If Content Costs Nothing to Make, Why Exclude Anything?
There used to be a moment in every content plan when somebody said we don’t have the capacity for that.
It was never a strategic moment. Nobody stood up and invoked Porter. Somebody looked at four people, a budget and a six-week turnaround, and the idea died of arithmetic. But that was the moment the strategy got made. Capacity did the choosing, and the document took the credit.
That moment is gone. The eleventh theme now costs a decent brief and an afternoon. The extra channel costs a repurposing step. The stakeholder request that would once have been quietly starved of resources can be honoured by Thursday.
Nothing in the system says no on your behalf any more. Exclusion used to be automatic. It is now entirely voluntary, and voluntary things tend not to happen.
What did we actually decide?
I have read a lot of content strategies. They are usually well made: audiences defined, themes set, channels mapped, formats selected, KPIs attached, everything landing neatly in an editorial calendar. Nothing is wrong with them, and that is what I have started to find suspicious.
Because when everything has found a place somewhere, I am left with one question the document never answers. Not what did we organise. What did we choose at the expense of something else?
Which audience matters more when two audiences want different things. Which channel are we deliberately not going to invest in. Which perfectly sensible request does this document give us permission to decline.
“If nothing was refused, this is not a strategy. It is a very well organised list of things we would quite like to do.”
Not long ago I helped a team present a repositioning to its internal decision makers. We brought three slides. The first showed the direction we had chosen. The second showed the directions we had considered and rejected. The third described what the new direction would mean in practice: for activities, for priorities, for the results people should expect.
The longest discussion of the session was about the second slide.
Several people were not sure why it was there at all. Others tried to soften it. Surely these were things we would do later, or things of lower priority. Not felt like a strong word for options that still looked perfectly good on paper.
It took a long explanation before a majority saw the point. And when they did, something useful happened. They understood the chosen direction better than they had from the slide that described it. The trade-offs made the choice legible in a way the choice could not make itself.
I have been calling it the NOT-slide for years, and the name has never mattered more than it does now. What surprises me is that I still have to argue for it. I would expect it to be standard procedure, the way a risk register is standard procedure. Clarity about what you are walking past is not a rhetorical flourish. It is how everyone else in the building knows what the direction actually costs.
The trade-offs made the choice legible in a way the choice could not make itself.
At which point a reasonable CMO asks: if content costs nothing to make, why exclude anything?
It is a fair question, and it is the one that makes this an argument about 2026 rather than a restatement of something Michael Porter settled in 1996. If content were still expensive, focus would be a budget conversation. It isn’t, so it has become something else.
Two things stayed expensive when production got cheap.
The first is attention, and not only the audience’s. Every theme you add is a claim on the same finite quantity of internal attention: the review cycles, the subject-matter experts, the arguing about tone, the maintenance. A marginal piece is cheap to make and just as expensive to make matter as it ever was.
The second is harder to see and matters more. Your content is no longer read only by readers. It is read in aggregate by systems that summarise you to people who will never visit your site. Those systems do not sample your best work. They describe the shape of the whole thing.
“The eleventh theme does not sit harmlessly at the bottom of the site. It votes.”
Which means the eleventh theme does not sit harmlessly at the bottom of the site. It votes. A body of work with nine interests gets summarised as a company with nine interests, which is another way of saying no position at all. Everything you couldn’t say no to is in that summary.
Why content teams find this so difficult
Because most of them operate, partly, as internal service organisations. People arrive with requests, and good teams want to help. Can you make something around this. Could we support that launch. Shouldn’t we be doing more video.
Every one of those requests is defensible on its own. That is precisely the mechanism. Over time, helpfulness compounds into accumulation, and the strategy quietly becomes an accommodation device in which everyone can find themselves somewhere.
There is a second trap, and it runs the opposite way. Content teams worry about repeating themselves because they have lived with an idea internally for months. An idea can feel old internally long before it has become familiar externally. So teams subtract for the wrong reason, boredom, and add for the wrong reason, novelty, while the thing that was starting to compound gets quietly retired in favour of something fresh.
“An idea can feel old internally long before it has become familiar externally.”
Two things that work on any Tuesday
One. Ask whether the work needed us at all.
In earlier work I have separated the thinking behind a piece from the wording of it, and used a counterfactual test for authorship: would this have existed without you? It works just as well pointed at a content plan. If a competent model with a good brief would have produced substantially the same thing, it does not earn a slot, however useful it looks.
The sharper version separates the two questions. Is the thinking ours, or only the wording? Work where only the wording is ours is exactly the work that fits effortlessly, costs nothing to approve, and adds nothing to the shape of the whole. It fits because it is generic. That is the reason to drop it, not the reason to keep it.
Two. Make subtraction a name, not a sentiment.
Give the strategy a NOT-slide. The audiences, channels and themes you are leaving to others this year, on one page, in the same deck as the direction. Then enforce one rule: no addition is approved without naming, in that document, the specific activity that now gets less. Not “we’ll find the time.” The name of the thing.
And watch the room for the word later. It is the polite form of not, and it is how a NOT-slide quietly turns back into a backlog. An option parked as later keeps its claim on attention while giving nothing up, which is the whole problem wearing a calendar entry.
The point of writing it down is not tidiness. It is that you can point at a page when you decline a colleague, instead of reopening the entire strategy every time someone arrives with a reasonable idea.
And once a quarter, review the calendar backwards. Most teams ask what should be added. Ask what should come out, and then ask the harder version: what should come down. If your published corpus is now the evidence from which you get described, a deletion project is a strategic act, not housekeeping.
The question I would put on the first page
Focus is not making less. It is making more of what matters and less of what merely fits. The difference only becomes visible when something reasonable gets refused.
So before the audiences, the themes and the channel matrix, I would put one question at the front of the next content strategy I read:
What deserves three years of our attention rather than three weeks?
Everything that cannot survive that question is still on your site. Quietly helping a machine explain you as an organisation with a great many interests and no particular position.
The NOT-slide for this piece: measurement, AI tooling, and whether you should publish less. Three other essays. Not this one.