⚡ Fast and forgettable?

You must be living under a rock if you haven’t heard all the chatter about Claude Cowork.

I jumped on the hype train with a duffel bag of curiosity, trying to figure out how to use it best. I watched 30+ videos over the past week. These weren’t random YouTube recommendations—they came from my trusted network, people whose judgment I respect. The supposedly “best” tier of what’s out there.

And I couldn’t tell you what most of them said.

All of them did the same thing, eventually blurring in an unhelpful mass of noise. Generic overviews. Quick demos showing the same basic use cases. Everyone racing to cover the same ground.

But in that pile of forgettable content, I found something unexpected: a powerful lesson on how to build content that doesn’t blend in and actually strengthens your brand.

Why most trend content disappears

When something new drops, there’s a race to be first. And in that race, depth is usually the first casualty.

Everyone’s saying the same high-level things because the high-level stuff is fastest to produce. You end up with dozens of pieces that are technically accurate but completely interchangeable. Nothing sticks because nothing stands out.

For content marketers, the implication is brutal: you’re spinning your wheels, breaking your back to produce something new that doesn’t make a dent in the minds of your audience. They don’t remember your content or your brand.

What the memorable content did differently

In my Cowork learning sprint, I finally saw a livestream from Trust Insights where Christopher Penn walked through setting up an actual project. It was starkly different from the polished five-minute demos and showed the real, messy, detailed process. He didn’t just show the steps; he explained the thinking behind them. How to structure a Cowork project so it aligns with your company’s strategy. How to make the output actually useful.

That one stuck.

The Trust Insights livestream worked because it broke the pattern.

They chose a low-friction format. A livestream meant no over-engineering, no fancy slide deck, just thinking out loud in real time. But low-friction didn’t mean low-value. They layered strategic depth on top of the tactical steps, answering the questions a marketer would actually have when implementing this themselves.

And it felt unmistakably like their content. Trust Insights has always been about strategic, mindful use of technology. They weren’t going to produce a shallow use-case roundup—that’s not who they are. The trend gave them a reason to show up; their standards determined how.

The balancing act

Here’s the thing: the marketers who skip trends entirely (“we focus on what matters long-term”) and the ones who jump on everything surface-level are actually making the same mistake. They haven’t figured out how to do both.

The real skill is holding three elements together:

Choose a low-friction format. You can’t spend three weeks perfecting a trend piece—by then, the moment’s passed. Find formats that let you move fast without sacrificing substance. A livestream. A voice note turned into a post. A quick video essay. Don’t over-engineer; invest that energy in depth instead.

Know how you can provide added value. Your differentiation comes from understanding what’s already out there and finding the gap. What has everyone already said and what questions are they leaving unanswered? You need to actively identify where you can add something new: a deeper angle, a practical application, a perspective no one else is offering.

Don’t let your quality standards slip. Your voice, your angle, your bar for usefulness—these aren’t luxuries you sacrifice for speed. They’re what make the speed worthwhile. If you abandon them to chase a trend, you might get the views, but you won’t get the return visits. The whole point is to use the trend as a vehicle for demonstrating your value, not as an excuse to lower it.

***

Trend content isn’t a distraction from brand-building.

The content brands that figure out how to balance timeliness and substance? Those are the ones we remember. And return to.

Balance matters,

📺 Video from me

If you missed my last live session and you’re even a little bit curious about TikTok, this one’s for you. Watch as I talk to social search expert Mathilde Høj about leveraging the short video platform to your advantage. And if you feel your brand isn’t as flashy as needed to show up on TikTok, consider the Danish labor union is on there and winning!

Watch the video →

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

The #1 Newsletter Metric To Focus On | Let me solve the click-bait curiosity: it’s email replies. But this piece is not just about that fact. It dives into different strategies to get subscribers to reply.

Shadows, Mirrors, and Icons: Reflections on Modern Brand Building | A look at how brands can capitalize on cultural trends and weave narratives that create true audience relationships. The CeraVe example is a great one, and while there are big budgets involved, finding a smart, culturally relevant idea is what many others can strive toward.

Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews (75k Brands Studied) | While organic visibility is still a long way away from being completely turned on its head, this research shows that brand reputation (proxied through YouTube mentions) has a bigger impact than links.

👀 Two for fun

This library of short movies | Watching shorts is something I thoroughly enjoyed in my 20s and had completely forgotten about. Until now.

This look at the scale of life | We humans are in the middle, size-wise, so both the extra small and the extra large look fascinating.