🟡 Your Brand Isn't Bad. But It Might Be Invisible.

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A CEO called me last week. Fifty retail locations. A brand with real heritage, decades of it.

He’d hired a social agency. His words: “I picked someone who looked like they knew what they were doing.” They got in, and it became obvious that they didn’t understand the brand.

Not the heritage. Not the historical significance. Not the work that had been put in on every other channel for years.

Then he said the thing that stuck with me: “We were great on TV. Where the attention was is not where it is today. How do we translate that into meaningful moments on social without sacrificing all the brand equity we built?”

That’s the question. And notice what he didn’t say. He didn’t say his brand was weak. It isn’t. His brand is invisible where attention now lives. Those are different problems, and they get treated with different medicine.

I get some version of this call a few times a month. “We don’t have the footprint we had in ’95. Or ’05. Or 2010.” And the pattern behind it is almost always the same.

These brands became dependent on paid advertising. And paid is a shield. When you’re buying your impressions, you never have to find out whether your creative actually moves anyone. The spend guarantees the eyeballs, so nobody ever asks if the content earned them.

Then the brand tries to show up organically and falls straight into the commodity content trap. Risk-averse posts. Copying whatever’s “working.” Chasing trends. Blindly stacking impressions and calling it a strategy.

But impressions aren’t the game. Here’s the distinction that matters:

Advertising is the act of getting impressions. Brand is the act of tying your offering to a customer’s want at the moment they think of it.

When a family thinks “fun night out with the kids,” I want them to think Shakey’s Pizza, one of our clients here in California. Not a competitor. Not a category. The name. Every piece of content either reinforces that position in the consumer’s mind or it doesn’t. Impressions that don’t do that job are just noise you paid for.

The other killer is stakeholders. Too many people in the approval chain who are afraid to take a chance, and what comes out the other end is watered down. And watered-down creative has a very specific performance profile: everyone looks at it once, goes “oh, okay,” and scrolls.

Content with a voice gets shared. Content that ruffles feathers gets shared. Content that is distinctly for someone gets shared. You can get there through education, entertainment, story, whatever fits your brand. Just don’t water it down.

And I’ll take my shots at both sides here. Agencies lack the courage to tell clients “we have to take this swing, and here’s why.” Internal teams aren’t willing to fight for a piece of content up the org chart. That CEO with fifty locations got burned by an agency that looked the part and never pushed back on anything. If your agency has never told you something you didn’t want to hear, you don’t have an agency. You have an order-taker.

Here’s the part that should change how you think about this: taking a swing on organic content carries almost no downside.

If a post falls flat, you’re not paying for distribution. Nobody sees it. The algorithm isn’t some robot deciding who deserves likes. It’s just a scoreboard of how actual humans reacted to your content. A flop costs you nothing but the production. A hit can carry your brand for a quarter.

That’s the asymmetry. Put two or three times the effort into a real idea and you might get ten, twenty, one hundred times the output. We’re in a feast-or-famine cycle on social, and famine is the default. Feasting requires taking chances.

Because the “build incrementally” era is over. That was a fun thing people sold. Your options now are two: pay for attention, and watch those ad costs climb every year on Meta, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Or make content that puts you in the cultural conversation and actually stands for something.

The best part about the CEO’s question is that it answers itself. You don’t protect brand equity by hiding it. You protect it by putting it where the attention is. Heritage sitting in a filing cabinet isn’t equity. It’s inventory.

When you play to the middle, you play to be invisible.

Pick a position. Take the swing.

P.S. If you want to connect on social media, where I share tips throughout the week, follow me on Linkedin.