Earlier this summer, the moderators of a SaaS subreddit did something that should have made every B2B marketer sit-up and pay attention: they banned promotional posts.
The community had been flooded with marketing campaigns that made it increasingly difficult to distinguish genuine discussions between practitioners from attempts to insert brands and products into those conversations. Around the same time, job listings for a “Reddit strategy manager” started to appear as specialized marketing agencies emerged, charging thousands a month for posts. The Reddit community—which had quietly become one of the most-cited sources in AI-generated answers—had suddenly become a prime marketing opportunity.
The instinct behind the flurry is the story. Faced with a new surface where influence could be won, the industry’s answer was familiar: if something is working, lean in and scale it.
The Lessons of Reddit
But in rushing to manufacture visibility, marketers risked degrading the very thing that made the channel valuable in the first place. Reddit’s share of ChatGPT citations has reportedly fallen from nearly 60% to around 10% as LLMs grew wary of exactly the kind of content marketers were chasing.
The quick pivot demonstrates something marketers increasingly need to confront: marketing is getting easier to scale and harder to measure. That might sound like a contradiction, but it isn’t. While we have the ability to create more activity than ever before, we also have more difficulty determining which of it actually matters.
The Abundance Problem
For most of marketing history, production and distribution were constrained by time, money, and access. Creating an asset took real effort, reaching an audience required real distribution, and running a campaign needed real coordination. Technology has quietly removed some of those constraints, and the result is an industry that can ‘manufacture’ marketing at extraordinary speed. That changes the meaning of volume.
If it takes weeks to months and significant resources to build a campaign, then ten campaigns represent a meaningful investment. But if technology lets you spin up a hundred variations in the same window, the count of campaigns tells you considerably less about what’s really going on.
The same logic applies to nearly every metric marketers have historically used as proof of performance. When clicks are easy to generate, a click means less, and when content is everywhere, one more piece of it barely registers. The more marketing we can manufacture, the less any single unit of activity tells us about performance—and that dynamic is now playing out across the entire marketing ecosystem.
Take some video streaming platforms that count a view as soon as a video starts playing. This is a small but useful reminder that even the definition of engagement isn’t fixed. A view is still a legitimate platform metric, but it widens the gap between what a platform can easily measure and what a marketer actually needs to know. Did someone watch? Did they pay attention? Did it change their perception? Those are very different questions, and as platforms evolve, marketers must be careful not to mistake the metric for the meaning. A number can get bigger without the underlying behavior becoming any more valuable.
This isn’t just a video problem. A click isn’t intent, a download doesn’t indicate influence, a lead isn’t the whole buying group, and an AI citation isn’t a purchase. The industry has gotten extraordinarily good at counting what happened. The harder job—and the one that matters more every year—is figuring out what it meant. That gap only widens as AI makes content nearly limitless to produce and programmatic makes distribution nearly limitless to buy, and it’s where B2B marketing runs into a particular problem.
The Signal Matters More Than The Activity
B2B buying has always been complicated, and the proliferation of channels alongside AI-driven research is making it harder to see clearly. A buyer might discover a brand through an AI answer, encounter it again on LinkedIn, hear about it from a colleague, read a customer’s perspective in a community, and then talk to sales—all without ever following the tidy linear journey most dashboards are built to track. And it’s rarely just one buyer. A B2B decision involves a group of stakeholders, each building their own understanding and confidence before the organization, as a whole, is ready to commit.
That means marketing’s job can’t simply be to create more individual interactions. It has to create signals that matter to the buying group, and that calls for a different approach to ABM. Marketers can no longer stuff more campaigns into more channels hoping that the sheer accumulation adds up to impact. They need to use the signals generated in one environment to make the next interaction more relevant. A question raised at an event should shape content. A customer conversation should become social proof in paid media. One stakeholder’s engagement should change how you approach another. Insight from a community should inform how sales talks about the product. The channels must build on each other rather than operate in parallel.
This is where brands need to pay closer attention to the role communities play in the buying journey. Communities provide a window into how buyers are thinking, what questions they’re asking, and what gives them confidence—or creates hesitation—well beyond the interactions a brand can directly measure. Rather than treating those conversations as a separate channel, marketers can use the signals and insights emerging from them to make the rest of the buying experience more relevant. The language peers actually use can make messaging sharper, and those insights can then travel across paid, social, email, events and sales. The community becomes an influence accelerator rather than one more channel to manage and report on. The best brands aren’t trying to manufacture advocacy—they’re creating the conditions for authentic advocacy to happen and then letting that influence strengthen the rest of the marketing ecosystem. A private community doesn’t replace influencers; it amplifies them.
The End of More
This is why I think we should approach the end of “more” as a useful marketing philosophy, and not through the lens that marketers should do less work. Technology has made more remarkably easy to produce but doesn’t answer the question that increasingly matters the most: did it matter?
The competitive advantage is moving away from generating activity and toward distinguishing meaningful signals from noise. That asks marketers to get more selective about what they create, more connected in how they distribute it, and more sophisticated about how they interpret what comes back. Because when everything can be measured, created and scaled more easily, the competitive edge isn’t more activity, but knowing which activity or activities matter.
That is the end of more.
As Chief Executive Officer at Madison Logic, Keith leads all business initiatives that further establish the company as a leading global account-based marketing solution that empowers revenue-driven marketers to accelerate the buying journey with more targeted, measurable, and effective strategies. Keith’s experience driving corporate growth with expertise in business strategy, marketing technologies, and advertising spans three decades. Prior to Madison Logic, Keith served as Chief Growth Officer at MERGE, where he led double-digit new business growth, and as Chief Commercial Officer & President, Americas of EVRYTHNG, Inc., where he was instrumental in driving global strategy and accelerating growth before its sale to Digimarc Corporation. He also served as EVP, Worldwide Managing Director of Ogilvy, where he was a member of Ogilvy’s Global Leadership Team; President/CEO of gyro NY, a global B2B agency network with 15 worldwide offices, that was acquired by Dentsu; and SVP, Head of Global Corporate Marketing of CA Technologies (now Broadcom). Keith will be at Advertising Week New York on the tech stage on Oct. 8 for the session titled Strange Bedfellows: The Unconventional Partnerships Rewriting the Industry Rules, that strips away the theory and gives a live look at the unlikely alliances driving the industry’s next chapter, proving why your most valuable collaborator might be the one you least expect.
