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Field Notes #093: A Tribute to the Old School

Field Notes #093 - A Tribute to the Old School

Anyone tired of the breathless “if you’re not doing X, you’re going to be left behind” takes?

They are white noise to me. Banner blindness. Nothing more than a lazy hook designed to capture my attention. 

They’re also not usually specifically true. 

Generally, they’re true. You shouldn’t let your skills ossify. You should constantly be reinventing yourself and learning new tools, tricks, methods so you’re not still running the same playbook over and over again. 

Yeah, that makes sense. 

But when we get into specific novelties, the recommendation is usually evangelism from a vendor, Solutionism, or FOMO to get engagement. 

Like, I saw a post the other day saying if you weren’t doing “personality-led content” you’d be left behind. Okay? Where’s the SAP account slinging unhinged memes on social media? 

The most common one of these is AI. 

“AI won’t replace you. Someone using AI will.” 

How many newsletter empires have been built off that hook?

I’m no luddite. My team and I were all early adopters of generative AI. But this is just patently untrue and hyperbolic. 

As someone who is constantly hiring, I can tell you what is true: those using AI, blatantly and lazily, are not even making it to the interview. But someone not using AI, who is otherwise smart, competent, and thoughtful, is.

So objectively, at least right now, that pithy hook is not true universally. 


Don’t get swept up in the consensus. What people are focusing on is a first order effect – the individual utility of AI (or some other tool, tactic, or channel) – but they’re forgetting about second and third order effects.

The Tragedy of the Commons and Diminishing Impact

When I interviewed Chris Toy, CEO of MarketerHire, on the podcast, it was a thrilling dialogue about the future potential of AI, automation, and personalization at scale.

I love geeking out on what’s possible, what we can hack together and build. And he’s clearly thinking about this stuff in an intelligent and effective way. 

However, I couldn’t get one nagging doubt out of my head: the tragedy of the commons. 

Think rationally here:

  • First order – generative AI makes it easier to create content. This means you can write more cold emails and publish more blog posts. You can comment on 100s of LinkedIn posts without breaking a sweat. This is good for you, as you can scale yourself. 
  • Second order – the barrier to entry is lower, and everyone else does the same thing, flooding inboxes, blogs, and LinkedIn with lower quality content. Supply rises, which means demand decreases.
  • Third order – we collectively start to develop defense systems and filters for the influx of content, which means new signals of trust and quality will emerge. These are usually a reaction against the flood of supply, such as hard to fake signals of authenticity. 

You’re already seeing this play out with Google search to a degree:

  1. SEO Heist guy figures out you can scrape a site map and copy 1000s of pages relatively quickly. Gets a short term win. 
  2. Every arbitrage marketer does something similar. Floods supply side. Google results become terrible. 
  3. Google prioritizes brand even more, because it’s a hard to fake signal. 

The “tragedy of the commons” refers to a situation in which individuals, acting in their own self-interest, overuse and deplete a shared resource, ultimately harming everyone in the process. The classic example is a group of herders who graze too many animals on a shared piece of land, resulting in overgrazing and the eventual destruction of the pasture.

Any individual marketer has no incentive to curtail their usage of tools to keep the “commons” (the internet) a healthy place for the collective. We rely on platforms and algorithms to police self-serving behavior. Then we evolve our tactics in a never-ending cat-and-mouse game to find alpha. 

Even if you don’t care about the commons, I believe the chase for short term arbitrage is a high risk bet (see Icarus) and low reward on a long enough time horizon. 

More interesting to me is to focus on the third order effects of technology and behavioral shifts like this – the point at which we develop new and better filters for what to pay attention to. Because if we can figure out those levers, we future proof ourselves. That’s where the fun part of marketing comes in. 

Zig When They Zag

As Mark Twain put it, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” 

I’d add, it’s also usually a phenomenal time to veer deliberately away from the majority in order to stand out. 

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Think of it this way (and I’m so happy I get to reference Forgetting Sarah Marshall here):

When life gives you lemons (the new thing), you can make lemonade (made with artificial lemon flavoring and Yellow #5 food dye) and compete with everyone else selling low grade lemonade now. 

Or, you can say “fuck the lemons,” and bail

If everything is going digital, maybe go back to print like The Onion. If all of your competitors are creating short form videos, maybe write long form essays about “the tragedy of the commons” in your weekly newsletter (hello). 

A key component of strategic thinking for me is to identify gaps in the market and to triangulate those with my own strengths, which form opportunities. SWOT, baby! 

