# Top 1% Content Strategies That Stand Out Now **Channel:** Joanna Wiebe **Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgvTvoBpafA **Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/fgvTvoBpafA ## Chapters - 0:00 — AI Slop Reveals Real Skill - 4:18 — Use AI To Co-Think Better - 9:58 — Copywriting Means Selling Results - 15:17 — Build A Real Media Channel - 18:39 — Distribution Beats Perfection Always ## Transcript **[0:00] Speaker A:** AI has given every brand access to the same content strategies for free, but I've never seen a shift like this kill this many brands this fast. I've worked in copy and content for years, and every week I sit across from founders and marketing teams who have no idea they are about to make a strategic mistake that could cost them the business. So, if you want to learn how to use the content strategies that will actually make you win this year, I'm giving you all of my secrets. The first secret is one that everyone overlooks. Understanding the cost of free content from AI and how it affects your content team. I have a friend who won't buy a book anymore if it was published after 2023. A few months back he was reading one on his Kindle and sitting right there in the middle of a paragraph was a leftover AI prompt. **[0:50] Speaker A:** Not a typo or some weird sentence, the actual instructions someone typed into a machine still in the book, still there when it got published. Nobody caught it, nobody even looked. This is what happens when making something costs nothing. Not just books, blog posts, social captions, video scripts, entire ad campaigns, all of it. For years, every brand used the same excuse for why their marketing wasn't working. We can't make enough, writing takes too long, editing takes too long, we don't have the head count to keep up. That was the narrative. Not enough content, not enough results. Then AI showed up and made all of it basically free. You can get a blog post in 30 seconds, a week of social captions ready before your coffee gets cold. What had always been holding them back, how much time and money it took to make any of it, was suddenly gone. **[1:38] Speaker A:** And every brand treated it like Christmas morning, but it's not Christmas morning. It's something that looks like a gift all wrapped up with a nice bow, but when you open it, you find a bomb inside wired to go off across your entire operation. If not being able to make enough content was really what was holding brands back all these years? Then why are we not in a golden age of marketing if everyone can now make infinite content for free? Instead, we're drowning in AI slop. AI writing slop in particular, which means once nobody could hide behind we don't have the resources anymore, what got exposed was not a resource problem. It was what it always was, a skill problem. AI didn't kill anyone's writing job, it just revealed who actually had skill to begin with versus those who did not. If you never had the taste or judgment to know why one word choice worked better than another, if you were just picking things that sounded fine and hoping they worked, there's no skill, there's no taste, there's no judgment **[2:37] Speaker A:** happening there. It's just guessing. And AI guesses too, faster and a lot cheaper than you ever will. AI just guesses based on averages, which is why what it produces is so average. But there was one interesting past exception where quantity really did work. So from the 2000s to the early 2010s, before Google's Panda and Penguin updates cracked down on it, more blog posts and more backlinks genuinely moved the needle regardless of quality. Brands that pumped out huge volumes of content got rewarded for it, but all that content ended up training the very AI platforms running the show today. For years you handed your competition the material to replace you without knowing it, and now algorithms have gone from rewarding volume to rewarding originality and whether the person actually reading or watching it cares enough to stick around. So, do this today. Kill the volume KPI. **[3:32] Speaker A:** Instead of measuring how many posts you push out a week, use one filter, one question before anything gets published. If AI could have written this, why is it going out under your name? And if AI did write it, why are you publishing it in the first place? If there's a real reason something needs to exist, if you're trying to be the page that shows up when someone searches a specific term, or there's a real question your audience has that nothing else out there actually answers, find the one person on your team who can write it properly. The two things that AI cannot fake are judgment and taste, and you need to pick the one person on your team who can write with both of those things. If you've got no one, we turn people into copywriters, so contact us. The link is in the description below. **[4:18] Speaker A:** The second secret is that while everyone else is using AI to outsource their thinking, you should be using it to co-think. Scroll through enough marketing pages right now, and you'll start noticing the same trick showing up everywhere. A headline sets up something obvious, then flips it. It's not a problem, it's a symptom. It's not that you're not attractive, it's that you're attracting the wrong people. The first time you read one of those, it lands, it sounds sharp. Then you see the fourth one that week, and the fifth, and you realize that you weren't actually reading someone's unique insight, you were reading a formula. And that formula is behind every piece of AI slop that dresses up an unremarkable idea as something clever. It's easy to look at a page full of those lines and blame the AI. But, AI did not decide to publish that page, a person did. **[5:04] Speaker A:** Someone typed in a prompt, got that answer back, and hit publish, or let their AI agent publish it without ever pausing to check if it actually said anything. That doesn't happen because of AI. We cannot blame AI. It's what happens when you outsource your thinking, which includes your ability to discern. Here's what's supposed to happen