Happy Sunday, Everyone!
I’ve spent the last few weeks visiting with clients & speaking at several fantastic events (if you’re looking for conferences to add to your agenda for 2026, I can’t recommend SMX Munich, SMX Paris & Friends of Search enough - each one is absolutely fantastic. You are guaranteed to learn something new at each one).
One of the major topics discussed at each of these three events was the evolution of marketing - and, in particular, how that evolution will impact what we can (and should) do going forward.
And those conversations got me thinking: Marketing isn’t mechanical. It’s biological. It’s a philosophy that’s rolled around my head for years, but never thought to articulate - until now. As I’ve (finally) put pen to paper (or pixel to screen), it’s become clear that this isn’t just an entertaining metaphor - it’s a framework for how to approach marketing going forward.
With that, here it is: an article half a decade in the making:
We marketers love to think of marketing as an assembly line: linear and predictable. We draw funnels, assign channels/campaigns to various “stages”, and allocate resources based on our desired outputs. This is the basis of the “mechanical” approach to marketing: inputs (time, money, creative) in, leads/revenue out. But the reality is messier - Markets shift, platforms evolve, creatives peak, plateau and fatigue. Audience behavior (and preferences) change at the speed of TikTok, often without rhyme, reason or warning.
If your marketing strategy is built on a foundation of rigid determinism, it breaks the moment the environment or the underlying process changes.
That’s why the better metaphor is evolution.
Markets are ecosystems. Brands are organisms. Channels are environmental pressures. And the growth function? It's the evolutionary engine: variation, selection, adaptation, extinction, mutation—all happening simultaneously, with increasing velocity (thanks to AI). Viewing marketing as evolution provides the perspective necessary to sharpen decision-making, accelerate learning, and reveal hidden opportunities.
It starts with this principle: if you want to outperform, outlearn. Evolution favors the organism that adapts fastest, not the one that started strongest or changes fastest.
Variation: The Raw Material For Evolution
Darwin observed (among many other things) that evolution requires variation. Genetic diversity is the fuel that allows natural selection to operate. No variation, no evolution.
The same principle holds true for marketing.
The most fundamental error performance marketers make is confusing optimization with innovation. I’ve reviewed ad accounts (as recently as a few weeks ago) running a half dozen A/B tests, each with “modifications” that are barely perceptible: a minor variant in the headline, a color shift on the landing page, a slight tweak to an audience definition. These aren’t experiments. It’s stagnation masquerading as strategy.
Real variation introduces radical change—not incremental iterations. It expands the adaptive range of the system. At its core, Meta’s algorithm embodies this principle. It doesn’t care about marginal headline tests or color changes or landing page tweaks; it rewards true creative diversity. It’s designed to hunt for breakout ads across a wide range of inputs. The best performance teams know this—and build systems to generate radical creative variation at scale.
There’s a reason that top-performing advertisers on Meta routinely introduce tens (if not hundreds) of new creatives each week – and it isn’t because they love keeping their designers busy making new stuff. It’s because quantity drives quality - and creative performance follows a power law distribution.
A DTC brand I advised tested nearly 50 ad variants in a week. Not 50 versions of the same concept—50 different ideas: statics, carousels, videos, UGC, influencer content - you name it. Most of them performed at (or around) the account average. Some sucked. A handful were exceptional. One - a vertical selfie-style video from the founder, responding to a comment on IG - outperformed the others by 3x and reduced new customer CAC by 36%. It wasn’t polished, but it was different.
That creative earned the right to survive. And from that success, the brand was able to iterate a dozen more variants – some with the founder. Some following variants of the same script. Others with novel angles based on this one “hit” ad.
This is the paradox of creative testing: most of what you make will fail (just as ~90% of the ads that DTC brand tested failed to do anything interesting) - but if you don’t try, you’re guaranteed to fail (it’s just a slower, more miserable death). Creative is a growth lever - but it only works if you’re willing to commit to structured, high-volume, high-variance experimentation.
The most obvious variations are creative, but they’re far from the only ones: bid strategies, audiences, landers, post-conversion experiences, lifecycle marketing, offers, angles, messages – all of these can be subjected to variation.
