The Algorithm Isn’t Killing Your Brand. Your Boring Marketing Is.

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard it this month…

-The algorithm’s been weird.

-Instagram doesn’t push Reels anymore.

-TikTok is shadowbanning us.

-Engagement is down across the board.

It’s become the adult version of blaming Mercury retrograde. The algorithm is the new scapegoat—convenient, invisible, and impossible to argue with. And it’s the perfect excuse because it lets everyone off the hook. No one has to admit the real problem, which is rarely technical, rarely mysterious, and almost always painfully simple:

Most brands are putting out content that feels like homework.

Not bad content, necessarily. Not offensive content. Not “they should be embarrassed” content. Just… content that’s safe. Polished. Generic. Earnest. Aesthetic. On brand. And completely forgettable.

The algorithm isn’t killing you. It’s just refusing to resuscitate you.

I want to take you back to a moment I’ve seen play out in different cities, different industries, different budgets, and different rooms—board rooms, group chats, and those “quick sync” Zoom calls that somehow run forty-five minutes. The moment is always the same: a team is staring at performance charts like they’re reading tea leaves. They’re trying to decode a mystery. They’re looking for the hidden lever that will make content work again.

And then someone says it.

“Maybe we just need to post more.”

Which is true in the same way “maybe we just need more money” is true. It’s technically correct and strategically useless if you’re not willing to talk about what you’re posting—and why nobody cares.

Because frequency doesn’t fix bland. It just distributes it faster.

The day I stopped fearing the algorithm

A while back, I was working with a brand that had what most marketers would call “good content.” Clean photography. Consistent typography. A brand voice that had been approved in a deck with sixteen stakeholders. The captions weren’t terrible. The creative was… fine. Nobody was going to get fired for it.

But the numbers were flatlining.

Every time we reviewed performance, the same ritual happened. A lot of nodding. A lot of phrases like “content saturation” and “platform shifts” and “reach decline.” We had dashboards full of metrics—impressions, saves, shares, watch time, click-through rate. We were doing what modern marketing teams do: measuring the life out of the work.

Then I asked a question that made the room go quiet…

“If you didn’t work here, would you stop scrolling for this?”

Nobody answered immediately, which was the answer.

I pushed a little. “Would you send it to a friend?”

That one landed harder.

Because deep down, every marketer knows the truth we try to ignore: people don’t share content because it’s well-designed. People share content because it makes them feel something. It gives them language for a thought they couldn’t articulate. It embarrasses an enemy. It validates an insecurity. It makes them laugh. It gives them a hot take they can borrow. It turns an internal moment into an external post.

Most brand content doesn’t do that. It informs, it announces, it updates. It acts like the audience is waiting politely to be briefed.

They’re not.

They’re scrolling through a world that is louder, sharper, and faster than any brand’s content calendar. They’re consuming culture in real time. They’re being entertained by strangers. They’re learning from creators who speak like humans. And they’re being sold to by people who understand that attention isn’t a right—it’s rented.

So when your post shows up and it sounds like a press release in a hoodie, the algorithm doesn’t “punish” you. People do. They ignore you. They swipe. They don’t watch. They don’t engage.

And the algorithm simply follows the crowd.

That’s the part most brands don’t want to accept: the algorithm is not your enemy. It’s an amplification system. It amplifies what people respond to. If people don’t respond to you, it doesn’t amplify you.

That’s not a glitch. That’s the job.

What “boring” looks like in marketing

Boring doesn’t mean you have a bad product. Boring doesn’t mean your team isn’t talented. Boring doesn’t even mean your content looks ugly. Some of the most boring marketing on earth is visually beautiful. It’s the type of content that wins internal approval and loses the audience.

Boring marketing usually looks like one of these:

-It’s content designed to offend no one.

-It’s content that explains rather than persuades.

-It’s content that sounds like a brand trying to sound like a brand.

-It’s content that was made for stakeholders, not customers.

-It’s content with no edge, no tension, no point of view.

And the worst part is that boring marketing often hides behind “professionalism.” Brands confuse professionalism with emotional neutrality. They think being credible means being sterile.

But people don’t build trust with sterile. They build trust with clarity.

Clarity has teeth. Clarity takes a side. Clarity says something specific enough that someone can disagree with it.