Our team at Omniscient is adept at long form writing and we’re quite socially skilled compared to the average SEO. So we index heavily on content like this newsletter and essays (e.g. Barbell Strategy), we do interview-based podcasts, and we host a bunch of IRL events

We’re also taking our own medicine: 80% of our work is based on predictable and stable bets, and then we experiment and do wild stuff with the remaining 20%.

I’ll tell you what: a lot of our leads come from “boring SEO content.” 

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On the experimental side, we’re producing a print magazine is an example of that. We’re working on automated and personalized outbound sales right now as an experiment. We’ve built CustomGPTs. Maybe someday we’ll do a conference, but we’ll make it a unique Omniscient experience. Who knows!

We’re not curmudgeonly haters constantly referencing the “good old days.” But we respect the fact that a lot of boring stuff still works really well, if you execute on it really well.

The Cyclical Nature of Fashion

There’s this idea that fashion trends repeat themselves. 

What was popular in the 1990s, thankfully for me and my millennial cohort, is popular again.

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To be completely honest, I understand very little about fashion and had to Google this idea to see if it really is a thing – and it is. 

But I see the same thing with trends in marketing, business, and growth.

It almost feels like there’s a collective pendulum in our industry, where once the consensus has ossified, a few contrarians take the polar opposite side, and then the pendulum starts to swing back to the other extreme. .

Take, for example, the concepts of the Minimum Viable Product and The Lean Startup. 

It was all the rage when I graduated university 10 years ago. Now? Then there was some pushback on the idea. Seems to have mostly faded away from the startup zeitgeist now. 

I had coffee with a serial founder the other day, and we were riffing on this idea of channel concentration versus a diversified and integrated approach. 

In other words, you used to, as a startup founder, be on the hunt for the One Channel with massive impact and scale that would take you to your next few funding rounds. 

Now, the more common approach is to take on a variety of channels with smaller isolated impact, but a large composite impact. We learned about this “new” way in college – it was called Integrated Marketing Communications, and there was an entire class about it! 

Growth at all costs? No more. Post-pandemic and post-ZIRP era is all about profitable growth. 

It used to be cool to say you were data-driven and to eschew mere opinions. Now? Being creative and ignoring the data is coming back into fashion.

What’s fun is if you get old enough to go through a few cycles, you see the same idea pop up under a different name. Permission marketing, meet owned media. Demand creation, meet brand marketing. BBQ content, or classic blogging? What’s a podcast but an on-demand radio show that you can cut up into TikTok clips?

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Point is, trends come and go. It may be more fruitful to ask, “What stays the same over time?” 

What’s Lindy?

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” – Ecclesiastes 1:9

The Lindy Effect is another concept popularized by Nassim Taleb. 

It states that the life expectancy of non-perishable things (like ideas, technologies, books, or institutions) increases with their age. In other words, the longer something has existed, the longer it is likely to continue to exist in the future.

I never liked these “old way vs new way” straw man arguments, but my crusty ire aside, Ronnie is completely right: this “new” stuff has been around for a minute. 

To throw in a bit of Yellowbird habanero sauce (AKA spice), I’ll add that the old way still works, too. Tom Whatley left a succinct comment to that effect:

“The funny thing is, most of the things in the “old” stack still work. If you remove words like “drier” and “cringey.” SEO works. Email still works. Shit execution of any of those things does not.”

That’s why it’s so important to think from first principles and to have an understanding of foundational systems and human behavior. 

For example, I don’t believe search is going to die, because of three precepts:

  • All of the possible content and information has not been created yet
  • The matching of that content and information with consumers queries has still not been perfected
  • People have a desire to find specific information to solve their problems

If all three of these are true, then search (and thus optimization for search visibility) remains valuable and opportune, even if our current paradigm of search (Google, 10 blue links with ads) changes. And it will

People, throughout time, seem to love stories, right? They love being entertained? Okay, so that’s unlikely to change. Can you find a way to tell stories and be entertaining, and to capture some of that attention and funnel it towards your product, solution or service? 

Right — so the medium and tactics may change, but the fundamental human desire sticks around. 

And if you focus on which principles stick around, the process of figuring out how the tactics and tricks are changing becomes really, really fun.

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Alex Birkett

Alex is a co-founder of Omniscient Digital. He loves experimentation, building things, and adventurous sports (scuba diving, skiing, and jiu jitsu primarily). He lives in Austin, Texas with his dog Biscuit.