Can I tell you a secret?

I am a little bit of a perfectionist.

I tend to overthink things. Sometimes that's really good. Sometimes it's a massive pain in my ass.

If you hire me to audit a growth marketing program, you want the version of me who digs through every channel and turns every finding into a forecast showing how marketing should drive gross contribution margin.

That level of meticulous consideration is why people call me. It is also one of the reasons this newsletter has been so inconsistent.

I keep asking myself: Is this useful enough? Is the format right? Should it be more practical? A field guide? A tool review? A video? Should I perhaps stare at the draft for another six weeks until the entire market changes and none of it is relevant anymore?

(That last one is apparently my favorite.)

So this issue is me saying something out loud that I have needed to say for a while: I do not want to keep writing another AI newsletter just because newsletters are the format I started with.

If you have been here since the beginning, you have seen every phase of Marketer in the Loop.

It started with observations as a marketing leader, not knowing how best to use new tools to adapt my practice. What was easy, and what was not. And how people were dealing best with change.

Then came practical AI advice and the operating system I built in Claude Code. Shout out to everyone who remembers the humble beginnings of Cursor CMO, which is still the cornerstone of my ai-native growth leadership practice. When every software product added AI (or a sparkle button), I started writing tool reviews. Then I worried reviews were not enough, so each issue became a field guide: what I am working on, what went wrong, and what you can do next.

Readers liked it. Then they would say, “I love the content. I just haven't had time to do anything with it yet.” Or, “I did the steps, but I got stuck on 'what next' and the team has been slow to pick it up.”

That bothered me. There is a huge gap between telling someone how to do something and helping them understand it well enough to make it work. A clean three-step process can hide every decision that determines whether the solution works.

I tried to close that gap by making the writing more detailed and complete. Naturally, the newsletter became harder to write and not necessarily easier to use.

But people still had the problem– "Great tactical stuff, but I still can't even get started"; or, "I tried the way you did it. And it worked for you, but not for me. What am I doing wrong?"

Here is what I finally realized: My readers' needs have changed as much as my own, and this format isn't "it" anymore.

Let me explain.

There is too much content. Everywhere.

Marketers see falling clicks and leads, then ask how to improve the content. Sometimes the content is the problem. Often, it is not.

Everybody started producing content at the same time. AI made even mediocre creators pretty okay overnight. Now we are all yelling “valuable insights” at one another.

Every morning, I wake up with ten newsletters and do not read them. I have Readwise, Instapaper, and a graveyard of agents built to filter everything for me. You know what none of them has done? Create more hours.

The "solution" to the "problem" today is not "more information for the thing that occupies 80% of my racing thoughts"– it's "how do I filter all of this shit down into something that helps me in the small block of time I actually have to consume stuff like this every day". It reminds me of choosing your top friends on MySpace. I want a short list like that for what’s worth my attention now.

You had a few top friends. If somebody moved up, somebody else fell off. It didn't mean you hated them. There were only so many spots. Many friendships ended over getting the boot out of someone's top 5.

Human attention limits work the same way. I have about two hours a day for newsletters, YouTube, Instagram, X, podcasts, conversations, and events. That is all content, y'all.

What this means for this newsletter: I don't want to cling so hard to the "newsletter" format that I fail to see that most of my users are like me– buried in newsletters without enough time to read most of them.

What we really need are... filters. 🤔

What is most useful to me right now is getting inside the tools and doing stuff.

I want to take a real problem and explore the options. What impact do we expect? Why this path? What did we get wrong the first two times? The journey is often more valuable than the answer.

Most AI content removes the journey. It gives you a prompt, workflow, or neat little architecture diagram and says, “Here. Do this.”

But what are you trying to accomplish? What does it affect? Why is today's process broken? How will the team use the new thing on Tuesday morning?

The work is the journey, exploration of many potential paths, realization that some looked promising but didn't work out (and why), and eventually arriving at the one that fit.

You can build an elegant AI version of a broken process and end up with the same problem, now with more YAML. Or it works for you, confuses everybody else, and changes nothing.

