What changed this year and what you need to know

Eight months into 2025, content creation has changed more than most companies realise. I've worked on more than a hundred campaigns this year, and one pattern keeps showing up. The brands doing best aren't producing more, moving faster or chasing every new platform feature.

They're doing the opposite. They slow down on purpose, make less, and ask every piece to work harder. Meanwhile, plenty of companies are still trying to outproduce an audience that has already tuned out.

The content crash nobody talks about

Early this year, something quietly broke. The old belief that posting everywhere, all the time, would eventually pay off ran into a wall. Audiences were saturated, algorithms leaned towards relevance and engagement over sheer volume, and inside companies a strange gap opened up: more output than ever, less real attention.

I watched teams spend weeks on material that ticked every box and disappeared on arrival. It wasn't bad. It was indistinguishable. It looked and sounded like everything else in the feed, the inbox and the website next door. Many brands were, quite simply, drowning in their own noise.

The numbers back up what I was seeing. In the Content Marketing Institute's 2025 B2B research, creating content that actually prompts action was the most-cited content challenge, named by 55% of marketers.

Treat content as strategy, not output

The companies cutting through this year made one clear shift. They stopped treating content as an output problem and started treating it as a strategic one.

AI played a part, just not the one people predicted. It didn't replace creativity. It absorbed execution: production, formatting, variations and optimisation all got faster and cheaper. What didn't change was the need for judgment about what to say, why it matters and how it connects to the business. A Harvard Business School and BCG experiment showed the same split: consultants using GPT-4 worked faster on tasks the AI handled well, and got worse answers when they leaned on it beyond that. When that division of labour is right, content moves faster without turning generic. When it's wrong, you just get more polished noise.

A human voice beats polished perfection

One of the clearest changes this year was the collapse of over-polished, committee-approved messaging. Audiences developed an almost instant radar for anything that sounds manufactured.

The brands getting attention aren't necessarily rough or casual, but they are recognisably human. They speak in a consistent voice, address real problems and take a position instead of hiding behind neutral phrasing. Generic corporate tone didn't just lose its effect. It became a liability.

One idea, many outcomes

The strongest content strategies I saw in 2025 rarely started with platforms. They started with one idea built to serve several purposes. I've seen a single well-designed concept become thought leadership on LinkedIn, behind-the-scenes storytelling on Instagram, material for sales conversations and recruitment content for HR. The work wasn't multiplied. The thinking was.

That took pressure off production while making everything more consistent. Instead of separate calendars and disconnected messages, teams lined up behind one story that travelled across departments. It's the same principle behind one video concept that solved four business problems.

Business questions come first

The most important change is where creative work begins. For years, many projects started with a concept and hoped performance would follow. This year the most effective teams reversed that. Every project opens with a business question: what outcome are we trying to drive? Only then does creative exploration start.

Creativity didn't disappear. It got sharper, because the constraints meant something. The Content Marketing Institute found the same thing from another angle: its most successful teams credit understanding their audience and setting goals tied to business objectives.

What stopped working, and what took its place

Several familiar habits quietly lost their power. Template-driven content is easy to spot and easier to ignore. Platform silos waste money and fragment the message. Vanity metrics like likes and follower counts still convince teams something is working when it isn't. And content designed by committee still offends nobody and connects with nobody.

What gained ground was more interesting. Executives in regulated and complex industries started speaking directly, carefully but genuinely, about their fields, and earned trust that institutional messaging struggles to reach. The Edelman–LinkedIn thought leadership study found that 73% of B2B decision-makers see an organisation's thought leadership as a more trustworthy basis for judging its capabilities than its marketing materials. Behind-the-scenes content grew up too: not shaky phone footage, but well-made material showing how decisions get made and what a culture is like in practice. And brands that taught rather than sold built stronger positions over time.

Where to start

Most organisations answer content pressure by adding tools or headcount. The teams that saw results this year invested in direction instead: someone who connects objectives, manages trade-offs and decides what not to make. Without that, even the best tools only speed up inefficiency.

Three adjustments make a difference quickly. Stop making content just to fill a calendar. Check honestly whether your content sounds like you or like your industry. And break down the walls between departments, so one piece can serve marketing, sales and recruitment at once.

If that sounds like your team, I'm happy to help you find the signal again. You can read more about how I work, see selected work, or book a 1-1.

— Joost