If your tests all look like the same idea wearing different clothes, you're not evolving. You're decorating a dead strategy. There’s a time and a place for incrementalism - but more brands would be better served by using the 10% or 10x testing strategy – and leaning really hard into the 10x section.
Selection: Feedback Loops as Fitness Tests
Variation is useless without selection. In nature, the environment chooses what survives. In marketing, the market (read: the algorithm + audience) does the selecting.
Each platform is its own ecosystem, with its own rules, its own data, its own priorities and its own objectives. TikTok rewards immediacy, novelty, engagement and authenticity. Google Search rewards relevance, clarity, alignment with searcher intent and user experience (that February LP update is starting to impact quality scores). Amazon prizes relevance, speed and credibility (reviews, ship time, return rate, etc.). Each of these is a selection pressure—your account/campaign either adapt or it’ll die.
This is where data enters the equation. If you’ve been to any of my presentations, one of my favorite things to point out is that data is your primary optimization lever. The primary reason for that? Data is what powers evolutionary feedback loops: the faster you get a signal, the faster you evolve.
Think of it this way: as humans were evolving, the ones that observed that sabertooth tigers weren’t friendly, rivers were quite dangerous and mangos are both edible and energizing were the ones that survived. The ones who decided to take Dancing with Wolves a little too literally did not. Having better, more accurate or faster insight into what works and what doesn’t is an evolutionary superpower. If you’re not investing in your data passback, you’re going to be hard-pressed to out-compete and out-evolve brands that have their data house in order.
Marketers today win by building tight feedback loops. Rapid testing (you don’t need a .95 p-value - you’re not trying to publish). Daily data scans. Weekly retros. A culture of curiosity. It’s not about reacting faster. It’s about learning faster.
Case in point: we’re building a dynamic creative testing system for one of our clients that integrates both Sales/CRM and market data. As new trends emerge from sales calls, we surface the relevant insights (offer, angle, messaging, pain point, opportunity, benefit), generate creatives & launch initial concepts into the ad accounts. The idea is simple: find the messages that resonate with their target audience as quickly as possible. For most brands, this would be a 30/60/90 day process (if it happens at all). Now, it happens in hours or days. It isn’t far-fetched to think this entire process could be automated in short order, with new creatives ready mere hours after a successful sales call.
The market doesn’t reward effort. It rewards adaptation. You must build systems that accelerate learning—not just activity. Here are a few examples:
- Connect Your Data: most organizations don’t suffer from a lack of data; they suffer from a lack of integration. If you want to be able to evolve, you need data that you can trust and that is connected to other sources of truth (i.e. ad data is connected to CDP/CRM data). The low-hanging fruit here is ensuring that you have enhanced/offline conversions set up (Google Ads), that CAPI is configured (Meta), that you’re collecting + storing click identifiers (i.e. GCLID, FBCKLID, MSCLKID, etc.), that BI data is feeding into ad platforms, etc.
- Set Kill/Scale Thresholds: While Meta (and Google) are far better at analyzing data than any of us (myself included), they’re not infallible. False positives and false negatives are a real thing - and they can go on for far longer than might be advisable. The solution? Establish kill/scale thresholds for ads, campaigns + platforms – if performance falls below the kill threshold for a certain period of time, turn it off. If performance exceeds the scale threshold, throw more money at it. Don’t wait for statistical significance; you’re trying to generate profit, not get published.
- Eliminate Data Dumps; Focus on Learnings + Actions: I loathe reporting meetings. They are miserable to present in, they’re miserable to listen to. Nothing good happens when someone is reading out numbers from a spreadsheet or powerpoint. Instead, send the numbers ahead of the meeting. Expect everyone to read them. Then use the 15/30/60 minutes with the decision-makers to handle the high-leverage items: (i) what went wrong/right; (ii) why did (i) happen; (iii) what are we going to do to either get back on forecast or push the advantage; and (iv) who is accountable for each item discussed? What’s done is done. The past is in the past. Don’t waste the present or jeopardize the future – focus on moving forward.
Adaptation: Building Fitness Over Time
In nature, the fittest species don’t survive by being the fastest or strongest. They survive by being the most in-sync with their environment.
The same goes for marketing & brands.