instead. You bring the judgment, AI brings the speed. And when brands get it backwards, that is when slop starts. Think about what happens when your own thinking can't lead a conversation. If you don't know what you're trying to say, and you ask AI to help you say it, it won't tell you you don't know. It'll just write something confident-sounding in whatever direction you pointed it in, wrong turn included. You walk away with a polished version of a bad idea that reads well enough that you don't notice. A few years ago, everyone was convinced the next big career skill would be prompt engineering. **[5:57] Speaker A:** Learn to phrase your requests better and you'll get better results. That's already turned out to be wrong. Instead of finding the right prompt to punch into your keyboard, the skill is leading with good strategic questions from the start. And you find those questions by first thinking, which brings me to one of my favorite pieces of advice on the planet. Think before you speak and read before you think. Read the book The Road Less Stupid. Use thinking time questions with AI. So, when you're trying to plan a new feature release campaign or product launch, for example, open up Claude, feed what you've got so far to it, and ask it questions like, "What don't I see? What assumptions am I making that, if false, would change everything? What would have to be true for this to work? What are the second and third-order consequences **[6:44] Speaker B:** of this decision?" Your job is to think clearly from the start and then use a machine to amplify and dimensionalize your thinking. AI first does not mean human second. If AI is the one leading you instead of the other way around, all it will amplify is confusion because think about what happens when everyone you work with uses AI. A marketing leader uses ChatGPT to generate campaign ideas, gives them bullet points. In a meeting, they read those bullets off to their team. The copywriter plugs those bullets into AI "Write a first draft of an email off of this." What's just happened? Nobody in that chain stopped to actually think. So, the machine is eroding value that fresh ideas could have generated instead of producing value. And that's exactly how an idea gets hollowed out instead of improved. Now, there is a right way to do this, and it actually comes from chess. **[7:34] Speaker B:** Back in 1997, a chess grandmaster named Garry Kasparov lost to IBM's Deep Blue, a computer built to calculate chess moves faster than any human ever could. Now, instead of walking away from that loss, Kasparov used it to create something new, a format where a human and a computer play as one team. It's called a centaur, half human, half machine. In tournaments built around this idea, the human brings strategy and instinct, while the computer calculates possibilities at a speed no person could match. Together, they beat both a solo human grandmaster and a solo computer every time. It's human first, AI second. The human directs the machine where it is useful. That's co-thinking, driven by your extraordinarily powerful brain. Most AI tools let you set instructions for how you want them to talk to you. Yet, almost nobody takes advantage of this. So, go set yours. Tell it to push back on your ideas instead of agreeing with everything you say. **[8:33] Speaker B:** Tell it to defend its own suggestions when you challenge them, and then you need to actually concede when you're the one who's wrong. That's how you build a two-way relationship with AI. Know what each AI platform is actually good for. Claude will give you a deep thinky conversation, albeit a slow one. ChatGPT is better for a quick first pass of an idea. Neither one is replacing the thinking, though. **[8:55] Speaker A:** Each supports a stage of your thinking. Now, this is not a new problem, either. Relying on GPS has been proven to weaken your sense of direction. Mental math gets harder when you rely on a calculator. You Google something, and you cannot remember the answer a minute later. And what about when the stakes are higher? So, take Air France flight 447. It was flying almost entirely on autopilot over the Atlantic. Ice crystals blocked the tubes, causing unreliable airspeed readings. The autopilot then disconnected exactly as it was designed to do. But now, the pilot suddenly had to fly the plane manually. One pilot kept pulling the nose up, putting the aircraft into an aerodynamic stall. They didn't realize they were stalled and continued making the wrong control inputs until the aircraft hit the ocean. This is a real-life tale of what happens not when automation takes over, but when it suddenly vanishes. **[9:49] Speaker A:** Do you know how to do the job you're doing? You bring the expertise, the judgment, the discernment. Keep thinking. Let AI support your thinking. **[9:58] Speaker A:** The third secret is that writing was never about writing. It was about selling and AI has proved that. There are two ads most people can still remember today even though they're decades old. One just says lemon under a picture of a car. The other says think small next to a tiny VW bug. Neither one describes the product. Neither one is clever for the sake of being clever. What made them work is that they did something different what everyone else at the time was doing, which was big, glossy, look how great this is ads. And that's the only reason anyone noticed them at all. Break the pattern everyone else is following and you get remembered. Follow it and you disappear into the noise with everyone else. AI doesn't break patterns. AI follows patterns. Most people think the job of a copywriter is to write well. It's not. **[10:48] Speaker A:** Hiding behind that word copywriter are actually two very different jobs. Content writing plays the long game. It builds trust over time and the connection between it and an actual sale is loose. Copywriting is direct. It exists to get a yes right now on this page, in this email, on this ad. Confuse the two and you'll hire the wrong person for the job every time. Here's what AI has actually proven and it's probably not what you think. If