Why Does Marketing Feel So Unhinged These Days?

Real talk...

Hi there! 👋🏻 LM here, founder of Vector. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably felt it too: marketing just feels very…off right now. Before sitting down to write this post, I tried to come up with a more elegant adjective to describe our current marketing climate, but honestly? Weird or off feels the most accurate right now. 

We’re clearly in the middle of a major industry transition point. It’s something deeper than a trend and more fundamental than a channel shift. It reminds me a bit of that moment in the 2010s when we all started to embrace inbound marketing. Our burgeoning digital connectedness shifted everything we’d thought about reaching people right on its head, and suddenly marketing was all about content – valuable content – and all of us young, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed marketers were madly scrambling to building SEO-optimized blogs and gated content to keep up with this major evolution in our industry. Meanwhile, veteran marketers were left wondering when the playbooks they’d relied upon for years had fallen out of Vogue. 

Fast forward to today, and I’m that veteran marketer. In these types of conditions, it’s very easy to become disillusioned or overwhelmed by all of the change, but taking a moment to breathe and understand the root causes of these changes can, in my opinion, help you gain some clarity and (dare I say it?) optimism. So, let’s sit down and talk it through for a few minutes and try to wrap our heads around these changes, what they mean for the industry over the next few months and years, and how we, as marketers, can address them. 

But first, let’s take a moment to review how we got here in the first place. 

Marketing: what's been happening over the last 10 years?

Inbound Marketing is Born

Way back in 2006, Hubspot coined the term inbound marketing, which emphasized content creation, SEO, and gated resources over traditional interruptive outbound ads. This, of course, coincided nicely with the rise of social media and blogging, and marketers started to see the potential of using these channels to “pull” in prospects with valuable content, rather than “push” their messaging and promotions to audiences who might not want it. 

The Rise of the Content Machine

Cue the frenzy that I talked about above. We all started creating whitepapers, blog posts, eBooks, and other lead magnets, and we started to plug these lead magnets into marketing automation systems in order to capture email addresses and start nurturing leads through email campaigns. And, the good old marketing funnel reigned supreme: Attract → Convert → Close → Delight (let’s all say it together, now… 🙂). 

The Peak Lead Gen Moment

Companies scaled up their content operations. Gated content, webinar funnels, and landing page optimization was everywhere. I remember this moment so vividly. I had just started my agency career during this peak, and my days were filled with toggling between writing content and obsessively checking my clients’ KPIs to see how far that content was going and how many leads it was generating. It was the digital version of publish or perish. Additionally, sales and marketing alignment became a major focus: inbound promised sales teams a reliable pipeline of warm leads. 

Inbound Currently

But, what happens when you have too much of a good thing? Well, people tend to get tired of it. As more and more brands jumped in, audiences got overwhelmed with information and content and gradually became less responsive. At the same time, I (and most of my peers) started noticing that people didn’t move through our funnels as efficiently or linearly as we’d all hoped. 

These days, we’re seeing more and more challenges to the one-size-fits-all inbound approach. So, is inbound still relevant? The short answer is: yes. The long answer is more complicated and nuanced, so let’s get into it in more detail. 

The First Elephant in the Room: Digital Fatigue

Are you tired of scrolling? Me too, honestly. I think we can all understand that disconcerting feeling when you realize you’ve been burning through TikToks for an hour…when you actually thought you’d only been watching for a few minutes. And, I think we can all also understand how unsatisfying scrolling actually is. 

Right now, the whole world is quite literally at our fingertips, and we are online more than we’ve ever been. The average person in the US spends 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media every day, and checks their mobile device 159 times per day. And yet, despite having endless access to content of all shapes, sizes, and forms, we’re feeling less connected with each other, less inspired, and more drained than ever." 

That’s digital fatigue. It’s what happens when quantity outweighs quality and when brands prioritize visibility over value. Audiences these days are tired of the endless content engine. They want real human interaction and authenticity.  In fact, according to Forbes, “the ability to forge an authentic connection couldn’t be more important for companies targeting Gen-Z buyers." 

