After twenty years in marketing, I’ve watched the same pattern play out at company after company. A vendor calls with the latest acronym. Or worse, the CEO hears about a success at another company and tells the team to chase it. The result is the same either way: a stack of disconnected tactics, no measurement, and a slow erosion of belief that marketing works at all. Here’s how it happens, and what to do instead.
Warning Chapter
Shiny objects are where marketing goes to die.
The two ways mid-market marketing programs fall apart, and why both produce the same outcome.
Marketing programs fall apart in two ways.
The External Trap
“Silver bullets are great in TV shows, but not in your marketing.”
The first way is external. A vendor calls. They sell SEO. Or paid media. Or marketing automation. Or a new AI tool that is going to change everything. They tell you their service is the answer to whatever your problem is, because that’s what they sell. If a firm leads with a tactic before they have asked you a single question about your customers, your business, or what you have already tried, you are talking to a vendor, not a partner.
The Internal Trap
“You are the trap. Sorry. I had to say it.”
The second way is internal, and it’s worse because it’s harder to see. You hear about a success and tell your team to try SEO, PPC, or the latest acronym, AEO. Something works once, so you do more of it. Over time it becomes a pile of disconnected efforts, loosely tied to a website that doesn’t speak to a defined customer. Each individual decision was small. The cumulative cost is enormous. Every test based on a whim was money spent on a guess.
Try-it-and-see marketing feels efficient, but it is the most expensive marketing there is.
A marketing strategy is a filter. It tells you what to do and what to consciously turn down, even when it sounds good in the moment. Building that filter is the work most companies skip, because no individual shiny object ever feels expensive enough to justify the discipline of sticking to a strategy. The cost is hidden in missed opportunities or in failed initiative after failed initiative. Instead of impulsively marketing your business, craft a strategy grounded in data and stick to it.
The Shiny Object Test
Run any new tactic through these five questions before committing budget.
- What customer problem does this solve?
- Do we have evidence that problem exists?
- Is this the best solution to that problem, or just the newest one?
- How will we measure whether it worked?
- What are we not doing if we do this?
Frequently Asked Questions
It's the pattern of chasing the latest tactic, channel, or acronym before the last one had a chance to work. It can be vendor-driven — an agency or platform pitching whatever's currently trending — or CEO-driven — hearing about a peer's success and asking the team to chase it. Either way the result is the same: a pile of half-finished efforts, no through-line, and a marketing budget that produced activity instead of outcomes.
Two reasons. First, the marketing function in a mid-market company is usually under-resourced and under-measured, so the CEO can't easily tell what's working. That makes a confident pitch about a new tactic feel like a lifeline. Second, mid-market CEOs are usually well-networked, which means they hear about every peer's recent win — and survivorship bias does the rest. The peer doesn't tell you about the three things they tried that didn't work.
A real opportunity is one you can connect to a customer truth, a number you already track, and a specific decision you're already trying to make. A shiny object is one that arrives as a category — AI, AEO, account-based, short-form video — without being attached to any of those three. The test isn't whether the trend is real. Most are. The test is whether it's relevant to the work you've actually committed to.
Yes — but as experiments, not pivots. Carve out a defined budget, give it a defined window, decide in advance what success looks like, and protect the core program from being raided to fund it. Most shiny-object damage comes not from the experiment itself but from quietly defunding the work that was actually working in order to chase the new thing. Run experiments small, run them honestly, and run them on top of a stable foundation.
Ask them what it replaces. A real recommendation specifies what comes off the plan to make room. A shiny object is always additive — the budget goes up, the activity list gets longer, and nothing is taken away. If the answer to 'what does this replace?' is a vague one, the recommendation isn't ready.
Set a strategic horizon longer than a quarter, and make changes inside it explicit. The marketing program should have a one-to-three-year shape, with quarterly tactics moving inside that shape. If a quarter's plan looks unrecognizable from the prior quarter's, somebody got distracted by something shiny. The program isn't pivoting — it's flailing.
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