If you’re still running your 2023 marketing playbook in 2026—celebrating content volume, bragging about impressions, and pointing at a funnel diagram like it’s a historical artifact—you’re not behind. You’re just asleep. Your buyers moved on. Your tech stack learned how to think. And AI is doing parts of your job now—just not the parts you should’ve been doing in the first place. This isn’t an article. This is your intervention.

Marketing folks tend to get easily distracted by the shiny new piece of tech or process and it's for a good reason. I believe that we are always looking for that next thing that makes us do the job better. the pressures to improve conversions or get coverage higher has us looking as evidenced by the 8,000 or so marketing technologies available. In this post we'll explore just why we (I) keep an eye out with examples.

Marketers love the idea of control. The market usually ignores that preference. The better skill is not squeezing uncertainty out of the system. It is learning to respond to it without panicking.

Most teams claim to be data-driven right up until the data threatens a favorite idea. Real progress comes from testing constantly, learning quickly, and not treating every failed experiment like a personal tragedy.

Marketing teams are great at worshipping whatever is new and dismissing whatever is old. That is usually a mistake. Old tactics are not automatically obsolete, and new ones are not automatically smart.