When Building Gets Cheap, Being Heard Gets Expensive

gcwagner.com | October 2026 | G.C. Wagner

AI has made it cheap to build products and to produce words. What it hasn't made cheap is knowing who your customer is and earning their attention. That's why I think marketing, and especially marketing built on real expertise, is gaining ground. It's also why the "easy" parts of content work are disappearing.

Two years ago, the received wisdom was that content jobs would be among the first to go. My own inbox tells a different story. I'm getting more projects of more kinds. More of my clients are building their business around marketing, and in many cases the marketing is months ahead of the product.

That's anecdotal, so I wanted to see what the data says. It backs part of my hunch and corrects part of it.