Appetite for destruction
Becoming tiresomely nostalgic is a cliché for a reason. Barely a day passes when I don’t sound like some ornery throwback, telling people what life was like before digital, when people had functioning attention spans and actual social skills and when the media world was both prestigious and lucrative.
This final point was so true that the Australian newspapers where I cut my teeth as a finance journalist were known universally as the “rivers of gold.” It was an entirely accurate description of the gusher of money that flowed in daily from advertising, reaching its weekly apex with a doorstopper of a Saturday edition bursting with classifieds and display ads and full-color inserts.
Then came the internet. News suddenly became a commodity people expected for free, the rivers dried up as advertisers fled online, and publishers collapsed as they clung stubbornly to an instantly obsolete business model. It took years for those still standing to realize the route to relevance and revenue was through truly distinctive content, especially by offering deep investigative work and authoritative, narrative-shifting opinions.
Sound familiar? The world of thought leadership is now following the same trajectory.
Fifteen years ago, “thought leadership” was a cottage industry. A handful of major professional-services firms and academic-adjacent publications understood the value of codifying their intellectual capital, but it took most much longer to realize content’s ability to define and burnish reputations, foster trusting relationships, and ultimately generate revenue.
When they did, the use of thought leadership as a marketing vehicle exploded. And if everyone with a keyboard thought they were a thought leader before the arrival of AI, it’s exponentially worse since. Between insufferable self-promotion on LinkedIn and the ability to almost instantly create a passable facsimile of serious content, audiences have been totally overwhelmed—but still crave truly distinctive thought leadership.
“As they consume more material, business leaders are becoming better at recognizing the difference between genuine insight and content that merely summarizes familiar trends,” the global leader of the IBM Institute for Business Value, Anthony Marshall, wrote recently. “To earn—and retain—executive attention, thought leadership needs a distinctive point of view, credible evidence, and practical, tangible implications.”
It sounds obvious because it is, but it’s worth the reminder. And while I’ve argued for more than 18 months that the only logical endpoint of the impact of AI on thought leadership will be a flight to quality, that transition is now being imposed on companies—just as digital disrupted the model for traditional media at the turn of the century.
Organizations need to double down on developing and publishing thought leadership of genuine quality that clearly addresses the needs of its audience, presented in whatever format and through whatever channel they demand. It could be a report. An article. A blog post. A social media post. It doesn’t matter so long as it clearly advocates a perspective that’s fresh and forces leaders to think differently about how they can solve their toughest problems.
And if the thought of that investment—in everything from research capabilities to editorial firepower to communications experts—seems daunting, consider this. Just before launching its website in 1996, TheNew York Times averaged weekday print circulation of around 1.1 million, rising to around 1.8 million copies on Sundays. It was dominant and influential and, yes, printed money. Yet the internet shattered its business model for more than a decade before the newspaper began its long climb back.
Today, TheNew York Times has around 560,000 print subscribers . . . and 12.5 million digital users. It erected a content paywall in 2011 to clearly signal its work was valuable; has eliminated traditional, commoditized reporting beats like sports (now outsourced to The Athletic); and doubled down on distinctive content, from news to opinion, games, and recipes. An example: The newspaper just published an investigation into law firm Paul Weiss’s capitulation to the Trump administration that takes 29 minutes to read. 29 minutes! Meanwhile, TheWashington Post—which had three million digital subscribers in January 2021—has moved the other way, hollowing out its newsroom and opinion writers and taking around a million subscribers with it.
AI has made “thought leadership” too easy to create. While the technology has clear relevance and applicability for how content is developed and published, companies should learn from the internet experience: Achieving ongoing relevance and success requires focusing on quality over quantity, spurning the easy route to walk the admittedly much harder road of creating truly world-class thought leadership. But it’s worth it. And if the obvious rewards aren’t enough, do it for me. I mean, how else will I be able to, a decade from now, quietly chuckle as colleagues reminisce about the world of thought leadership before AI?
This was published on LEFF Field, the Substack home of LEFF Communications. You can view the original post here.