you ask it to write something, what it comes back with is perfectly fine. Clean, correct, reads well, even sounds perfectly fine. Fine does not sell. Clients have paid my agency 20K a month retainers not to write something that sounds perfectly fine. No one's ever paid me to write. It's always been to get results, to get the yes, always. AI doesn't get that. When you ask it to make something persuasive, that's when it starts reaching for actual selling moves. **[11:40] Speaker A:** Things like urgency, a direct call to action, maybe language built around a specific fear or want, but none of that showed up in the first version. It had to be asked for on purpose by somebody who knows. That gap between well-written and persuasive is the whole point of the job of the copywriter. If persuasion showed up automatically the moment writing got good, there'd be nothing to ask for, but there is a gap, which means persuasion was never a byproduct of good writing. It is a separate skill integrated on purpose, and it is the actual job. Good writing was never enough. Even journalism, a job that's for writers, is a storytelling exercise with its own separate rules. Copywriting has rules, too, and they have almost nothing to do with sentence construction, alliteration, or creativity. This is why so many companies hire the wrong person for a copywriting role. **[12:31] Speaker A:** They look for someone who's a strong writer first and assume the selling part just happens when you write copy, like it just miraculously happens. This is such an expensive mistake. Think about every email, ad, page, post that goes out for your company. They all made their way onto the marketing plan for the quarter because the business has financial targets for the quarter, targets that show up like leads and revenue generated. The target the C-suite develops is not write creatively, but then the copywriter gets the brief, and they are operating under the assumption, possibly the delusion, that the business wants them to be creative, that they're getting paid to be **[13:08] Speaker B:** writers. The creative director runs a brainstorm. The copywriter develops concepts. The creative team produces an email that's got a clever headline and punchy language, which the boardroom then reviews and gets terribly frustrated. The boardroom wants to grow the business. The copywriter wants to be creative. The two don't talk to each other, **[13:27] Speaker A:** and you end up with 15 iterations on a Google Doc. Little wonder AI seems like such a solution. What the whole team needs is a reset. What is the job of copywriting in your business? This is the very first chapter of my book, The Copy Selling System. So, make it required reading for your team. And when you're building your content and creative teams, stop hiring for writing ability first. There are fully trained copywriters out there. I know because I have trained them. Recruit them. Put it in the job description. Tell them before you hire them, they need to be trained in this. Growth-focused companies like ClickUp recruit and hire copy leads who've shown they have actual training in the skills, selling-at-scale skills, like completing courses in Copy School. You want a skilled copywriter, which is a completely different skill than being able to generate a nice phrase. **[14:20] Speaker A:** If you already have copywriters you work with, start by empowering them to use AI as a partner, not a replacement. What they need to know is one, they're not going to be replaced by AI, and two, the business has actually done them dirty by not understanding their jobs, by not investing in their skills, and then by judging their work against the wrong metrics. Apologize that the goalposts have moved so much. Tell them the new goalposts, measuring performance against real KPIs. Creative wordplay is not persuasion. Copy that is purely creative needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, not polished. The tools aren't the answer here, either. A better AI model or a smarter prompt won't fix a team that doesn't understand what the job is. What fixes it is everyone agreeing on one thing. Every single piece of copy has to move one specific person one step closer to a decision. **[15:10] Speaker A:** If it's not doing that, it does not matter how well it's written. Understand the person, and you can fix how you talk to them. **[15:17] Speaker A:** But there's a bigger identity question sitting underneath all of it, and it starts with a single word you're probably using wrong. The fourth secret is that everyone thinks content is its own thing, and it's not. Content is media, and a content company is a media company. Say the word content out loud and think about what it actually means. Content is what goes inside a container. It's filler. You put content in a box, in a page, in a slot that needs something in it. The word doesn't promise quality, it just promises a space is no longer empty. Now, say channel instead. A channel has to hold on to people. It has an identity, a reason people come back to it because they want to. Same with a publication, something with an actual editorial point of view behind it. Nobody subscribes to a content creator, they subscribe to a point of view. **[16:02] Speaker A:** This matters more than you might realize. If you think of yourself as making content, you're going to keep asking the wrong question, which is, "Did we post today?" But if you think of yourself as running a channel, that question becomes, "Would someone actually choose to watch this?" Most brands are still clearing the first one while losing pretty badly on the second. Running a real channel means having a recognizable perspective, a face that's memorable, something distinct enough so people can tell it's you before they even see your name attached. And right now, that almost always means video. Not because it's trendy, but because a person's voice and face still read as trustworthy, especially now that so much writing could plausibly have come from AI. Video can be fake, too, sure, but it's really hard, which means there's friction, which means it's not free to do. Most video still has a real person behind it, and science shows that's why it's so powerful. **[16:56] Speaker A:** Now, there's a name for this coined back in 1956 by two researchers, Horton and Wohl. They called it parasocial interaction, the one-sided trust-based bond people form with someone they watch on a screen even though that person doesn't know they exist. