We Are Content Creators First, Second and Third. Then, Marketers.

I have said that line to a lot of rooms full of content people: “We are content creators first, second and third. Marketers somewhere after that.” It is deliberately overstated. What bothers me is how few fellow marketers look offended.

Most of us came into this profession because we love ideas, stories, writing, video, editorial thinking, formats, craft. So that is what we got good at.

We built editorial calendars, production processes, content operations, increasingly sophisticated workflows. And then, usually somewhere near the end, somebody would ask what we were going to do with the thing now that it was finished. Which channels? Any paid budget? Who is posting it on LinkedIn?

A few years ago, Content Marketing Institute asked for my input for its annual trends update on where content marketing budgets were being wasted. I said over-creation and under-distribution, and reduced it to four words: less content, more marketing. I sometimes joke that we should have called the discipline marketing content instead. It is only a joke because there is enough truth in it to sting.

Since then, I have realised my diagnosis was too narrow. Distribution is only the visible half of the problem.

I have been drawing the whole thing on whiteboards for years as a shelf. Content is the row of books in the middle. Marketing is the two bookends holding it upright, one at each end. But bookends as most people picture them are flat and closed. Marketing turns up, props the work in place, and leaves.

So, I draw mine with a porch. An open, covered space on the inside face of each bookend, where the two disciplines are meant to sit together for a while.

The front porch is where marketing comes in before anything is made, and it brings two things. One is the business objective the content exists to support: what needs to change in the market, in someone’s mind, in behaviour, preference, demand or retention. The other is what we know about the audience, arriving early enough to shape the content rather than to approve it. Between them they answer the question we skip most reliably: why should this particular thing exist at all?

The back porch is where marketing supports the finished work on its way out: how the idea finds those people, how it behaves in the environments where they meet it, and what should happen once they have consumed it.

Most content operations have the bookends. Almost nobody builds the porches. Marketing arrives at the last minute, holds the work upright long enough for it to be published, and goes home.

“Marketing should not begin when the content is finished. It should decide what deserves to be created.”

The bottleneck moves

Then AI arrived, and at first it looked like it would make the imbalance permanent. Research moves faster. Drafts get challenged and improved. One idea becomes five formats. A team of three produces what used to take twelve.

All of which matters less than it sounds, because the part of the job we were already best at is the part that just got cheaper. When your strongest muscle gets a machine attached to it, the relative value of your weakest one goes up. We can now produce more content, but audiences did not acquire more hours in the day. We can publish in more places without understanding any of them better. We can generate an impressive volume of perfectly competent material without getting any better at deciding what deserves to exist.

“The bottleneck moved, and most of us are still standing at the old one.”

Make AI your difficult client

Here is the part I did not expect.

I spent two years worrying that AI would become another excuse to make more content. It still might. But the same technology is also the first practical way I have found to force marketing thinking into the process before anything gets made. Not by asking AI to be the marketer, which it cannot be, but by giving it the one role content teams systematically avoid.

Make it the difficult client. The one who refuses to nod politely, does not care how much work you have already put in, and keeps asking why.

Before you ask AI to research anything or draft anything, give it the actual brief: the business problem, the audience, what you know about them, what you believe needs to change, what evidence you have, where you expect resistance, which channels matter, and what outcome would make the work worth doing. Then tell it to interrogate you, not to help you.

My own prompt is three words: roast my idea. The feedback stings, but considerably less than publishing something nobody finds, reads or remembers. What comes back is the set of questions we are best at skipping:

• Are we solving a real audience problem, or filling the calendar?
• What assumption are we making about these people that we have not tested?
• Why would they care about this now?
• Is content even the right response?
• What would have to be true for this to work?

Keep the client in the room

The brief does not have to disappear once creation starts. Most of the damage happens after it: the piece drifts towards what interests us rather than what matters to the reader, the useful part ends up halfway down the page, we start assuming knowledge the audience does not have. Feed the marketing intent back in as the work evolves and ask whether it still serves the problem you identified. That is a different use of AI from asking it to make a paragraph punchier.

It changes the other end too.

A LinkedIn post is not a shortened article. A newsletter is not a dumping ground for whatever appeared on the website that week. A conference talk is not a blog post with slides. Yet the single most common use of AI in content teams remains mechanical: turn this article into five LinkedIn posts. That is not distribution. That is photocopying.

“That is not distribution. That is photocopying.”

Give AI the original marketing objective and the context of the channel instead, and ask which part of the idea deserves to travel there, what would have to change for it to work in that environment, whether the audience you want is even present, and what somebody should be able to do next if the idea earns their attention. Those are marketing decisions. Some belong on the front porch before the work is made; others belong on the back porch before it goes out into the world. None belongs in a last-minute export menu.

And once something is published, the same difficult client is useful again: which framing attracted the audience you actually wanted, which questions kept recurring, what produced a spike and nothing else, what deserves another iteration, and what should quietly be allowed to die. That is not reporting. It is the next brief, arriving early.

The muscle we keep training

Which brings me to what bothers me most about how our profession is currently learning AI. We gravitate towards using it on the part of the job we already know. Writers learn AI writing. Video people learn AI video. Content teams learn to produce, adapt and repurpose faster. Of course we should learn those things.

But content creators should spend less of their AI-learning time becoming faster at content creation, and more of it becoming better marketers.

I have argued for years that this industry needed less over-creation and more marketing. The fix, it turns out, may involve the greatest content-production accelerator anyone has ever handed us — pointed at the brief as often as the draft. It can sit on either porch with us, keep asking why, and make it much harder to hide the marketing questions we failed to answer.

Maybe AI will not just change how we make content. Maybe, finally, it can help us put the marketing back into content marketing.