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🪩 Volume 133 | April 22, 2026

 

I just finished the Ryan Murphy Love Story series on FX—the one about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette—and I have not fully recovered.

 

I was born in 1993, so I have zero actual memory of these two as a cultural moment.

 

Everything I know about them I learned the way my generation learns everything: retroactively, through a screen, with the benefit of knowing exactly how it ends. But watching that show sent me into a full rabbit hole about the 90s in a way I wasn't expecting. Not just the fashion (though Carolyn's fashion? COME ON). The pace. The way their entire relationship played out without a single Instagram post, without a comment section, without anyone being able to weigh in in real time. A couple whose private love became a national obsession—and they never had to manage an algorithm to make that happen.

 

I couldn't stop thinking about what that meant for the brands of that era too. You filmed a commercial, ran it for six months, and had time for leisurely things, like lunch. You reached a monoculture—one audience, one message, one channel. The Super Bowl ad moments for brands were genuine cultural event. A brand could breathe between campaigns. THAT WAS IT. There was no need to post on social every day—trying to appease the algorithm gods with perfectly timed content and witty comments to garner likes and shares.

 

I went to a marketing conference last week where every other slide had the word ”agentic” on it, and someone in the audience was always nodding a beat too early—and I walked out feeling something I didn't expect: grief, almost, for that pace. For the version of this industry where the rules stayed put long enough to actually learn them.

 

The 90s weren't without anxiety—the internet arrived and nobody knew what it meant, the OJ trial invented 24/7 news cycles, parents were terrified of AOL chatrooms. But the marketing was calm. Now you're a CEO, a content creator, a prompt engineer, and apparently a vibes consultant for an AI tool that didn't exist six months ago.

 

This week I want to talk about WHY there’s so much “AI exhaustion”—not to stress you out more, but because understanding the mechanism is the first step to opting out of the feeling of “I need to adopt every new version of AI that comes out”  in a way that actually works for your brand.

 

Let's get into it. 🍰

 

 

 

“You have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.” — The Red Queen, Alice in Wonderland

 

Setting the stage: 90s marketing → broadcast model → monoculture audiences → one channel, one message, done → internet arrives → social media → algorithmic fragmentation → AI content explosion → the Red Queen takes over.

 

In the 90s, a brand had “an audience,” marketers created ads for that audience, and they used a singular vehicle to reach them—TV, radio, print, or billboards. You reached a shared cultural narrative. The Super Bowl ad was a genuine event. You made it once and it lived for a year.

 

Then the internet happened. Then social. Then the algorithm. Then fourteen different platforms. Then AI.

 

The era of monoculture is over. Today's landscape has fragmented into what researchers are calling a “vibrant ecosystem of micro-obsessions”—audiences who've splintered away from shared culture into niche communities. 

 

The above table shows it cleanly: we went from mass market monoculture to algorithmic silos, from top-down broadcasting to interactive community engagement.

 

That shift is what the Red Queen is about. Because AI dramatically lowered the barrier to creating content, 85% of marketers are now actively using AI tools, and 74% of new websites feature AI-supported content. The volume of noise EXPLODED. Brands feel like they have to produce 10x more just to maintain the same level of attention they held last year.

 

So everyone runs faster. The baseline rises. The Red Queen keeps moving. And you're still in the same place—except now you're exhausted.

 

Here's how this plays out in three specific ways for founders:

 

1. The death of best practices. In the 90s, rules existed. You followed them, they worked, done. Now, by the time someone publishes a guide on how to use an AI tool, the software has already been updated. Marketing teams that spent years experimenting with AI are now being asked to restructure entireeeeeee workflows and demonstrate ROI. The strategy feels fragile—you're building on sand. The move isn't mastering every button of a tool that might be gone next month. It's AI literacy: understanding what's possible, not memorizing what's current.

 

2. The paradox of choice. Should you automate your email? Build AI influencers? Shift your budget to predictive ads? Move everything to LLM optimization because IDC is projecting brands will spend five times more on that than traditional SEO by 2029? The irony is brutal: AI is supposed to save time, but the mental tax of deciding which AI to use is costing more energy than the original task ever did. Shiny object syndrome is a real strategic threat.

