When Everyone Is Publishing, Original Thinking Becomes the New Currency

Last month, I reviewed forty-three pieces of content before our weekly content meeting.

Forty-three articles, posts, and thought leadership pieces — all on digital marketing trends, all published in the same week, all saying roughly the same thing. Different logos at the top. Same ideas underneath.

That is not a content problem. That is a thinking problem.

And it is the most important challenge facing anyone in communications and digital marketing right now.

We optimised for frequency and forgot about purpose

Somewhere along the way, brands got obsessed with the content calendar. Post three times a week. Maintain consistency. Stay visible. The publishing cadence became the goal — and what actually got published became secondary.

AI made this worse before it made it better. Suddenly, the blank page was never blank. Content was always available. But available is not the same as valuable. And a feed full of perfectly structured, impeccably formatted, utterly forgettable articles is the price we are all paying for that trade-off.

When publishing becomes a schedule, thinking becomes a bottleneck. And most people quietly remove the bottleneck.

What original thinking actually looks like

It is not about being contrarian. It is not about manufacturing a hot take at 8 AM on a Monday.

Original thinking, from where I sit, is the specific observation that only comes from being inside the work. It is the campaign that performed exactly as the brief promised — and yet left the client unsatisfied, because the brief itself was measuring the wrong thing. It is the audience behaviour that contradicted every best practice we had built our strategy around. It is the moment you realise that what the data is telling you directly contradicts what every industry report is saying — and you have to decide whether to trust the report or trust your own numbers.

Those moments are everywhere in this work. Most of us just do not stop long enough to write them down.

The AI reality no one is saying loudly enough

AI has made average content free. Which means the market value of average content is approaching zero.

Recommended by LinkedIn

New Year resolutions for the Indian PR Professional

Shiv Shankar Devaraaj  7 years ago

Dare To Win- How We did it in PR

Shiv Shankar Devaraaj  7 years ago

The Changing PR Landscape

Shiv Shankar Devaraaj  7 years ago

What AI cannot do is sit across a client who is three months from a product launch, nervous about a market they do not fully understand, and find the exact framing that makes their story land with credibility. It cannot feel the room in a campaign review when something is technically working but strategically off. It cannot bring the pattern recognition that comes from two decades of watching what actually builds reputation versus what just builds impressions.

That lived experience — specific, sometimes uncomfortable, occasionally wrong — is the only thing that cannot be generated.

Why this is a business argument, not just a content one

In communications, we understand something that pure marketing functions sometimes miss. Content is not just publishing. It is positioning.

Every article you put out is a signal about how you think. And in a market where everyone is visible, how you think is what differentiates you. Original thinking builds authority. Authority builds trust. Trust builds relationships — with clients, with media, with talent, with the audiences that matter most to your business.

This is not about going viral. It is about being the person — or the agency — that people turn to when they need a perspective they can actually rely on.

Before you hit publish, ask yourself one question

Could anyone else in my industry have written this?

If the honest answer is yes — it is not ready yet. Go back to the specific observation, the uncomfortable truth, the moment from your own experience that no one else was in the room for.

That is your original thinking. That is your currency.

And right now, it is worth more than any content calendar can account for.

What is the last piece of content you read that made you stop and actually think? I would love to know.

‍