Alex M H Smith spends twenty-eight minutes explaining why your marketing stopped working, and for about half that time he’s right in a way most marketing commentary never manages.
I like Smith’s diagnosis and I think his cure will hurt the people most likely to follow it. Telling a small business owner or a first-time author that anything easy is worthless sends them off to spend money and months manufacturing friction, and the ones who can least afford that detour are the ones most inclined to believe a confident man on camera.
His argument runs like this. There are only so many people, only so many hours in their days, only so much money in their pockets, and only so much room in their heads. Attention is fixed. Supply isn’t. Every barrier that used to hold supply back, writing being hard, design being hard, video being hard, went away, and the flood arrived channel by channel in order of how easily a machine could do the work. He points at a Financial Times chart showing app production climbing while downloads flatten, and says the divergence is the shape of a hard limit being hit.
From there he draws a rule: when something becomes abundant it loses value, no matter how good it is. Goodness is a function of scarcity. Which means there’s now so much competent marketing that in practice there’s no good marketing at all.
That part is correct and it’s worth thinking about. I made the same argument from the other direction when I wrote about what happens if everyone gets access to a brilliant writing assistant. Doubling the number of competent books doesn’t double the hours anybody has to read them. It divides the same attention across a larger field. He arrives from the supply side, I arrived from the constraint side, and we land on the same floor.
Where does the difficulty argument break down?
Then he states his law. If it’s not difficult, it won’t work. He means it exactly as it sounds, and he says ease of any description is now disqualifying. Three moves follow. Make it unfair by using advantages nobody can copy. Make it tedious and expensive, because friction is the moat. Replace something in the customer’s life instead of asking to be added to it.
Difficulty is a proxy for scarcity, and he’s mistaken the proxy for the thing itself.
Plenty of difficult things are also crowded. Grinding out fifty speaking slots in a year is hard, and it’s also what every consultant in the field is currently being told to do.
Commissioning original research is expensive, and half the SaaS companies on earth publish a State of the Industry report nobody reads. Difficulty isn’t a moat when everybody has been handed the same instruction to suffer.
Advice that treats pain as proof of value is rubbish. It flatters the people who can afford to burn a year on something tedious, and it tells everybody else that the plain, useful work they were already doing was doomed from the start. Some of them will quit the one thing that was working because a video told them it was too easy to count.
And some things are easy and scarce anyway, because nobody thought of them, or because the person doing them has something no amount of effort would produce in somebody else.
Can you predict whether a video will perform?
One detail undoes the law. He predicted, on camera, that the video would get about four hundred views. Two days later it had roughly forty-seven hundred, on a channel with thirty-five hundred subscribers, with two hundred and sixty-one likes. That’s more views than subscribers inside forty-eight hours, and a like rate above five percent on a twenty-eight minute talking-head video.
No crew. No agency. No budget. A man in a home office, sitting in front of a camera, talking. By his own structure that should have failed, because it was the easy version of everything he says no longer works.
It worked for two reasons and neither of them is difficulty. The title named a worry the viewer already had. Why marketing isn’t working anymore is the exact sentence running through the head of everybody who might watch it. That costs nothing. It requires knowing your reader well enough to name what’s bothering them before they say it out loud.
And he had something to say. A real argument, held together across twenty-eight minutes, from somebody who has been thinking about strategy long enough to have a position. Nobody is producing that at volume, and the reason is that it requires having thought something through, and most of the people flooding the channels haven’t.
Nobody is producing that at volume, and the reason isn’t that it’s expensive.Share on X
That’s the actual scarcity. He walked past it.
Was the marketing video too long?
It was, and the length is its own small irony.
The argument is: supply exploded, attention is fixed, so lean on what nobody can copy. That’s a paragraph. The app store chart, the George Clooney tequila brand, the coach who trades on a Sam Altman association, the thirty-two thousand a month YouTube agency, the woman whose next video hit two hundred thousand views, the company turning staff training into podcasts, all of it restates one idea with a different anecdote attached.
Twenty-eight minutes of padding in a video whose thesis is that there’s too much stuff competing for too little attention. I don’t say that to be clever about it. I say it because it points at where the value in the piece really sits, and it’s not in the running time.
What should a writer take from the scarcity problem?
Four things survive, and they’re worth more than the structure they arrived in.
Scarcity is the variable. Quality, effort and volume all matter less than whether you’re the only one who can say a particular thing, because something good and abundant has no value.
I think that’s the most useful idea in the whole video for a writer, because it changes what you’re competing on. The goal becomes saying what only you can say, and outdoing the rest of your field matters far less once you’ve done that.