You can’t brute-force growth forever (just ask Uber). The rules of the game change. Channels shift and audiences evolve - but that doesn’t mean throwing out the playbook every quarter or pivoting every time a competitor breathes.
Adaptation is the art of staying aligned to your north star while moving forward. It’s about refining how you show up—without losing who you are.
Adaptation ≠ Reinvention
Bad adaptation looks like:
- Chasing trends with no connective tissue to your brand/ethos/audience
- Launching new channels without a strategic vision or specific objectives
- Watering down brand identity in the name of “agility”
Good adaptation looks like:
- Reframing your message for the moment + audience
- Evolving the format, not the DNA
- Tightening your offer to match where demand is peaking
A classic example of adaptive fitness in action is Duolingo. The brand didn’t fundamentally change when it leaned into TikTok. Instead, it leaned in. Their social media director embraced the demise of Duo (the owl), leveraged it into a viral moment, opened up an entirely new market, and grew the company’s following to over 16M. Was it unhinged? Yes. Was it effective? Absolutely.
How to Build Adaptive Fitness (Without Reinventing Yourself)
1. Develop an “environmental radar”
Instead of waiting for your client to figure out your competitors have launched a new campaign, or hoping your metrics don’t tank, proactively monitor where the ecosystem is shifting:
- Are buying behaviors changing?
- Is platform preference tilting toward new formats?
- how are conversations on social media changing (social listening is your friend)
- Are competitors reframing the narrative?
This entire process can be automated. Configure an AI agent to proactively scan competitor websites for new angles/offers/specials, review platform data, pull search trends, assess pipeline/CRM data and/or flag anomalies.
2. Use “message-market mapping” as a calibration tool
Adaptation starts with message fidelity. Are your current messages still relevant to where your customer is today—not where they were six months ago? There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing a brand that’s still relying on years-old audience research to inform messaging and/or media strategy; they might as well be trying to cure cancer using the content from the Herculaneum scrolls.
A better solution? Pull your sales calls, customer support chats, reviews, whatever – throw them into ChatGPT (or Gemini), and have it extract the core messages. Map those onto your current go-to-market messages (i.e. headlines, ad creatives, angles, etc.). If there’s a disconnect, shift your go-to-market content.
3. Shift format, not fundamentals
When your environment evolves, you don’t need a new story—you need a new delivery mechanism. This is where the art of content distribution can be a game-changer. Take your highest-performing long-form asset (e.g. video, article, whitepaper, case study) and transform it into 3-4 new formats across different channels (social posts, X thread, short-form article, 3-4 ad creatives, etc.).
4. Redesign offers for current friction, not past assumptions
Offers get stale. Not because they’re bad—but because the buyer’s context changes. What felt urgent in 2024 likely feels irrelevant today. Too many brands insist on running the same offers/sales at the same times every year, despite the fact that the audience is in an entirely different place (mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically - take your pick).
The easiest solution? Interview 10 recent customers/clients Ask what almost stopped them from buying. Then interview 10 prospects who didn’t convert - and ask the same question. Find the overlap between the two sets of data, and you have your next set of offers/angles.
The bottom line is this: adaptation is about precision, not panic. Successfully organizations evolve from a position of insight and strength —not insecurity. You don’t need to be first, loudest, or trendiest. You just need to be more in tune with what the market values right now, without losing the thread of what made you valuable to begin with.
Mutation: Creative Leaps and Strategic Risks
In nature, most mutations are useless (see the ad account example from above - 90% of the creatives provided no benefit to the account). Some are harmful (i.e., the handful that were downright dreadful). But every once in a while, a mutation changes everything. That’s how evolution leaps forward—not just via incremental optimization, but by pairing it with exponential breakthroughs.
Marketing works the same way.
Most brands (willingly or not) optimize to the middle of the bell curve - but they do so under the guise of “best practices.” Standard campaign structure. Same-as-everyone-else KWs. Safe copy. Proven offers. Polished visuals. All perfectly engineered to generate…wonderfully average results. Best practices are where great brands go to retire and die. I don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in either of those things for a long, long time.
If you want to unlock disproportionate outcomes, you need creative mutations. Weird ideas. Unexpected tones. High-risk bets. Controlled chaos.