If your marketing never risks disagreement, it also never earns conviction.

The algorithm didn’t change. The audience did.

Yes, platforms evolve. Yes, distribution changes. Yes, every year there’s a new format, a new feature, a new set of best practices. But here’s the uncomfortable reality: most brands weren’t winning before the changes either. They just didn’t notice because organic reach was higher and competition was lower.

Now the floor is gone. You don’t get free attention because you posted. You get attention because you earned it.

Audiences have become ruthless, and I don’t blame them. They’re busy. They’re overstimulated. They have ten seconds of patience for anything that isn’t immediately relevant, entertaining, or useful. And when they do stop, they’re silently asking a brutal set of questions:

-Is this for me?

-Is this saying something new?

-Is this worth my time?

-Is this real?

-Is this trying too hard?

If your content doesn’t answer those questions quickly, it doesn’t matter how “on trend” your audio is.

The algorithm isn’t a magic slot machine. It’s a reflection. It’s a mirror held up to how people actually behave.

So when brands say “engagement is down,” I always want to ask: is engagement down, or is tolerance down?

Because the market is crowded with content that looks like marketing. People can smell it. They can see the template. They can predict the caption before they read it. They know exactly where the CTA is going. They know when the “value” slide is coming.

And once people can predict you, they stop paying attention.

The content that wins is the content that commits

The best-performing content today—across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, even LinkedIn when it decides to act normal—has one thing in common:

It commits to a perspective.

It doesn’t try to please everybody. It doesn’t try to impress the board room. It doesn’t try to sound like a “brand.” It sounds like a person who knows what they’re talking about and doesn’t need permission to say it.

That is what audiences reward. Not perfection. Not polish. Not expensive production. Commitment.

Commitment is what makes someone stop scrolling. It’s what makes someone think, “Wait… that’s true.” Or, “That’s insane.” Or, “Finally, someone said it.”

And that reaction—positive or negative—is fuel. Because emotion drives behavior. Behavior drives signals. Signals drive distribution.

If you’re posting content that creates no emotional response, you are asking the algorithm to do something impossible: manufacture interest.

The algorithm can’t make people care. It can only notice when they do.

The story you’re not telling is your advantage

Here’s what’s wild: most brands already have everything they need to create better content. They just refuse to use it.

1. They have customer stories that would make people feel seen.

2. They have founder perspectives that would make people lean in.

3. They have behind-the-scenes chaos that would build trust instantly.

4. They have opinions about their industry that would separate them from competitors.

5. But they hide it behind brand guidelines and corporate language…

-They think vulnerability is unprofessional.
-They think honesty is risky.
-They think taking a stance is dangerous.

And sure—taking a stance can cost you some people.

But blandness costs you everyone.

There’s a difference between controversial and reckless. Controversial is often just being specific. It’s saying, “We believe this,” in a world where most brands say, “We’re committed to delivering solutions.”

Nobody shares “solutions.” People share statements.

Not because they love drama (although, yes, they do). Because statements help them form identity. People don’t just buy products. They buy signals. They buy alignment. They buy language that helps them tell the world who they are.

If your marketing doesn’t give them language, you’re forcing them to do all the work.

The three silent killers: weak hooks, low stakes, and vague payoffs

There are a thousand reasons content underperforms, but if I had to bet my own money, I’d put it on three things most brands consistently get wrong.

-They start slow.

-They say nothing at stake.

-They don’t deliver a payoff.

Starting slow is the quickest way to die on social. Most posts begin like a polite handshake. “We’re excited to announce…” “In today’s post…” “Here are three tips…”

That’s not how people consume content. People consume content the way they walk through a crowded street: scanning for something that demands attention.

If you don’t demand it, you don’t get it.

Low stakes are the next killer. Most brand content is informational, but not consequential. It’s “nice to know,” not “need to know.” It doesn’t challenge the audience, call out their reality, or make them feel urgency.

And then there’s vague payoff. The content promises value but delivers generalities. It hints at insight but never commits. It gives advice that could apply to any brand in any industry in any year.

Audiences feel that immediately. And once they feel it, they’re gone.

If you want SEO and social performance, stop writing for robots

Let’s talk SEO, because a lot of brands treat it like a separate universe from social content. They think SEO is about stuffing keywords into paragraphs and writing like a textbook.