 

3. The uncanny valley problem. When AI can generate a flood of sophisticated, polished content, what starts to stand out isn't the most produced—it's the most human. Brands that fail to invest in authentic storytelling increasingly rely on paid amplification to be seen—but even that has diminishing returns. As a brand, you need a clear POV to survive this. A voice. A person behind the logo. AI can't fake that. (Er, not yet at least).

 

 

AI adaptation—let’s talk about it:  the brands doing it well aren't doing it faster. They're doing it with room.

 

My team has been able to jump on things—the marketing dashboards, the new tools, the workflow rebuilds—not because we're especially brilliant or especially funded, but because we deliberately protect whitespace for it. Time that isn't billed, isn't client-facing, isn't ”on.” Time that exists specifically so that when something new lands, we're not adopting it in a panic at 11pm between deliverables. We're actually thinking about whether it belongs in how we work.

 

That's the Red Queen trap in its most specific form: you see another brand roll out a gorgeous AI system or a slick new creative output and you feel the pull to match it right now, with whatever bandwidth you have left over from running your actual business. And that's exactly when AI becomes a liability instead of an asset.

 

 

The 90s had a monoculture and a pace that gave brands time to breathe between decisions. We don't have that luxury anymore—but we can manufacture it. Whitespace isn't a reward for when things slow down. It's a business decision you make in advance, or AI will make your decisions for you, badly, in a hurry.

 

For your business: You don't need a bigger tech stack. You need a protected few hours—per week, a quarter—where the only job is to actually think about how AI fits into YOUR business, YOUR audience, YOUR brand. Adopted poorly, it's a brand risk. Adopted intentionally, it might be the most competitive thing you do this year.

 

 

 

Alix Earle launched her podcast Hot Mess under Alex Cooper's Unwell Network back in 2023—and then the show was dropped in early 2025, kicking off months of rumors about bad blood between them. Things finally went public this month when Alix started reposting shady TikToks about Alex, including content calling Cooper an “ambulance chaser” and suggesting she “exploited” guests on her podcast. Alex responded with a video that people immediately called ”the mean girl final boss move”—posted while Alix was at Coachella, calling her out directly and daring her to “just say what you gotta say.” Alix's response? A pole-dancing TikTok set to ”You Don't Own Me.” (Respect).

 

Both of these women are their brand. There's no separation between Alex Cooper the person and Call Her Daddy the product, or between Alix Earle the girl and Alix Earle the creator business. Which means this drama isn't just personal—it's a brand event for both of them, whether they want it to be or not. The audience is watching to see who handles it with more grace, more wit, more authenticity. The one who plays it best wins a cultural moment. And cultural moments, right now, are worth more than any paid campaign. I’m on the edge of my friggin seat!!!!!!

 

 

Justin Bieber walked onto one of the largest Coachella stages in festival history, sat down in front of a laptop, and played YouTube videos of his younger self. Some called it lazy. Some said it healed their inner child. He earned a reported $10 million for the set and his brand Skylrk moved over $5 million in merch over weekend one.

 

In a year where every stage show is competing for “most produced,” Bieber showed up in a red hoodie and chose low-fi. Whether that was strategic or just authentic Bieber doing Bieber things—doesn't matter. The rawness made it spread. High production is a commodity. Humanity isn't. (See: everything in Campaign above.)

 

 

Two posts of mine went unexpectedly viral this month—and they're basically live case studies in everything I just argued.

 

First: a client told my team "it sounds like ChatGPT" after we'd spent 50+ hours developing their messaging from scratch. I wrote about what that sentence actually means—that we've gotten so good at pattern-spotting AI overuse that we've started penalizing human writers for writing well. Over 110 reactions and counting. (Read it here.)

 

Second: we lost a client unexpectedly last month. Instead of panicking, I redirected my team toward something we'd been putting off: building out Claude Code dashboards for every client account. Integrated marketing dashboards pulling website sessions, leads, social, email, heatmaps, and campaign data into one place—with an exec summary in plain English. The post blew up. (Read it here.)

 

 

Til the next cake drop, Lauren 🍰