Remember Dollar Shave Club’s launch video? Shot for $4,500 in the company’s warehouse, packed with profanity, irreverent humor, a guy in a bear costume and a classic line (“I’m no Vanderbilt, but this train makes hay.”), it took a sledge hammer to every “norm” the razor industry held dear. It violated every “best practice” in the advertising playbook. It also drove 12,000 orders in the first 48 hours and rewired how DTC brands thought about launch strategy.
Mutation is how you get noticed in an environment saturated with sameness.
The best brands design for mutation. They are intentional in creating pathways for wild ideas to get to market — without requiring a 12-person signoff or a brand committee’s blessing. These aren't random stunts; they’re structured experiments with asymmetric upside.
A B2B SaaS brand I’ve worked with took this to the extreme, with a “ship first” approach to creative, targeting, platforms, you name it. They allocated a budget and put in place minimal ground rules: as long as there was a sound rationale for the change AND the content of the ad was accurate to the best of the marketing team’s knowledge, ship it. No need to submit a strategy to launch a new channel. No waiting around for approvals from legal, compliance and/or leadership. No brand team sign-off on creative concepts.
Were some of the ads out there? Yup. Did some of those crazy concepts end up performing staggeringly well? You bet.
The reason it worked is because the brand both (a) trusted its people to not go completely mad and (b) wanted a way to introduce mutations that are radically different from what’s in the market. They recognized that the “process” was the problem – it normalized everything. It proactively weeded out the mutations (good and bad) that triggered real evolution.
The key? Don’t mutate for the sake of novelty. Mutate with purpose. Create space for things to evolve in unexpected ways. I honestly think too many of us are so worried about short-term downside (read: the boss/client won’t like this concept) that we lose track of the real downside: stagnation is just slow extinction.
I genuinely think more brands would be more successful if they adopted an approach similar to the B2B SaaS brand: take an axe to “process” & embrace a “ship fast, learn faster” philosophy. Trust your people to make good decisions (after all, if you don’t trust your team to make good decisions, why are they still employed?) and empower your people to capitalize on the opportunities they see.
Disclaimer: I understand that this just isn’t possible in some industries - but even in heavily-regulated industries, there are ways to encourage mutation. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Extinction: What Should Die (But Won’t)
In the natural world, the inefficient and the unfit aren’t coddled - they’re killed off. In the immortal words of Taleb, it’s “Evolve or die.”
Marketers, on the other hand? We love our sacred cows.
One of the joys of doing audits is that I get to see this in real time. I can’t count the number of times I’ve found wildly outdated personas, decaying campaigns, creative assets that even 2016 doesn’t want back, bloated tech stacks and websites that look like something my 94-year-old grandmother would say is ancient. If you’ve worked in marketing for any length of time, you know what I’m talking about.
The story behind these things is (almost) always the same: someone somewhere (usually with a big salary) thinks it still works, so it stays. In some cases, we even waste time creating performance reports to justify underperforming tactics, like that webinar playbook that peaked in fall 2020 that everyone keeps resuscitating. It’s operational necromancy.
It’s a problem.
Every living system improves through subtraction. Extinction is what creates space for new growth. If I’ve learned anything over the last decade, it’s this: you don’t need more ideas. You need fewer zombies.
Challenge yourself to view everything you do as zero-sum: every minute you spend doing X (and every dollar you spend doing X) is a minute and a dollar you can’t spend on something else – so is X the thing you believe is the optimal use of your time and resources? If not, then cut it. Aggressively. Without mercy.
I’m not going to lie to you: it is miserable to do this. It hurts to take an “L” on a service line, SKU, channel, partnership, whatever that you believed would have a transformational impact. But you know what sucks worse than missing on this one? Missing the next one because you held on to a loser for too long.
The solution? Conduct an extinction audit every quarter:
- What channels/tactics/assets are underperforming for 3+ cycles?
- What offerings (SKUs/Services) do not make financial sense?
- What content is no longer aligned with ICP?
- Which social channels has our audience left?
- What site pages have gotten <25 visits in the L30/L60/L90?
- What tools are still in the stack but unused?
- Which nurture flows have flatlined?