There is no perfect answer for most AI work. There is the goal, context, constraints, options, and judgment you build by seeing how they interact.

That is why more prescriptive writing did not solve the reader problem. People found the steps useful, then got stuck when their situation did not match mine. The missing material was the reasoning between the steps.

Honestly, writing is not always right for that. If something is instructional, show me. If it is informational, let me listen while I walk or drive. I want to hear smart people work through the awkward bits they would normally edit out.

This newsletter format isn't solving the "practical application" problem my readers have, so I need to adapt. Nice shoe– wrong size.

That is why I keep returning to the Profound Marketing Engineering podcast and Lenny's podcast. I can listen while walking or driving, and I get to hear how somebody thinks instead of only consuming the polished answer. Then, I can apply the "frameworks" to my own problems and build something that works because it was designed for the purpose.

So, yes, after all this talk about not constantly changing the format, I am changing the format (the irony is not lost on me).

There will be more video, working sessions, wrong turns, and explanations of why the obvious solution failed with a real team. Not because video is a content hack. Some things make more sense when you watch the work happen.

I also want to spend less time talking about what I'm doing and more time talking with people doing this work. Partly, that is practical. There is only so much client work I can show when NDAs exist and other people's businesses are not my content calendar.

The bigger reason is that marketing feels lonely as hell right now.

Everything is harder. Everybody is working more. Some old ways are so obviously broken that you start to wonder whether you are the only person who can see it.

As a consultant, I believe my job is to help companies transform. Get them from point A to point B. Make them understand how much the market changed. Save them from becoming extinct.

What I've realized is: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Not everyone will be able to make this transformation.

I cannot keep trying to move immovable objects. Some leaders still treat AI as a tool-training project they will address after the roadmap clears. It is not going to clear, and the old operating model will not become more viable while they wait. It's sad to say and accept that some of those businesses genuinely are not going to make it.

I want to invest more of my time in the people who do get it: founders, private equity leaders, marketing leaders, operators, and agencies building differently. I mean the people who make you feel hopeful because they are not just posting about the future. They are doing the work.

(People like you – because you are here reading this right now, probably on your Labor Day Weekend Saturday.)

I call those people lighthouses. 🌅

They are the people you look for when you feel misunderstood, blocked, or alone. Maybe you need someone to jam with. Maybe you need a new job and are tired of companies that have not accepted what changed. Maybe you just need validation that you're not losing it– the whole world is, in fact, changing. The marketing practices, people, playbooks that worked before really do NOT work now. We have to MOVE ON.

I spend probably 30 percent of my time talking with founders, private equity leaders, CMOs, marketers, and agency operators. Every week, I find people doing something genuinely interesting. I want to introduce you to them and show you what they are building, how they think, and what they learned when the first version failed.

The next decade of marketing will not be figured out by one person publishing the perfect field guide. We will figure it out by talking about what we are learning, supporting people moving the work forward, and building enough community that nobody has to solve everything alone.

Some of the brightest minds in modern growth leadership right now have one thing in common: they regularly, openly, and confidently express that they don't have all of the answers. And that everything we do right now is in the spirit of LEARNING what the "new" way is. And anyone proclaiming to confidently "know" the new playbook right now is... not someone you should be following.

That is what I want Marketer in the Loop to become: more seeing, more hearing, more real work in progress, more people worth knowing, and fewer tidy prescriptions pretending there is one correct way to do any of this shit.

Thank you for being here through every weird version of this thing. I mean that. The next issue will look different, and I hope you love it.

Who is doing this right?

Who is building, leading, experimenting, or changing the way marketing work gets done in a way that gives you hope?

Reply and tell me who I should feature first, or forward them this email and we can get in touch. You can nominate somebody well known, somebody almost nobody knows yet, or yourself. Just tell me what they are doing that the rest of us should see.

I am ready to get out of the pile and into the work.

I’m Hanna Huffman. Marketer in the Loop is my weekly letter about doing good marketing work as AI changes how we do it. Expect useful ideas, people worth knowing, and things I’m figuring out in my own work.

Published by MultiplAI Growth Partners.