The 0.14% Strategy

This isn’t an “AI is the devil” or an “AI is nirvana” article. It doesn’t matter.
The real question is: Is AI helping?

I’m a video producer. AI speeds up the mechanics of my work enormously. But it isn’t creative. It’s average. By design. It makes up for unoriginality by iterating endlessly and discovering answers that work.

Some people consider AI-iterated content a strategy. I consider it a broken clock.

I’ve got an antique clock that belonged to my parents hanging in my office. It’s 9:13. Has been for years. Twice a day, it’s right. Two minutes out of 1,440. That’s 0.14%.

If your strategy is to iterate content, and discover the best combination of a headline, tag, copy & images, and then put that in front of the right person at the right time, you’ve got a 0.14% strategy.

But that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is you’re going to sound like your competitors, because they’re running the same plan.

To be fair, the math is tempting. When AI makes content almost free, a 0.14% hit rate doesn’t look so bad. In fact, if you hang 720 broken clocks, each stopped at a different minute, one of them is always right.

The trouble is, everyone else has done the same math.

HubSpot, which sells AI content tools, surveyed more than 1,500 marketers. 71% say AI helps them create significantly more content, and about half say it’s made content so easy to create that it’s become less effective.

Think about that. Half the marketers making all that content believe it’s less effective. They know. They keep making it anyway, because cheap is easy to approve and durable is hard to prove.

On their own podcast, HubSpot’s top marketing executives called the result a sea of sameness. Their answer is to teach the AI your “taste,” then increase the amount of content: great content at scale, a new round of tests every sprint, and more ad variations every month. In their words, “The new benchmark for paid advertising is 20 creatives a month.”

And when the algorithm picks the winner out of 20, it isn’t just choosing your audience. It’s choosing your message. You’ll probably get more clicks. But next month you’ll need 20 more, because a message picked for clicks wears out. One built on what’s true doesn’t.

So making content keeps getting cheaper, and getting anyone to care keeps getting harder. The platforms and content creators get paid either way. The brand trying to grow is the only one who needs it to actually work.

It isn’t a new idea, but it’s usually mistaken for a testimonial, and that undersells it. The people closest to your product can explain it with an authority no pitch can match.

A message built this way is durable, not disposable. It lasts for years because it’s built from the reasons your product or service actually works, not the features, benefits, and claims every other company in your space is already making.

Here’s the part that matters. It isn’t written. It’s revealed.

The people who created your product explain why.
The people who build it explain how.
Your clients explain what changed for them.
All in their own words.
All unscripted.

A pitch is an opinion. It has to be, because the person making it has a reason to make it. But several people who weren’t given talking points, each describing the problem they had, how it was fixed, and the benefits they experienced afterward, using their own words, is the closest thing to proof you’re going to get. You already know this. It’s why you ask for recommendations before hiring vendors or choosing products.

Yes… AI could generate a room full of convincing clients, all describing the same results. But a synthetic version showing your clients agreeing isn’t a weaker version of the real thing. It’s a lie. The real one works because the agreement actually happened — people with no reason to coordinate, arriving at the same answer on their own. That’s evidence. A generated version is evidence of nothing but a prompt.

James Surowiecki wrote about why this works in The Wisdom of Crowds. Ask a diverse group of people a consistent set of questions, separately, and their combined answer is often closer to the truth than the smartest person in the group.

One voice can do it too, if that voice is authentically sharing valuable content gleaned from their experience, not crafted with an agenda. Many brands already have content like this sitting on a hard drive or a folder in the cloud: unscripted conversations about the product, podcast interviews, keynotes, and media appearances. The key is that it’s unscripted, and that it’s true. Seems like a low bar, but it’s rare.

So what separates it from a testimonial? A testimonial is a compliment. This is convergence, and convergence can’t be manufactured. It’s either there or it isn’t. The editing decides which pieces to use. It doesn’t decide what anyone said.

Which means the method can fail. If the stories don’t line up, there’s no message to build, and that isn’t a video problem. It’s a product problem. I’ve never seen it happen, though I suspect that’s because the companies I’ve worked with have products and services that genuinely work.

Videos built this way keep working long after most content expires, because they aren’t written by the brand, or a copywriter, or lately a trained model. They’re built from the voices of the people closest to the subject.

Here’s what durability looks like. Five years ago I made a video for Brand Builders Group. Nine unscripted interviews with clients and the strategists who serve them, each telling the story from their side of it. It’s still on their homepage. In that time, the company has grown from seven figures to mid-eight. They paid for the video once.

They weren’t the only ones. CityWide Plumbing‘s video has been live on their homepage for seven years, while their retail product made it onto the shelves at Lowe’s and Home Depot. Prime Food Distributors‘ video has been live for eight years, as they transitioned from a regional supplier to a global supplier.

The videos didn’t build those companies. Video never does. But as those companies grew, the message never needed to be replaced. Like your most reliable employee, it just kept doing its job while they did everything else right.

The people who know your business best are already in your contacts. You’ve just never asked them. It’s a small imposition, and also an opportunity to deepen the relationship. In my experience, people usually say yes.

You know the feeling when your product is better than your marketing?

That gap comes from building your message inside out. No matter how well it’s crafted, your message is still … your message.
But when you build it from the outside in, from what your clients already say about you, it’s not only durable. It’s true.