I broke this down in detail in the very first issue of the Digital Download (“Simplify Your Marketing World”) - and it’s more true today than it was then.
You’re not a museum curator. You’re running a living system. Cut without mercy.
Speciation: Divergence Creates Advantage
In evolutionary biology (who doesn’t love AP bio references coming back to help you a decade later?) speciation occurs when one group diverges so far from its original form that it becomes something entirely new—and uniquely suited to its niche.
The longer I work in marketing, the more I’m convinced that this is exactly what great marketing does. It doesn’t just segment. It specializes. It evolves a brand into something the competition can’t replicate.
Liquid Death is a fantastic example. They didn’t just sell water. They sold anti-corporate counterculture in a can. Mountain Spring with death metal branding. Could anyone else put water in a can? Sure. Has anyone replicated Liquid Death? Not even close.
Similarly, Notion didn’t become popular because it was slightly better than Evernote. It gained traction because it didn’t behave like a note-taking app. It was legos for productivity. It evolved into a category of one.
Speciation isn’t about creating a new category in a pitch deck. It’s about earning defensibility through functional and emotional divergence. It’s when your brand DNA is so distinct that even if others copy your tactics, they can’t compete with your identity.
Want to speciate? Start by asking:
- What do we do that our competitors won’t? Plenty of brands focus on what makes them different; virtually none actively think about what their competition is unwilling to do (either because of their values, technology, positioning, size, resources, etc.). There’s often an edge to be found in what your competitors think is off-limits.
- What emotional territory do we own? Humans are not rational; we’re rationalizers (to quote Prof. Gerald Zaltzman). We’re emotional creatures – so, what emotion do your customers/users attach to your brand? Brand loyalty is less about specific features and functionalities, and more about identity, pride, defiance, belonging and connection.
- Where do our most passionate users differ from the mainstream? Your superusers are a window into your future niche. Study how they behave, how they talk about your product, what they build with it or say to others. They’re leading your speciation.
- What behaviors do our best customers exhibit that others don’t? Obsessive behaviors are evolutionary signals. They often point to unmet needs the mainstream hasn’t voiced. Study your power users—they’re showing you what to become.
- Where can we create friction that attracts the right people and repels the rest? True brands have edges. What belief, ritual, or design choice could serve as a cultural filter? The goal isn’t to please everyone—it’s to become *indispensable* to the right someone.
- What constraints, unwritten rules or taboos can we intentionally violate? Some of the most iconic brands broke the rules—on purpose. What would feel outrageous to your category but natural to your community? There’s power in strategic provocation.
- If we disappeared tomorrow, what would our niche/market actually miss? This is your acid test. If your brand vanished and your best customers could easily replace you, you haven’t speciated. You’ve commoditized. You need a deeper hook.
Speciation is messy. It means alienating the generalist in favor of the fanatic. But the payoff? A moat made of meaning.
Coevolution: Platforms and Marketers Shape Each Other
In nature, species don’t evolve in isolation. Bees evolved alongside flowers. Wolves shaped the deer, and the deer shaped the wolves. It’s coevolution—two entities adapting in response to each other.
Marketing is no different.
Every platform evolves based on how marketers use it—and marketers evolve based on how platforms change the rules. It’s a never-ending dance. Facebook’s newsfeed changes, and suddenly every creative team is racing to master short-form video. Google tweaks its algorithm, and a cottage industry of SEO gurus emerges overnight. We’ve all been part of this hundreds of times over, whether or not we’ve realized it.
Here’s the part that many marketers miss: you can’t outsmart the system forever. The opportunities created by arbitrage are fleeting - but you can ride the wave, if you understand where it’s going (and have a good idea when it’s time to exit).
A fantastic example of co-evolution in action is/was TikTok. Early adopters who treated it like IG 2.0 failed (and did so quite spectacularly). The ones who studied the native behaviors—authenticity, jump cuts, dances, trending sounds, duets, absurd humor—built followings (and did so fast). When the platform shifted toward longer-form educational content? The best creators (and brands) evolved again.
That’s—at best—table stakes. By the time a tactic becomes a best practice, it’s already on the path to saturation. You're not leading; you're catching up. Put another way: as adoption increases, the surplus value decreases in proportion – there’s zero surplus value in doing something that everyone is already doing.
