Keats, negative capability, and the work that disappears
Keats called it negative capability: the maker who disappears so the work can belong to everyone. A poet’s discipline, and a content strategists’.
The leadership gap
Content programs don’t fail on execution. They fail on the leadership gap—all the responsibility for content, and no one with the authority to act on it.
Content is the platform
Content isn’t a campaign, a style guide, a CMS default, AI plan, or a governance afterthought. Content is the platform they run on.
AEO and GEO aren’t a tactics problem. They’re a platform problem.
Everyone’s selling the same AEO and GEO checklist: schema, FAQs, entity claims. None of it works without a governed content model underneath. It’s the same lesson SEO tried to teach a decade ago.
The experience is the platform’s only job
The platform, the voice system, the content model, the governance structure—none of it is the point. The experience a person actually inhabits and remembers is the only reason any of it is worth building.
The governance problem isn’t new
CMOs are told their AI problem is really an operating model problem. Content strategists have argued this for twenty years. AI didn’t create the gap between governance and accountability—it just made ignoring it expensive.
The content strategist as maker
Most content strategy fails not because the analysis was wrong. It fails because no one in the room could hear what the content was actually saying.
A content model is architecture
A content model isn’t a CMS configuration or a spreadsheet of content types. The content model is architecture that determines whether your content platform scales or fragments. Here’s what that means in practice.
Content is a platform, not a campaign
Most organizations budget content as an expense. It’s not. It’s not. Content is a platform—and that misclassification is costing you more than a bad quarter.
Brand voice is a system, not a style guide
Brand voice consistency doesn’t fail because of bad writing. It fails because most organizations treat voice as documentation instead infrastructure.