25 May The Marketing Mirage: When Busy Work Masquerades as Growth

You’ve seen it. The standing meeting where everyone beams about progress, but no one mentions KPIs. The newsletter that took a week to build and reached 14 people. Marketing theater is alive and well – but it’s not driving revenue.

The Weekly Marketing Show

Everyone goes around the horn, sharing updates. “We launched the new landing page.” “We scheduled the newsletter.” “We wrapped up the explainer video.”

Applause. High-fives. All smiles.

And not one person says the word growth.

Nobody talks about leads. Or pipeline. Or pipeline velocity. Just polished slides and busy energy. The problem? That newsletter took 20 hours to produce and resulted in zero clicks. The blog post? Beautiful, but unread.

It’s marketing theater – and everyone’s a performer.

Attribution Is Hard. Accountability Isn’t.

Sure, attribution is murky these days. AI, privacy changes, shifting buyer behavior – they’ve all made it harder to draw clean lines from tactic to revenue. But let’s not confuse “hard to track” with “not worth tracking.”

Just because attribution isn’t linear doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect impact. There’s a difference between playing the long game and playing make-believe. If you’re running plays that never show up in revenue, engagement, pipeline lift, or even basic intent metrics — you’re not playing the game at all.

Performative Progress Is a Dangerous Drug

This isn’t about dunking on hard-working marketers. It’s about recognizing when the system has failed them.

When teams aren’t led with clarity around business outcomes, they fill the void with tasks. Work gets done. Calendars stay full. Meetings stay upbeat. But revenue stays flat.

And because everyone feels productive, it gets harder to raise a hand and ask, “What are we actually accomplishing?”

The Org Chart Can’t Be a Black Hole

This gets worse in larger orgs. Leaders get further removed from the work. Teams get siloed. Each person becomes a cog — operating in a vacuum, disconnected from the whole.

People create campaigns, not because they work, but because that’s what the roadmap says to do. Nobody’s watching the full machine. Nobody’s asking: are these cogs actually moving the wheel?

And worst of all, even when someone does ask — they’re met with crickets. Or defensiveness. Or buried in rationale. Because questioning the impact of work in a “positive” meeting can feel like breaking some unwritten social code.

Busy ≠ Impactful

You can be busy every single day and still accomplish nothing.

You can have a fully staffed team, a full calendar of content, and an impressive backlog of ideas — and still make $0 in attributable growth.

It’s not a strategy unless it’s working. And it’s not working unless it’s moving the business forward.

Bringing the Fire Back

The antidote? Start every meeting with KPIs. Make “what did this drive?” a reflex. Connect every tactic back to a measurable goal. And if it’s not measurable? Question it. Push it. Kill it.

Not everything has to close a deal. But everything should serve the system.

Because in the end, it doesn’t matter how pretty your newsletter is — if it reaches no one and drives nothing, it’s just noise.

And the longer people pretend otherwise, the longer they drift from the one job that really matters: driving growth.