The best growth teams operate upstream. They think in second-order effects—not just what’s happening now, but what this change sets in motion. They read platform updates like hedge fund managers or stock traders read company updates, with an eye on what happens next.
There’s no reason marketers can’t take this same approach. The next time you read a platform update, force yourself to think through each of these questions:
- How does user behavior evolve after this update? When IG boosts Reels, what happens to time-on-feed for static posts? When LinkedIn promotes newsletter content, does it suppress external links? The behavior change isn’t always immediate—but it’s predictable if you understand incentive design.
- What unintended behaviors will this new feature create? Every product update invites exploitation. IG Stories were intended for sharing; they became a tool for manufactured scarcity. Threads was supposed to be for conversation—it became another broadcast channel (oops). Bluesky was supposed to be the new X/Twitter…but only a segment of the audience joined, so it turned into an echo chamber. Savvy marketers game out the exploits before they become obvious.
- What will become saturated—and what will be undervalued? Most marketers rush to where the spotlight is brightest. The best ones find the shadows. If everyone’s doing TikTok voiceovers, raw talking-head clips become a scroll-stopper. If carousel ads dominate the feed, a single bold static image regains punch. If everyone is running UGC, brand-forward creative suddenly catches the audience’s eye. Look for the negative space. Zig when everyone else zags.
- What types of content/campaigns will become algorithmically expensive—but functionally necessary for our target audience? As platforms shift, some formats become costlier (in terms of reach, CPM/CPC, effort, etc.) even as their strategic importance grows. Example: Publishing thought leadership content on LinkedIn or launching a niche podcast may not convert immediately, but they create the opportunity for reputational compounding over time (which, in turn, increases trust, deal velocity, close rates, etc.). If a platform move makes personal brands more visible, companies that don't invest in the ability to create or leverage them become invisible (at least in the short-to-medium term). The best teams pre-invest in high-cost, high-trust formats before they're table stakes.
- What happens when a tactic works too well and the platform responds? Hyper-efficient tactics often invite platform suppression. If too many advertisers exploit a targeting loophole, it closes. If too many creators game a trend, the algo deprioritizes it. Smart marketers + teams ask: If this scales, will it trigger a response? And if so, what's our backup plan? They avoid over reliance by building parallel strategies—even when things are working.
This is where the real performance edge comes from—not just knowing the rules, but understanding the system well enough to play around them.
Platforms are always shifting. Most marketers react. The best ones coevolve.
Evolutionary Fitness = Strategic Optionality
The strongest species aren’t the ones with the biggest muscles. They’re the ones with the most paths forward. In volatile environments, optionality is the ultimate strategic asset.
If your growth depends entirely on one channel, one persona, or one tactic, you’re not fit—you’re fragile: the instant the environment changes or the competition adapts, you’re finished. We’ve all heard (or known) brands that were over-reliant on a single channel or a single tactic – and when something happened (an algo update, an ad platform tweak, an audience change, a new platform launch, a new security/privacy feature (cough cough iOS14.5 cough cough)) that rendered that thing obsolete, they were in a world of hurt because they had no other path forward.
The most adaptive brands build portfolios of creative, channel, and audience bets. Not because they’re indecisive—but because they understand ecosystems don’t reward linear strategies. There’s a reason the term “glass cannon” has a negative connotation.
Think of optionality as your survival system. It’s what gives you room to maneuver when the environment changes faster than your roadmap.
This is where Taleb’s concept of *antifragility* becomes particularly relevant: fragile systems break under stress, robust systems resist stress, but antifragile systems get *stronger* because of stress. Optionality isn’t just protection—it’s a mechanism for improvement through volatility. It gives you more surface area to absorb shocks and turn disruption (something the current environment has no shortage of) into advantage.
As with everything else, optionality comes in many flavors – but here are the four I tend to think about the most:
Creative optionality: Your brand has more than one audience - so it must be able to speak in more than one way. That means multiple voices, formats, emotional tones, and visual expressions—tailored not just to platform norms but to different segments and sub-segments. This isn't about being inconsistent; it's about being dimensional. Successful brands have the range to show up as sophisticated and buttoned-up on LinkedIn, trendy on TikTok, and human in email— all while creating the same emotional connection with their target audience and maintaining brand consistency. Rigidity is a liability when platforms and expectations evolve at breakneck speed.
