The marketing team is launching campaigns. The agency is testing creative. Someone is rebuilding the website. Someone else is fixing attribution. There are dashboards to review, reports to build, meetings to attend and, increasingly, AI tools helping everybody do all of it faster.
Everyone has a list.
Everyone is working hard.
And sometimes the business isn’t moving at all.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately because of one of our clients.
They’re a specialty retailer with a small, incredibly engaged internal team. They care deeply about the business. They pay attention. They ask questions. They work hard.
So do we.
Over the past year, we’ve produced creative, managed promotions, built reports, held weekly calls, fixed tracking, investigated platform issues and worked through more little fires than I could possibly remember without going back through the record.
And the paid social account has performed extraordinarily well.
Roughly $128,000 in spend has generated about $1.8 million in attributed revenue over the life of the relationship.
The first quarter of this year generated more revenue than the entire prior year.
One month this summer ran more than four times the revenue of the same month a year earlier.
On one recent call, our paid social lead reported that on essentially flat spend, purchases were up by half, revenue was up by more than half, and cost per purchase was down by a third.
Then we moved on to a photoshoot.
I remember sitting there thinking:
What the hell are we doing?
Not because the photoshoot didn’t matter.
Because somehow, one of the most important things happening inside the business had become the least interesting thing in the meeting.
We had become exceptionally good at finding problems
Over the course of the year, an executive saw an old Easter ad on her phone.
We investigated.
The ad had been paused for months. Zero impressions. Zero spend. Zero clicks.
A few weeks later, somebody noticed the word “spring” in an ad running during the summer.
We fixed it immediately.
Then the Easter ad appeared again.
This time it was real. A platform feature had dynamically pulled old media into a live catalog ad.
We found it and fixed it that afternoon.
All legitimate concerns.
And we dealt with them.
But somewhere along the way, I realized something uncomfortable:
Our scoreboard had become exceptionally good at detecting mistakes and surprisingly bad at recognizing progress.
We were measuring toggles, sightings, copy changes and efficiency ratios while the channel we were policing was producing record growth.
Problems demand attention.
Progress rarely does.
That can become dangerous.
Sometimes the problem has moved
There was another pattern hiding underneath all that activity.
Every time paid social found more room to grow, the conversation shifted toward controlling it.
Efficiency targets tightened. Then loosened. Then tightened again.
Eventually, someone on the client side said the quiet part out loud: their organic channels simply couldn’t keep pace with paid as quickly as it was scaling.
Another executive had already identified constraints around suppliers and fulfillment.
That changed the question.
The question was no longer:
How do we make paid social perform better?
It was:
How much growth can the rest of the business currently absorb?
Those are very different questions.
The advertising wasn’t necessarily the constraint anymore.
The constraint had moved.
And every time we tried to solve the new problem by pulling back on the old one, we were treating a business constraint like a marketing problem.
I see versions of this constantly.
A company thinks it needs better advertising when its best products are out of stock.
It thinks it needs more traffic when the website isn’t converting.
It thinks it needs more creative when its economics can’t support the cost of acquiring another customer.
It thinks it has an agency problem when nobody agrees on how performance should actually be measured.
The work may be getting done perfectly.
It may simply be the wrong work.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: we participated in it
This is where I have to point the finger back at us.
We’re a service business.
When a client sees something strange, we investigate it.
When tracking breaks, we fix it.
When they ask for another report, we build it.
When somebody has a question, we answer it.
That’s part of being a good partner.
But experience is supposed to provide something beyond responsiveness.
It’s supposed to provide perspective.
Our job isn’t simply to do everything a client asks us to do.
Our job is to keep asking whether the thing everyone is working on is still the thing preventing the business from growing.
We did the work.
We were slower than we should have been to say out loud that the problem had moved.
That lesson has stuck with me.
Because productivity isn’t the amount of work a business produces.
It’s the amount of meaningful progress that work creates.
AI is about to make this problem much bigger
I’m enormously optimistic about what AI will do for businesses.
We use it every day.
Machines can analyze enormous datasets, monitor accounts continuously, identify patterns, produce reports, organize information, retain institutional knowledge and automate repetitive work at a scale humans simply can’t match.
That should give experienced people more time for the work humans are uniquely good at.
But there’s a catch.
AI can make us dramatically more productive without making us any more effective.
If we point it at the wrong problem, it will happily help us solve the wrong problem faster.
We can produce ten times the creative.
Build ten times the reports.
Run ten times the analyses.
Launch ten times the tests.
Generate ten times the activity.
And if none of it is aimed at what is actually constraining the business, we haven’t created leverage. We’ve industrialized wasted effort.
The scarce resource isn’t going to be output.
We’re going to have more output than we know what to do with.
The scarce resource will be judgment.
What deserves to be worked on?
There’s a question I think every CEO should ask
Look at everything your organization is working on right now.
Marketing.
Sales.
Product.
Technology.
Operations.
Your agencies.
Your consultants.
Your AI initiatives.
Then ask one question:
If we solved everything we’re working on right now, would the business materially grow?
Not: would things improve?
Not: would the dashboard look cleaner?
Not: would everyone have fewer things bothering them?
Would the business materially grow?
If the answer isn’t an obvious yes, I’d start asking why.
Because your company may not have an execution problem.
It may have an attention problem.
And those are becoming increasingly expensive.
Mark R Brown
Founder, Voltage Media