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is more valuable now than it's ever been. If you're a plastic surgeon, video is what gets someone to stop scrolling in the first place. A real patient, a real before and after. If you're a graphic designer, video helps show your process. The best storytelling rule has always been show, don't tell. Video is great for showing, which is why it belongs heavily in your content strategy. The question is not whether you should invest in video or invest in copy. Your content strategy needs both. Each format has its strengths. A great exercise is to take a copy of your org chart and try replacing the titles with the outcomes of So, replace copywriter with lead generator, replace designer with trust builder, replace video editor with attention holder. **[17:53] Speaker A:** You're not a content team. You're a channel or a publication, whatever word fits your brand as long as it's not content. And this word change is not decoration. It sets clear goal posts for the people in the role and establishes their business value for their peers. Then build the four things an actual channel needs. An editorial point of view people can recognize, at least one real face attached to the brand, a plan for getting that in front of people consistently, and a willingness to lead with video first because right now video is what earns the trust that gets someone to stick around long enough to read anything else that you may publish. But the channel, the face, the video, none of that matters if nobody ever sees it, which brings us to the last point and it's the one most people get bass-ackwards. **[18:39] Speaker A:** The fifth secret is that distribution beats perfection every time. This means that you have to stop thinking in funnels and focus instead on distributing your messages. When a comedian builds a Netflix special, they don't write the whole thing, walk on stage, and perform it cold. They test material in smaller clubs first in front of maybe 30 people. Half the jokes bomb. They cut those, keep the ones that kind of landed, tweak the ones that almost work, and go do it again somewhere else the next night. By the time you see the special, every joke in it has already survived dozens of rooms. It's not the first draft. It's what survived all those rounds of testing. Now, most brands do the opposite. They treat every single email or ad like it has to be perfect right out of the gate. Finalize, finalize, finalize, and then publish to crickets cuz you were wrong. **[19:25] Speaker A:** The mistake most brands make is thinking their content is failing because it's not good enough. It's usually not that. It's because they're treating every single post or publish like a launch. But, what they should be doing is treating it like a rep. A launch is rare, high-stakes, and takes forever to prepare. So, it makes people freeze instead of ship. A rep is cheap and fast, and if it flops, nothing bad happens. You just learn something to apply next time. Instead of paralyzing you, reps build you. Perfection is where people hide, and the market is the only thing that can actually tell you if something works, not a conference room. So, test campaign promises, outcomes, and offers in small, low-risk ways months before the campaign runs. Television advertisers have always done market tests. As a media company, you need to do the same. When he was generating a title for his book, Tim Ferriss printed off pages with different titles on them, went into bookstores, and wrapped the pages around books. **[20:21] Speaker A:** Then, he sat back and watched which ones shoppers reached for. That's how he landed on the title The 4-Hour Work Week, an international bestseller. Dropbox did something similar. Before they'd coded their product, they made a simple video showing how file syncing would work, and used the response to decide whether to build the thing. Zappos did the same thing with far less money. The founder photographed shoes already sitting in stores, listed them online, and only bought a pair once someone actually ordered it. He validated the entire business before it cost him anything. The point is not to post more for the sake of it, but to make sure every rep teaches you something before the next one. And testing in public does not mean being provocative just to get a reaction. If you say something wildly contrarian just to see what happens, ask yourself first if that's really the reaction you want. **[21:09] Speaker A:** At the same time, don't be afraid to say what needs to be said from your brand's point of view. If your marketers are tastemakers, they will understand the difference. Trade the launch mindset for the rep mindset starting now. Stop aiming for one perfect swing, aim for more swings, more at-bats. That's how you learn what's going to work right now, not moving slowly and following old, outdated playbooks. Iterate in small, fast cycles instead of big, slow ones. Publish before you feel ready and let your audience help you finish figuring it out. That's huge, and that part will feel uncomfortable. It's supposed to. Now, before any of that works, decide what you actually stand for. This is not optional, and it's not something you can skip by just posting more often. Once you know that, the job is simple, repeat it relentlessly in public one small rep at a time. **[22:00] Speaker A:** If you're a founder or a consultant trying to build a real personal brand around what you stand for, and you're ready to turn that into actual revenue, it's exactly what we cover in the next video. It will walk you through how to go from making a few thousand dollars a client to a hundred thousand a client, and distribution is a massive part of how you get there. Go check it out next.