Channel optionality: Too many growth strategies hinge on a single channel that “works”—until it doesn’t. CPMs spike. Attribution breaks. An algorithm update cripples performance overnight. We’ve all heard (or seen first-hand) the horror stories (if you haven’t, go check out SEO Twitter after a helpful content update) of a golden goose becoming a cost center.
Channel optionality isn’t about being everywhere. It’s about building a portfolio of asymmetric bets, with each channel playing a complementary role in your customer/client acquisition strategy:
- One channel as your core acquisition engine—where you scale with confidence.
- One as your experimental platform—where you test new hooks, audiences, and formats.
- One as your signal amplifier—used for credibility, virality, or trust-building.
- One as a fallback - usually something similar(ish) to your core acquisition engine that you can rely on to deliver acceptable volume at hyper-efficient costs AND which is somewhat isolated from changes to the core channel (i.e. Bing to Google or Amazon to Meta).
This is also not a case where you’re splitting the budget evenly across these channels (more than likely, 70%+ of your budget is going to the core acquisition engine); it’s about diversifying risk and regaining some measure of leverage over platforms.
For example: a law firm brand might focus on paid search for high-intent lead capture, test new messaging on Meta ads, build thought leadership / credibility on YouTube to create long-term demand and have Yext or Nextdoor as a fallback for generating leads in their local market. Each channel has a job, but the combination creates resilience.
Channel optionality also acts like a failsafe in the event of a major platform change (i.e. bans, fundamental changes, etc.), allowing the smart brand to escape with minimal disruption/damage.
- Are we hostage to one platform’s cost structure or algorithm?
- Which channels provide fast feedback? Which offer long-term compounding value?
- If our top-performing channel shuts off tomorrow, what’s our continuity plan?
Optionality isn’t dilution. It’s insurance. And when $h!^ hits the fan, optionality is often the only thing standing between a tactical setback and getting selected out of existence.
Audience optionality: Your core ICP isn’t your only growth path. Optionality here means understanding adjacent personas, emerging verticals, and alternate use cases. It’s not just about targeting more people—it’s about developing richer segmentation, more relevant messaging, better audience insight across the full spectrum of need states. Optionality gives you the ability to shift offers, angles and messages without losing relevance or diluting your brand messages.
Team optionality: If your team is built around narrow specialists and rigid playbooks, you’re not ready for change. Now more than ever, you want a marketing team stocked with thinkers who see systems, not just tactics. People who can move across functions. Designers who get data. Analysts who understand brand, storytelling and messaging. Marketers who can prototype and ship without handholding or errors. Internal agility is your fastest route to external adaptability.
Optionality is more than flexibility—it’s foresight. It’s the scaffolding that lets you pivot without panic. When you’ve built in room to move, you don’t just survive shifts—you capitalize on them while everyone else is catching up.
The Bottom Line: Evolve or Die
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: marketing is not a fixed playbook. It’s a living system, with all the good (and all the bad) that comes with that. It’s chaotic, messy, frustrating, emotional, unpredictable and utterly insane.
You’re not going to win that kind of a game by playing it safe, following a playbook or imitating others - you’re going to win by identifying your unique advantages and points of leverage, then applying them to the environments where you’re operating.
The brands that dominate are not the ones with the best strategy deck or the highest budget. They’re the ones that evolve the fastest. They test more ideas. Kill weaker ones faster. Adapt more intelligently. Mutate creatively. And build systems that support long-term fitness, not just short-term wins.
If you want to build a marketing organization that is ready for everything 2025 (and 2026) has in store, then you need to adopt the evolutionary framework:
- Embrace variation
- Accelerate selection
- Adapt relentlessly
- Kill what no longer serves you
- Reward useful mutations
- Design for optionality
And never forget: evolution isn’t about finding the perfect answer. It’s about becoming too adaptive to fail.
That’s all for this week. Until next Sunday,
Cheers,
Sam
Loving The Digital Download?
Share this Newsletter with a friend by visiting my public feed.
Follow Me on my Socials