For marketers this presents a real challenge and tension. How do you cut through all the clutter in a way that doesn’t just demand attention from your audience, but earns it. How do you create content, campaigns, and customer experiences that feel meaningful and not just optimized? 

In our opinion here at Vector, marketers have to choose our content carefully, and put less focus on capturing all the keywords and dispersing their brands to the widest audiences. Channels that are flooded with filler don’t perform well. 

The marketing world moves fast, but we can’t over-emphasize the importance of slowing down and listening closely to your audience.

Spend that time understanding who they are fundamentally and determining exactly what they want from you. What does your brand need to embody in order for it to capture their attention? You should design your marketing strategy so that it respects your customers’ time and attention and delivers substance and not just scrollability. 

The Second Elephant in the Room: The AI Avalanche

If digital fatigue is the emotional weight we all feel from content overload, then AI is the mechanism piling on even more weight. 

I want to be totally clear about this: Vector is by no means anti-AI. We use it, embrace it, and love it for so many reasons. But, we also recognize how much it’s fundamentally changing the marketing game (and not always for the better). 

Right now, AI makes it easier than ever to generate content at scale. Gone are the days of taking an entire day to write an optimized blog post. Blog posts, ad copy, social captions, and product descriptions can now all be created in seconds. The barrier to publishing has all but disappeared, and while that creates wonderful opportunities for companies and brands that normally wouldn’t have the resources to hire full-time or freelance content creators and strategists to engage with their audiences, it also means that the internet is getting much noisier, much faster. 

Over the last year, we’ve seen an explosion of surface-level sameness: keyword-stuffed content that ranks, but doesn’t resonate with key audience members, endless variations of the same marketing tips (over and over…and over), etc. This puts us marketers in a bit of a double-bind: if you don’t use AI, you could fall behind on speed, but if you rely on it too much, you risk blending in. 

So what do we do? What’s the path forward? 

At Vector, we don’t believe in rejecting AI. We believe in embracing it for its strengths and advantages, but grounding and anchoring it in strategy and insights.

It’s a great tool for amplifying your thinking, but it certainly cannot replace it. That’s why we help our clients pair smart automation with smarter questions. In a nutshell, what stories are we telling that no one else can? 

Making Sense of it All

So, yeah…marketing absolutely feels weird right now. Because it is weird right now. 

But weird doesn’t have to mean hopeless or chaotic. We’re simply learning how to use new tools and frameworks. It’s like sitting down at a fancy dinner party and attempting to understand when and how to use the seven forks you see in front of you. Weird can be an indicator that we’re in a moment of reinvention; a messy middle that comes before a saner subsequent chapter. 

If you’re a business owner/leader or a marketer who’s feeling a little disoriented right now, you’re not alone. Maybe you’re questioning your strategy and you’re unsure of what’s actually working, or you’re wondering why all the content you’re putting out into the world isn’t landing the way it used to. Or, like so many others, you may be wondering how to even get started. 

That’s the tension we’re all dealing with right now. It’s also where the opportunity is, and why I created this company. We got tired of seeing undifferentiated messaging and being overwhelmed by the volume of options and content floating around out there. We believe that the strongest marketing strategies start with listening: to your audience, your data, your team, and your instincts. These all work together symbiotically to build marketing systems that feel less performative and more purposeful. 

So if you’ve been feeling overwhelmed, burnt out, or just unsure of what to do, this is your permission to slow down and do some learning. And, if you need any help, let’s talk. Because for as uncertain as things feel right now, I still believe that clarity is possible. Strategies for growth are still possible. And marketing can feel more normal when you’re equipped with good insights and clear strategies.

About Vector

Vector is a full-service marketing partner for small and growing businesses. We don’t chase trends for trend’s sake. We help you figure out exactly what your audience needs, what’s worth investing in, and how to build a marketing system that reflects the reality of your business – not someone else’s playbook. 

So if you’ve been craving a reset (or even a reality check) you’re in the right place. 

Want to keep working through this with us?

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