cf #98: the timeless, the timely, and you

You are reading contentfolks—a monthly(ish) blend of sticky notes, big marketing ideas, and small practical examples. Thank you for being here! ~fio

Hey there 👋

This newsletter turned 5 yesterday, which feels like a good opportunity to be a little philosophical… and also gently annoyed at past fio for not writing the 2 additional issues that would have made this into #100.

Anyway!, five years is both a long time and an insignificant blip in the history of humanity—and if you work in marketing, this dual perception shows up in your job all the time.

In 5 years, the tactical landscape can change drastically. Think back to 2020: nobody had heard of ChatGPT. Organic traffic built significant business moats. GA4 had just launched, so we had at least two more years to pretend it hadn’t. And if your title was Content Marketer, you were not yet expected to write case studies, edit video clips, design LinkedIn carousels, and polish AI-generated copy in the same week.

At the same time, 5 years do not significantly disrupt the fundamentals of human behaviour. For all our obsession with change, we are a remarkably consistent species: we’re still moved by stories, we still (mostly) buy from folks we trust, and we still make decisions with emotion and post-rationalise them with logic.

Being an effective marketer means balancing these two speeds: knowing the timeless and translating it to be timely. This was always true, by the way; in 2025, it just started feeling more urgent.

AI is a perfect example of where this double velocity shows up. Every day, new tools pop up that promise to help you move faster in a market that demands speed—but if you ignore fundamental human principles and go in the wrong direction, you’ll just be more ineffective, faster:

• Shallow content generated quickly and at scale is still shallow, there’s just more of it for people to ignore

• A million automated workflows won’t move prospects along if you don’t address how they really make decisions: emotionally, irrationally, and almost never in the linear way your funnel assumes

• A comparison page you vibe-coded in 35 minutes that lists every product feature under the sun will not work on a prospect whose key goal is de-risk investment and not look incompetent for picking the wrong software

Meanwhile, the current market doesn’t always give you the luxury of time. You need to cultivate a bias for speed, where a solution shipped today often beats one shipped next month:

• An unpolished LinkedIn post from the CEO published while a topic is hot will outperform a perfectly crafted article that launches after everybody has moved on

• A scrappy Loom walkthrough may close deals faster than a fully produced demo video stuck in post-production

• Your best-performing ad might be one you whip up in 10 minutes by lifting a sentence verbatim from a customer call

Most growth opportunities exist in the overlap between the timeless and the timely. If you don’t understand what makes humans behave as we do, no amount of innovation will make your marketing work. And if you don’t understand how the market moves, no in-depth knowledge of human behaviour will be enough to keep a business afloat.

How will you balance these two next year?

⚡️⚡️ BONUS: a cryptic announcement about a secret marketing project
I’ve had an idea stuck in my brain for years, and by semi-telling you about it, there’s a higher chance I’ll finally make it happen in 2026. So stay tuned… and maybe start gathering a few pens, crayons, and scraps of paper 👀