One side creates the connection. The other side delivers it. Neither works without the other.
At some point, we stopped asking if our content was good and started asking if it would perform.
Those are not the same question.
MrBeast figured something out that most creative teams haven’t. He separates the people who dream up ideas from the people who produce them. His reasoning is simple. If you’re responsible for building something, you’ll only ever dream within what you know is possible. But if you’re naive to the limitations, you’ll just dream up the coolest thing you can. The truth lands somewhere in between. A little more ambitious than the producer thought was realistic and a little more grounded than the dreamer imagined. That gap is where the best creative work lives.
Most marketers have collapsed that gap entirely. The algorithm tells them what worked yesterday, and they build tomorrow around it. But the algorithm is always running on old data. You can chase it, but you’ll rarely catch it.
Here’s the thing about data. It will always follow what humans are looking for. And humans will always look for connection.
That’s not changing.
There are two distinct jobs happening in any good marketing operation, and too many businesses treat them as one. The first is creative. Your job as a creator is not to make something that goes viral. It’s to make something that communicates. Something that lands the message so clearly that the right person feels understood. There is longevity in that process. There is humanity in it. That’s where a brand finds its footing and actually lives.
The second job is distribution. Media buys, targeting, paid advertising. That’s the machine’s territory, and it’s a legitimate one. Its job is to take your creative piece, with its message intact, and put it in front of the right people at the right time. When both sides are working well together, they move like a well-practiced dance. To the outside world it can look like one thing. But make no mistake, they are two separate movements.
We learned this the hard way early on at Giant Shoe. A decade ago we were making genuinely great video content. Creative, entertaining, and well-crafted. We’d hand it off to clients, and they’d upload it to YouTube and come back saying video doesn’t work. The content was hitting the spot. It just wasn’t going anywhere after it exported. That’s part of what pushed us deeper into the advertising world. We built a full digital department so that content doesn’t just get made. It gets seen by the right people, in the right way, all the way from social to broadcast.
People don’t want to be sold to anymore. They want to be entertained, moved, or understood. The product doesn’t need to interrupt the experience. It needs to be infused into it.
A few years ago we did a campaign for a taco restaurant. The easy approach would have been promos, limited-time offers, and reasons to choose tacos. We took a different path entirely. We started with one honest observation. People already know what tacos are. And everyone already loves tacos. So instead of convincing anyone of anything, we built scenarios around the moments in life that aren’t exactly lovable. Trying on outfits and getting that look from your friend. Sitting through your son’s first live performance and it’s a little off-key. Trying to enjoy your meal while someone nearby is performing for their phone. Each scene builds that familiar sour expression. And just when it settles in, the waitress arrives with tacos and the whole mood lifts. Everyone loves tacos.
The campaign connected because it wasn’t about tacos. It was about people. The product was already in the room. It just knew when to show up.
The algorithm is a business. It is built to churn attention for profit, and it will keep changing the rules to do exactly that. You don’t ignore it, but you don’t build your creative strategy around it either.
Create for the human first. Then use the machine to find them.
That’s the dance.
If your marketing strategy depends on what the algorithm wants this week, you don’t really have a strategy. Let’s build you one.
