to be wrong and then figuring out why. The gap between those two skill sets is not always visible in the writing, which makes it harder for readers to calibrate how much weight to give any particular piece of advice.

I am not suggesting that you need to have run a large agency to have useful things to say about marketing. Plenty of excellent thinking comes from people earlier in their careers, from researchers, from strategists who have never managed a P&L. But there is a specific kind of commercial grounding that only comes from being accountable for outcomes over a sustained period, and that grounding tends to produce different conclusions than the ones you reach when your primary accountability is to produce content.

When I grew an agency from 20 to 100 people, the things that actually drove that growth were not the things I had read about in marketing articles. They were things like pricing structure, the quality of the client relationships we chose to invest in, the decision about which verticals to specialise in and which to walk away from, and the internal culture that determined whether the best people stayed or left. Most of those topics are underrepresented in marketing content because they are hard to write about in a way that generates traffic.

How to Read Marketing Content More Critically

Given all of this, the most useful thing I can offer is a set of questions to apply when you are reading marketing content, rather than a list of sources to trust unconditionally.

The first question is: what was the author accountable for? Not what their title was, not what their agency or company was, but what they were personally accountable for when they were doing the work they are writing about. Accountability shapes thinking in ways that observation does not. Someone who has had to defend a budget decision to a CFO thinks about marketing measurement differently from someone who has only ever written about it.

The second question is: what conditions does this advice assume? Almost all marketing advice is conditional. It applies in certain markets, at certain stages of growth, with certain levels of brand awareness, with certain team capabilities. Articles that present advice without specifying its conditions are either oversimplifying or they do not know the conditions themselves. Either way, that is worth knowing.

The third question is: what would have to be true for this to be wrong? If you cannot answer that question after reading an article, the article has not made a specific enough claim to be useful. Useful claims can be falsified. Claims that cannot be falsified are not claims at all. They are noise.

The fourth question is: does this change how I would approach a specific decision? Not does it confirm what I already think, not does it give me a new vocabulary for something I already do. Does it actually change what I would do next time I face a particular decision? If the answer is no, the article may be interesting without being useful. Those are different things.

Tools like behavioural analytics platforms can help you understand what content your audience actually engages with versus what they simply land on. The same principle applies to your own content consumption: time on page is not the same as value extracted.

The Go-To-Market Writing That Is Worth Your Time

Not all marketing content is produced for the same purpose, and it helps to be clear about what you are looking for before you start reading. There is a difference between content designed to introduce a concept, content designed to help you apply a concept, and content designed to challenge how you think about a concept. All three have value, but they require different things from the reader and they serve different needs.

Introductory content is useful when you are genuinely new to a topic. There is no shame in needing to understand what go-to-market strategy means before you can have a more sophisticated conversation about it. Why GTM execution feels harder than it used to is a good example of a piece that meets practitioners where they are while still making a substantive point.

Application content is useful when you understand the concept but need help translating it into action. The challenge here is that application is highly context-dependent, and content that works well for a SaaS company at Series B is not necessarily useful for a B2C retailer with a 40-year-old brand. The best application content is explicit about its context.

Challenging content is the rarest and the most valuable. It is the content that makes you uncomfortable, that contradicts something you thought you knew, that forces you to examine an assumption you did not realise you were making. This kind of content tends to be shorter, sharper, and less well-optimised for search. It also tends to be the content that sticks.

The growth hacking examples genre is a useful case study in the limits of application content. The examples are real. The tactics worked in specific contexts. But the implicit message, that you can replicate these outcomes by copying the tactics, is almost always wrong. Context is not a footnote. Context is the point.

What This Means for How You Build Your Own Knowledge

If most marketing content is optimised for the wrong things, the implication is not that you should stop reading it. The implication is that you should be more deliberate about how you build your marketing knowledge, and more honest about the difference between reading about marketing and learning about marketing.

Reading is passive. You can read 50 articles about positioning and still not be better at positioning. Learning requires application, feedback, and the willingness to be wrong. Most of that happens in the work, not in the content. Content can point you in a direction. It can give you a vocabulary. It can surface a question you had not thought to ask. But it cannot replace the experience of making a decision with real consequences and living with the outcome.

The most commercially useful thing I did early in my career was not reading more marketing content. It was getting close to the financial side of the businesses I was working with. Understanding how marketing spend translated into margin, how customer acquisition costs related to lifetime value, how the mix of retained and new revenue affected the stability of the business. That financial literacy changed how I read marketing content, because it gave me a way to evaluate claims that went beyond “does this sound plausible.”

Pricing strategy is a good example of an area where financial literacy changes everything. BCG’s work on pricing in B2B markets makes clear that pricing is one of the highest-leverage levers in go-to-market strategy, yet it is one of the most underrepresented topics in marketing content. That underrepresentation is partly because pricing is genuinely complex, and partly because it requires a level of commercial grounding that most marketing content does not assume its readers have.

The same applies to organisational questions. How teams are structured and how they make decisions has a direct effect on marketing effectiveness, but it rarely appears in marketing articles because it does not fit the format. It is not a tactic. It is not a framework. It is a structural condition that shapes everything else, and structural conditions are hard to write about in a way that gets shares.

There is also the question of what you do with the content you read. The most useful habit I developed was writing a single sentence after reading any article that was supposed to be useful: “The one thing I would do differently as a result of reading this is…” If I could not complete that sentence, the article had not done its job, regardless of how well it was written or how many people had shared it. That filter eliminates a lot of content that feels useful without being useful.

For a broader perspective on the strategic thinking that connects these ideas, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub is where I collect the pieces that have passed that filter, the ones that change something rather than just confirming it.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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