Efficiency is wonderful. Assuming you’re efficiently doing something useful.

Modern marketing has developed a slight obsession with speed.

We can create content faster. Launch campaigns faster. Analyse data faster. Automate emails faster. And thanks to AI, we can now produce in twelve minutes what previously took an entire afternoon and at least three coffees.

This is genuinely useful.

Unless, of course, we’re doing the wrong thing.

Efficiency Is Not Effectiveness

Imagine you’re driving from Edinburgh to London.

Halfway through, you discover you’re heading towards Inverness.

Installing a larger engine isn’t really the solution.

Yet marketing occasionally works this way.

A campaign isn’t generating results, so we produce more content. Emails aren’t working, so we automate more. Social engagement is poor, so we increase the posting frequency.

We rarely stop to ask the rather awkward question: Should we be doing this at all?

As I explore in Episode 15 of The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing Podcast, automation works brilliantly when the thinking underneath it is sound. Automate a good process, and you save time. Automate a bad one, and you’ve developed a remarkably efficient mistake-making machine.

Then AI Arrived

AI has made this question even more important.

We can now research, write, analyse, personalise and produce content at extraordinary speed.

The opportunity is enormous.

So is our newfound ability to create vast quantities of things nobody particularly wanted.

An irrelevant article written in ten minutes is still irrelevant.

A poor email automatically sent to 48,000 people is still a poor email. It has simply achieved scale.

Speed doesn’t fix bad thinking. It amplifies it.

Think First. Accelerate Second.

Before asking how technology can help us do something faster, perhaps we should ask:

Is this worth doing?

Does it help the customer? Does it support the strategy? Does it contribute to an outcome that actually matters?

If the answer is yes, technology and AI can be extraordinarily powerful.

If the answer is no, perhaps don’t automate it.

For more on AI, automation, technology and why modern marketing has become so complicated, listen to Episode 15: Why Marketing Has Become So Complicated. The podcast episode explores why better marketing doesn’t necessarily mean doing more, and why sometimes the smartest decision is deciding what to stop doing.

Because doing the wrong thing faster is still doing the wrong thing.

You’ve just finished earlier.