The Good Comms Edit - Issue 20 - 10.08.26

A Monday briefing on the biggest shifts in PR, marketing and brand storytelling.

There’s an odd contradiction developing in marketing ... we have more tools to communicate than ever before.

We can create faster than ever, target more precisely than we've ever been able, we can automate more of the process and publish far more consistantly but yet some of the most interesting signals coming out of the industry right now seem to suggest audiences want almost the opposite ... less polish and performance and less content for content’s sake.

This week, three stories caught my attention because together they raise a useful question ...

Have we become so good at producing marketing that the next competitive advantage might be knowing when not to?

Here’s what I’ve been reading ...

1. LinkedIn has an AI slop problem and it’s doing something about it

There’s something wonderfully ironic about a technology platform deciding that perhaps we’ve had enough technology!

LinkedIn has been taking increasingly direct action against low-effort, generic AI-generated content on the platform.

It says it is using systems trained alongside its editorial team to identify content that lacks genuine perspective or expertise, as well as automated comments and responses that simply repeat what somebody else has said.

There’s now a consequence too ... content identified as generic AI material can have its distribution limited beyond the author’s immediate network.

LinkedIn says its early testing is identifying generic content correctly 94% of the time.

The message however, isn't “don't use AI”, it's much more interesting than that ...

Use AI, but have something to say.

Why it matters

For the past couple of years, the marketing conversation around AI has largely been about productivity, asking questions like ...

how much faster can we create? how much more can we publish? how many processes can we automate?

LinkedIn's response points towards the inevitable second-order problem... what happens when everybody does?

When content becomes almost infinitely easy to produce, simply producing it stops being valuable and what becomes valuable in it's place is perspective, experience and original thought.

Perhaps most importantly, recognisably human becomes valuable.

What I'd be thinking about

Don't ask "Could AI create this for us?" Instead ask "What are we bringing to this that AI couldn't know?"

Experience, opinions, observations, your customers' stories, your own stories signal to the consumer that you're real and worth their attention.

AI can help enormously with the telling but there still needs to be something worth telling in the first place.

2. Social media is becoming less … social

Here's a statistic that stopped me this week ...

A recent survey of 1,000 Americans found that 55% are posting less on social media than they were five years ago.

53% have also become more selective about who can see what they post, while more than half said maintaining an online presence can feel like work.

Meanwhile, we're seeing growing interest in smaller communities and spaces such as Reddit, Substack and other interest-led platforms where participation can feel less performative.

People haven't necessarily stopped consuming social media but they've stopped wanting to perform on it.

Why it matters

This trend has potentially fairly significant implications for brands. For years, social strategy has been built around encouraging visible engagement ... post, comment, share, tag a friend - yada, yada.

But if people are increasingly consuming much more quietly, traditional engagement metrics may tell us less about whether communication is actually working.

Someone can watch your video every week, read every newsletter, even recommend you privately to a friend, and never once click “like”.

That doesn't make them an unengaged audience member, it may simply make them a modern one.

What I'd be thinking about

I'd be very careful about using public engagement as the sole measure of audience connection. Instead, we'll be looking further down the chain ... are people returning?

are they searching for you?or joining your mailing list? making enquiries? buying?or mentioning you elsewhere?

Attention and interaction are not the same thing.

3. Marketers are using AI everywhere. But are we using it for the right thing?

ISBA's 2026 Gen AI Survey produced a fascinating contradiction ... 99% of the advertisers surveyed are now engaging with generative AI. So, adoption is essentially ubiquitous but only 14% reported a significant impact on business results.

Dig a little deeper and things get even more interestingn...

Organisations prioritising effectiveness rather than simply efficiency were twice as likely to report significant business impact. In other words, using AI to do the same things faster is useful but using it to do better things may be where the real opportunity lies.

Why it matters

Efficiency is seductive because it's easy to measure. We made 20 pieces of content instead of five or, we produced the campaign in half the time and saved X hours.

Great, but none of those things necessarily mean the marketing worked.

There's a danger that communications teams become extraordinarily efficient at producing things nobody particularly wanted and that's not transformation, that's just faster output.

What I'd be thinking about

Every time AI saves you time, ask, What are we doing with the time we've won back?

More research? better customer understanding? stronger ideas? more considered strategy? better relationships?

The most interesting promise of AI isn't that it allows communications teams to become content factories, it's that it might give us more time to do the bits that require human thought.

The Pattern

This week's three stories all point towards a tension I think we're going to hear much more about ...

Our capacity to produce communication is increasing at exactly the same moment our audience's appetite for more communication appears to be decreasing.

That's a fairly fundamental challenge! and the answer can't simply be more, the strategic question is going to be ... What genuinely deserves to exist?

When everybody has access to extraordinary production tools, restraint becomes a skill ... so does editing and so does knowing your audience well enough to understand what they'll actually value.

Maybe the communications teams of the future won't be judged by how much they can produce, they'll be judged by how well they decide.

The Last Edit

There's a sentence I've been thinking about this week ...

Just because we can make more doesn't mean people want more from us.

I think that's worth sitting with. AI is truly extraordinary, social media remains incredibly powerful and content can build businesses, communities and reputations.

None of that has changed but perhaps our job as communicators isn't to fill every available space, it's to decide which spaces are worth filling and then put something genuinely useful, interesting or human there.

We don't know about you, but in an age of infinite content, good editing might be one of the most valuable forms of marketing we have.

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Everything & Nothing helps creative founders and cultural organisations find the stories worth telling and share them well.

The Good Comms Edit is our weekly look beyond the headlines at what's changing in PR, marketing and brand storytelling, why it matters, and what we'd be thinking about next.

Back next Monday.