Ask what’s true about you that nobody could fake. This is the best line in the video. It’s also a filter you can run on every piece before it publishes, and it costs one second. If nothing in the thing could only have come from you, it’s going into the sludge with everything else.
Ask whether you’d still do it if it cost ten times more. A good test, applied without flinching. It kills most of what sits on a marketing plan. That’s the point of it.
And think about displacement in place of addition. A prospect already has a way of not writing their book. Replacing that habit is a different conversation from asking for a slot in a full day, and I’d take the first conversation every time, because the second one usually ends with a polite no.
Which parts of the scarcity argument should be discarded?
The difficulty law, for the reasons above.
The spending argument, because his evidence is a woman who paid thirty-two thousand a month for a YouTube agency and got two hundred thousand views on the next video. That proves money works for people who have money. We never hear from the ones who spent it and got four hundred views, and there are more of them.
That kind of example does real damage. Somebody with a modest budget hears it, spends money they needed on an agency, and gets the four hundred views. Nobody makes a video about them, and they usually decide the failure was theirs.
And the Sam Altman coach, which he admires, then concedes is only half true, then calls an asset anyway. That’s a misrepresentation dressed as strategy, and it sits badly in a video whose central claim is that trust collapsed. If the diagnosis is a saturated audience defaulting to deep skepticism, the prescription can’t be borrowing somebody else’s name.
Does the claim that AI-based marketing plans fail hold up?
He says that if your plan leans on AI it already doesn’t work, because AI is the purest example of making things easy and therefore the purest example of ineffective marketing.
Half right, and the half he misses is the one that matters.
The backlash people are feeling is about content with no human material in it. Every piece of slop shares one property: nothing in it could only have come from the person who published it. That’s the line, and it happens to be the same line his own unfair-advantage test draws.
I use these tools every working day and say so publicly.
What they never touch is the material. The material is thirty-three years in enterprise technology, twenty of them as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s, fifty-four ghostwritten books, forty-two documented client projects, a hundred podcast appearances, and one Tuesday in a data center that nobody else was standing in. A tool can draft around that. It can’t supply it, and a piece built on it can’t be slop no matter what typed the connective sentences.
I wrote about the publishing industry’s version of this confusion when book deals started collapsing over detection scores. The industry is testing how the prose reads when the questions that hold up are about provenance, accuracy, and whether anybody was deceived.
By the way, he uses Trader Joe’s as an example of a brand that replaced something instead of adding to the pile. I ran their IT operations for two decades. That’s the kind of detail his own test is asking for, and it’s not difficult, tedious or expensive. It’s just mine.
What produces business here, and what does not
The video is short on evidence about what works, so here’s mine.
Six introductions arrived through an AI matching service over recent months. Three became guests on Leaders and Their Stories. Three became clients. Six for six, which is a rate nothing else in my pipeline approaches, and the constraint turned out to be supply instead of conversion.
Local search converts. People find me by searching for a ghostwriter in their town, and they arrive already most of the way decided.
The podcast produces referral relationships in place of direct sales. Slower, and more durable. A guest who had a real hour of conversation is positioned to send somebody my way for years. And a body of work under one name does the corroboration that no individual post can. Six links from my own site are one signal repeated six times. Records under my name across independent sources are what a machine can check, which I worked through in detail elsewhere. None of that list is expensive. Some of it is slow. All of it rests on material that took decades to accumulate and can’t be bought at any price. That’s Smith’s own point, stated without the theater.
Where this leaves the difficulty question
Smith closes by saying that if you finished the video thinking you can’t do any of this, or that you simply don’t want to, then he did his job, because a strategy most people won’t run is the only kind that still works. That’s a neat rhetorical move and it’s unfalsifiable. Any objection becomes proof of the thesis.
I dislike that move more than anything else in the video. An argument that can’t lose also can’t teach anybody anything, and it leaves the sensible viewer, the one who said they couldn’t afford any of this, being told their doubt is proof the plan works.
The version I’d offer instead is narrower and easier to act on. Scarcity is the variable, and difficulty is only one route to it. The cheaper route is having something to say that came out of a life nobody else lived, then saying it plainly to people who already have the worry you’re naming.
He proved that in the video without meaning to. Four thousand seven hundred views in two days, from a man in a home office, because he had a real argument and a title that landed. If you want a strategy most people won’t run, try that one. The reason they won’t run it has nothing to do with effort, and I’m tired of watching people get told that suffering is the strategy when what they’re missing is something to say.
