Here's a fun (and mildly unsettling) fact: GPS systems need regular updates — not because the satellites move, but because the Earth does.
Tectonic plates, those massive slabs of crust beneath us, drift at roughly the same rate your fingernails grow: a few centimeters per year. That's an oddly specific comparison — and a disorienting one when you realize our maps are always just a little bit wrong.
And those shifts add up. In 2017, Australia had to recalibrate its GPS coordinates by nearly two meters to stay aligned with reality.
Marketing strategy works the same way. You’ve been running familiar campaigns on familiar maps, but the ground beneath you never stops moving.
Most of the time, it moves at the same speed as our fingernails grow. But over the last year or so, the pace of change has felt seismic. Call it a strategic earthquake.
Many marketers I speak with describe the same feeling these days. They know what they want to create, but decisions about where to put it, how to distribute it, and which platforms to trust have become dizzying.
You see the problems all over social media. As recently as last week, search expert Rand Fishkin declared himself "grumpy" because of a study in which "60% of marketers say that more traffic is their goal," when he's been talking about zero-click search and the degrading of organic traffic for some time.
A recent Bain study found that roughly 80% of consumers use zero-click results in at least 40% of searches, chopping organic traffic by up to 25%. Meanwhile, publishers report that traffic is diving as AI-generated overviews replace traditional site visits.
And it’s not just search.
Marketing continues to reel from social’s For You feeds, which favor algorithmic relevance over follower counts. Brands spent years trying to build audiences on their social media feeds, only to now find themselves not just in the zero-click age but the zero-share and zero-comment age, too.
Social media has become media — the social part got algorithmically desiccated.
What's left is a feed driven by anything that can pierce the algorithm's veil. Sometimes, that's a brilliant insight from a subject-matter expert. Sometimes, that’s a guy blending cottage cheese into his coffee while explaining crypto.
Either way, people, not institutions, now steer the conversation.
At this point in 2025, it’s clear that this isn't an SEO quirk or a social curveball. It's a tectonic shift.
If your content strategy feels like it's spinning in place, it's because your program’s internal compass is pointing at stale coordinates.
Let's move the GPS coordinates and begin to chart a new topography — five powerful currents shaping how content actually moves today.
1. Paid presence in a distracted world
Paid advertising and sponsorships still play an important role. But the game has changed. The spotlight has always been rented. But now, when the money stops, the momentum dies even faster.
Many brands now find themselves executing a kind of "dumbbell" strategy; they’re either figuring out ways to do hyper-targeted, performance-driven personalization or doing broad mass-media awareness plays (and sometimes both).
Put simply: They’re either paying to make sure that Jane, the CEO from that specific Fortune 100 company, sees a personalized ad 450 times, or they’re sticking their logo on a stadium and all the free T-shirts.
One approach whispers to an audience of one — the other shouts to the crowd. And increasingly, both ends are chasing the same thing: engaged attention. Can you buy time, presence, or even a few moments of immersion in a crowded and distracted world?
That polarization hollows out the middle of paid advertising. The haves (those with the necessary data, technology, and budget) can thrive on performance marketing and afford to shout in the middle of Times Square. The have-nots (mostly smaller and midsized businesses) are scraping efficiency out of shrinking margins and seeing paid social and search get ever more expensive.
One aims for saturation, the other for relevance within a specific, affordable niche.
This drive for engaged attention also fuels the boom in paid influencer marketing, which offers a form of borrowed trust. It's a way to show up in someone else's earned space, even if you paid to be there.
Today, many of the most strategic media buys aren't network placements. They’re buying a network of influential people.
2. The algorithm as editor
Today, content discovery often begins with algorithmic surfaces — not traditional search, not your lovingly curated homepage, not even your email campaigns, but feeds, recommendation engines, and AI-generated answers.
Content doesn't drive traffic the way it once did. It now performs inside the system. It succeeds by being seen, paused on, watched through, and, ideally, by inspiring someone to seek you out. Clicks aren’t the measure.
This isn't a tactical shift. It's a strategic one. If your multi-channel model centers on what happens after the click rather than before the scroll, then it's built for a terrain that's no longer stable.
Not long ago, I wrote about how brand discovery isn't a signal-versus-noise problem. It's a complete rewiring of how attention works.
People aren't waiting for you to reach them. They're tuning their feeds and inboxes toward resonance over reach. They're not just choosing what to see; they're choosing who gets seen.
To gain access to these self-curated spaces, you'll need to understand the new physics of relevance and develop strategies around it.
3. Networks of trust
At the same time, the boundary between community and media coverage has nearly dissolved. Media coverage has morphed into influence, which is emotional, participatory, and decentralized. And influence isn’t driven by brands. It’s driven by people at the brands.
That's because people (journalists, creators, subject-matter experts, and, yes, even employees) trust people more than institutions.
Influence now lives inside the crowd. And the crowd, more often than not, lives inside a community.
A podcast with a niche but loyal audience often carries more weight than a front-page story. A LinkedIn post from a respected voice inside your industry might spark more action than a press release picked up by three wire services and two trade blogs.
Going viral has taken a backseat to being trusted and worth forwarding, quoting, or quietly bookmarking.
4. Designed moments, lived media
Experience is no longer an accessory to marketing. It is the medium.
Experiential media now encompasses more than just trade shows or B2C expos. It includes livestreamed workshops, B2B webinars, podcast tapings with live Q&A, branded pop-ups, and digital summits that offer real-time utility (e.g., ideas you can use immediately).
Presence in a designed experience — whether physical or digital — matters. So does the way presence fuels participation.
The touchpoints don't chase media with content (“Cover our press release!”). They generate it organically. The experiences inspire stories people want to share, moments worth remembering, and takeaways that travel because they're built for connection.
Done right, experiential becomes its own category, blending performance, storytelling, memory, and momentum into something no algorithm can replicate.
And that gives it weight.
Which brings us back to our channels — the ones we can control.
Your website. Your email list. Your portal. You still control the content and (maybe more importantly) the context in these places. But the role of owned media is shifting fast. And, yes, grumpy Rand is correct — it's no longer about traffic.
It's about giving your specific audience a reason to come in the first place.
AI-generated summaries and zero-click searches raise these questions:
What will inspire someone in that AI citation to seek us out?
If someone shows up, what will they find that justifies the journey?
Your website is no longer a publishing platform. It's a product. A resource hub. A decision tool. A personalized interface. A private space where people interact, exchange, download, share, learn, buy, and leave with something of value.
This reality forces a new kind of content calculus: What stays public and searchable to help you show up in answer engines? What gets held back behind velvet ropes for meaningful exchange?
Owned media has always been about playing the long game. But the rules have changed. The scoreboard isn't clicks or time on site. It's trust. It’s usefulness. It's willingness to return.
Recalibrating north
If you've felt unmoored lately, you're not alone. The terrain has shifted. The maps are outdated. Our old coordinates no longer match the new landscape.
This might be good news or bad. No one knows where it's all going right now. For the most part, we're all charting new maps together.
But I find comfort in the power of knowing we're off course — because it means we're ready to navigate.
We’ll all need to learn how to move through ambiguity. To follow the actual paths people take, not the ones we wish they did. To watch how content flows, then meet it there.
In a world of drifting plates and spinning compasses, the goal isn't a perfect destination. It's a more responsive orientation.
And remember: It’s your story. So find your new north. Then, tell it well.
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