Modern SEO is about clarity, specificity, and usefulness. It’s about answering real questions people search for, in language they actually use, with insight they can apply.

And here’s where brands mess up: they write content that sounds like it was built to rank, not built to resonate. They write safe, sanitized blog posts that repeat what everyone else already said.

Google doesn’t need another generic article. People don’t either.

If you want a blog post that ranks and gets shared, you need the same thing you need on social: a point of view, a hook, and real substance. The difference is the format. The attention dynamics change, but the human psychology stays the same.

A strong SEO blog post doesn’t just answer “what is the algorithm?” It answers “why is my reach down?” and then tells the truth people don’t want to hear. It names the problem clearly. It gives examples that feel real. It offers a framework that doesn’t sound like it was copied from a webinar.

That’s how you win SEO now. Not by gaming the system. By being the best answer.

The uncomfortable truth: your content is competing with everything

This is what marketers forget: your content isn’t competing with other brands in your category. It’s competing with everything on the internet.

-A TikTok from a comedian.
-A breakup story.
-A cooking hack.
-A news clip.
-A street interview.
-A creator teaching someone how to flip their life in 60 seconds.

That’s your competition.

So when a brand posts a glossy graphic that says “Monday Motivation” with a quote that sounds like it came from a corporate screensaver, it’s not just underperforming. It’s getting annihilated by the sheer reality of what people actually want.

People want relevance. They want entertainment. They want usefulness. They want the truth said plainly. They want to feel something.

If your content provides none of that, the algorithm isn’t your problem. Your creative strategy is.

What to do instead: make content that has a pulse

I’m not going to give you a cute list of “10 ways to beat the algorithm” because that’s the same lazy thinking that got most brands here. But I will give you a truth that works across industries, platforms, and budgets:

Make content that people would miss if you stopped posting.

That’s the bar.

If you disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice? Would anyone ask where you went? Would anyone feel like they lost something?

Most brands don’t ask that because it’s a brutal question. But it’s also the most useful one.

If you want to build a social presence that actually drives business outcomes—brand awareness, demand generation, pipeline, sales—you need to stop thinking like a brand and start thinking like a publisher with an edge.

-A publisher has a point of view.
-A publisher understands distribution.
-A publisher doesn’t chase attention—they earn it.
-A publisher knows their audience and speaks to their reality.

And a publisher does not apologize for being interesting.

The real reason brands stay boring

Here’s the part nobody says out loud in marketing meetings: boring is safer internally.

-Boring gets approved.
-Boring doesn’t trigger legal.
-Boring doesn’t upset leadership.
-Boring doesn’t create risk.

Boring also doesn’t create results.

So teams end up optimizing for internal comfort instead of external impact. They build content calendars that feel “strategic” because they’re organized, not because they’re effective.

Then the numbers don’t move. Then the team blames the algorithm. Then they buy ads. Then they burn budget amplifying content nobody wants. Then they call it “brand awareness.” Then they repeat the cycle.

It’s expensive, exhausting, and avoidable.

The fix isn’t a new platform trick. It’s a new standard.

Stop asking, “Is this on brand?” and start asking, “Is this worth watching?”

Stop asking, “Will this offend anyone?” and start asking, “Will this move anyone?”

Stop asking, “What should we post?” and start asking, “What do we believe that our competitors are too scared to say?”

That’s where the magic is. That’s where the growth is. That’s where the algorithm starts working with you instead of being blamed for your lack of momentum.

A final thought before you post your next “we’re excited to announce”

The algorithm isn’t a villain. It’s a mirror. And right now, it’s reflecting something a lot of brands don’t want to confront:

They’re not losing because the platform hates them.

They’re losing because they’re forgettable.

The good news is that’s fixable.

-You don’t need a bigger budget.
-You don’t need a new camera.
-You don’t need another “content strategy deck.”

You need courage, clarity, and a point of view. You need creative that doesn’t sound like it came from a committee. You need marketing that feels like it was made by humans for humans.

Because in 2026, attention isn’t a distribution problem.

It’s a taste problem.

And taste is a choice.

So the next time someone says, “The algorithm is killing us,” you can smile, take a breath, and tell the truth:

“No. We’re killing ourselves. Let’s stop making boring marketing.”