"The fact of Barack Obama, of Michelle Obama, changed our lives. Their very existence opened a market. It is important to say this, to say it in this ugly inelegant way. It is important to remember the inconsequence of one's talent and hard work and the incredible and unmatched sway of luck and fate. I knew it even as it was happening. I felt that I had not changed, but the world was changing around me. It was as if I had spent my years jiggling a key into the wrong lock. The lock was changed. The doors swung open, and we did not know how to act."
—Ta-Nehisi Coates on being a Black writer in "Notes from the Second Year" from We Were Eight Years in Power
The lock changed
When I was little, I wanted to be an editor when I grew up. This small burning was shelved for a couple decades while I studied finance and international business, tried UX design and federal innovation and consumer marketing, then got into B2B brand management with writing samples from a food media publication I had started on the side.
As a writer who's mostly worked on the commercial sides of startups - closer to sales than product - I am well aware that words are not enough to spend your days on. There is people managing and influencing. Client whispering. Making things look nicing. Investor updates to write, team newsletters to send. No time for the story starfield you want to map out, sketching out the narrative edge of your organization.
And yet — AI's very existence opened a market for editorial strategy. Not despite easily generated content, but because of it. It is important to say this, to say it in this ugly inelegant way.
Everyone's jiggling the same "productivity" key. AI will free up your time, AI will make you more efficient. But the lock is changing. It's not about incremental improvements to your work life; it's about the problems that were always there to begin with, now intensified by boundary-breaking tools.
Editorial is not your blog
When I say editorial, I mean a publication, a platform for corporate storytelling that is distinct from (though complementary to) what you think when you think content marketing. It is not: Homepage > Resources > Blog > "8 Tips for Better Remote Collaboration."
It's something that can usually be traced to a couple reasons for existence:
Product loyalty plays. Stripe & Stripe Press. Amex & Resy. Chase & The Infatuation. These companies bought or built editorial arms because content compounds customer relationships in ways that product features alone can't. When your product is commoditized - as often in financial services - the conversation is the moat.
Founder belief regardless of market conditions. Someone at the top believes in it so deeply that they'll back it up to investors even when the metrics don't immediately justify it. After all, it's their job to make that case.
AI has re-leveled the field because most companies are starting at the same place again. Nobody knows how to talk about this yet. The selling point is some iteration of "Our AI-enabled product frees you up to do your real work." It applies to market leaders too - the latest ChatGPT ads remind me of TikTok's search ads. Cinematic in style, showing how technology helps us be more present in our "real" lives.
I did appreciate Anthropic's "Keep thinking with Claude." So did a YouTube commenter: "instantly gained my respect, i love the creativity of the ad, but mostly the music choice. R.I.P MF DOOM"
Claude may be onto something, but even they must carve their way out of the mainstream malaise of the AI narrative. Freeing up our time for "better" work is still a productivity narrative disguised as worker empowerment. It's still in primary service of corporate growth - helping companies make more money in the name of creativity.
Conversation is the moat
That's the easiest narrative to sell - subway ads in NYC more or less amount to "less time on ops, more time for the important stuff." The hyper-specific customer pain point story is valid for your marketing campaigns, but it shouldn't be the same story you pitch to Fast Company for that writeup you're gunning for.
Look at Figma, Canva, Miro, Adobe - they compete but they're also having multiple conversations across domains. Add in the Cursors and Replits to the table, everyone competing for Most Interesting Dinner Party Guest. Today's editorial landscape is like a convention center full of companies with conversational ADHD (which I say lovingly). It's easier to capitalize on trending narratives instead of owning one conversation deeply.
Figma's strength is in bringing creativity to commercial culture. They've made a tool that business users - not just designers - actually want to use because it makes the work feel different. When 2/3 of your users aren't designers, you're not selling design software anymore. You're selling a way of working that elevates craft and brings play into the boardroom.
That's a narrative worth owning: tools that don't just help you ship faster, but help you build taste and creative rigor into how your organization operates. When I'm looking for software that can drive cultural change - not just productivity gains, but actual shifts in how teams collaborate and what gets celebrated and advocated for - that's what I'm looking for. Not another McKinsey report on how design-driven companies increase shareholder returns.
It's okay if you're still developing your own company perspective. Everyone was "Democratizing Access" to something (homeownership! better pet food!) at some point. No one knows where this is all going anyway! But you can start by asking harder questions - questions that open up more interesting conversations.
The harder question
Editorial should fit into your financial frameworks, yes. Impact measurement is not revolutionary - e.g. how this has improved sales, or brand sentiment.
But there are also cultural frameworks. Team cohesion. Company values. You can't measure everything about culture, but you still need to justify the spend. This is the tension at the heart of any editorial investment. The way through isn't to pretend you can reduce it all to metrics. The way through is to ask the harder question:
How do you build an integrated business?
Not just a good product with good marketing. An integrated business where there's continuity between how your founder talks about company direction, how sales reps and product teams talk about it, and how customers and investors actually perceive it.
For example, Figma is no longer just design or cloud collaboration software - they're a full product development platform.
Do your people get it? Do they know what to rally around? For most companies, the answer is no. Even C-suite will tell you to put AI in the headline because investors like it. That's not a strategy; that's pandering.
This is where editorial comes in. You need something to bridge the gap between founder vision, sales messaging, customer perception, and product direction. This is not your origin story. This is not your value prop. This has to be both wider and deeper in scope.
On belief, infrastructure, and the margins
It's hard. It's especially hard the longer you're corporate. Your job is to compound on existing dominance. You have the budgets to execute on imagination, but you've been out of the margins for too long. And that's where the magic happens.
In the beginning, investing in having a point of view is less about financial rationale and more about belief. This is not content marketing. You can and should systematize it, but you can't lose the posture of - let's set this thing in motion and see where it goes.
For my food media publication Currant, I built the kind of thing that got Intuit and Harvard listening (thanks to a wonderful team - Sarah Cooke, Clare Lagomarsino, Renee Hunt). The seeds that took my last company to Cannes Lions, took me to Willamette Valley wine country and Seattle jam country, brought a Discord community to my living room floor. None of those were on the bingo card when I started - just me spending my early mornings in a Greenpoint cafe before going into the office.
That's what editorial does. It opens doors your product roadmap never anticipated. It builds relationships in places your GTM plan didn't map. It creates the conditions for unexpected conversations that compound into business value you couldn't have forecasted in a deck.
How do you build an integrated business? I think editorial is the most exciting candidate for that exercise.
Want to walk through this together? Email me at [email protected] & I can take us through the questions below 🙂
