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The Shared Tragedy of Red Queen Marketing

Marketing teams are running harder than ever: more campaigns, more channels, more content, more dashboards, more tools. Too often, they are only staying in the same place.

May 11, 2026 • 7 min read

The Shared Tragedy of Red Queen Marketing

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The Problem Is Not That Marketing Teams Are Lazy AI Makes Red Queen Marketing Worse Before It Makes It Better The False Proxy Problem The Hidden Cost Of Marketing Sprawl From More Marketing To Better Marketing What PlaybookM Is Really About The Practical Test Stop Running In Place Sources

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, The Queen's Race

Seth Godin recently wrote about Red Queen hiring: the organizational habit of making hiring processes longer, heavier, and more exhausting because everyone else is doing the same thing.

More applicants. More interviews. More filters. More certainty theater. More running just to stay in the same place.

Marketing has its own version of this problem.

I call it Red Queen Marketing.

It is what happens when marketing teams compete with each other, and sometimes with themselves, far beyond the point where additional activity creates additional value.

More campaigns.

More channels.

The Problem Is Not That Marketing Teams Are Lazy

Quite the opposite.

Most marketing teams are working extremely hard. The issue is that the modern marketing system rewards visible motion more than useful progress.

A campaign exists, so it gets a landing page.

A landing page exists, so it gets paid media.

Paid media exists, so it needs reporting.

Reporting exists, so it gets promoted to a meeting.

Meetings create new requests.

Requests become more campaigns.

And the machine keeps running, looking productive in the same way a laptop fan sounds productive during a frozen Zoom call.

This is the Red Queen problem: the team is sprinting, but the business cannot tell whether marketing is advancing or simply maintaining the appearance of advancement.

Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that marketing budgets stayed flat at 7.7% of company revenue while CMOs continued to pursue productivity gains under pressure. Gartner has also reported that martech utilization dropped to 49% in its 2025 Marketing Technology Survey.

That combination should make every marketing leader pause.

Budgets are constrained. Tool stacks are underused. Expectations are rising. AI is increasing the speed of production. Buyers are harder to reach. And the default answer is still often: "Do more."

That is not a strategy.

That is a treadmill with a dashboard.

AI Makes Red Queen Marketing Worse Before It Makes It Better

AI did not create this problem. It amplified it.

For years, marketing teams have confused production capacity with marketing effectiveness. AI now makes that mistake cheaper, faster, and more dangerous.

If the old problem was that teams could produce too many campaigns, the new problem is that they can produce nearly infinite content, variants, summaries, social posts, emails, ads, briefs, and reports without necessarily improving credibility, clarity, or buyer trust.

Content Marketing Institute's 2025 B2B research shows marketers expecting to increase investment in video, thought leadership, AI for optimization, paid advertising, and AI for content creation. HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing report similarly frames distinctiveness, trust, and relevance as critical because AI is flooding the market with content.

That is the key point.

AI makes "good enough" content abundant.

But buyers are not short on content.

They are short on confidence.

They are trying to figure out whom to believe, which claims are real, which vendors can actually deliver, and which signals are credible enough to survive internal scrutiny.

Forrester has reported that generative AI and conversational search are becoming highly meaningful sources of information in B2B buying journeys, with AI being used across stages of the buying process.

That means your marketing is no longer only being read by humans. It is also being interpreted, summarized, compared, and compressed by AI-mediated discovery systems. Somewhere, a paragraph you wrote in Q2 is being reduced to one sentence by a machine that has never attended your positioning workshop. Be brave.

So the question is no longer:

"How much content did we publish?"

The better question is:

"Did we create enough credible, structured proof for buyers, and the systems influencing them, to understand why we matter?"

The False Proxy Problem

Red Queen Marketing is driven by false proxies.

Marketing teams use activity as a proxy for impact because activity is easier to count.

Emails sent
Webinars hosted
Posts published
Ads launched
MQLs generated
Campaigns completed

These numbers are not meaningless. But they are incomplete. Worse, they can become a shield. They let marketing look busy even when the business cannot connect activity to revenue, trust, pipeline quality, or customer movement.

This is how teams end up with a full calendar and an empty strategy.

A full content engine and no point of view.

A full dashboard and no decision.

A full funnel and no conviction.

The more mature version of marketing is not "more activity."

It is more visible intent.

Every meaningful marketing activity should be tied to a clear operating logic:

What business problem is this meant to solve?
Which audience is it for?
Which buying stage does it support?
Which revenue motion does it influence?
Which proof asset does it create or activate?
Which owner is accountable?
Which outcome tells us whether it worked?

Without that operating layer, marketing becomes a collection of disconnected acts of effort. That sounds nicer than "random stuff in six tools," but only slightly.

The Hidden Cost Of Marketing Sprawl

The cost of Red Queen Marketing is not only budget.

It is attention.

Every campaign creates coordination cost. Every channel creates maintenance cost. Every tool creates adoption cost. Every dashboard creates interpretation cost. Every meeting creates opportunity cost.

The tragedy is that most of this cost is invisible.

It does not show up as one dramatic failure. It shows up as drag.

The launch that slips
The sales team that does not know what campaign is live
The executive team that asks for a pipeline explanation nobody can confidently provide
The agency doing work that overlaps with internal work
The webinar that happens because it was on the calendar, not because it was tied to a clear buyer need
The campaign that gets marked "complete" even though nobody knows whether it changed anything

This is why marketing needs an operating system, not another productivity slogan with an abstract lightning bolt next to it.

From More Marketing To Better Marketing

The answer is not to stop doing things.

Marketing is an execution function. Work has to ship.

But the work has to be governed by a better question than "What else can we do?"

The better question is:

"What is the smallest coherent set of marketing activities that can create the greatest amount of buyer confidence, sales usefulness, and business evidence?"

That is where Proof Ops comes in.

Proof Ops is the discipline of making credibility operational. It means treating proof not as a random byproduct of marketing, but as a managed asset class.

Case studies
Customer quotes
Security posture
Implementation evidence
Analyst validation
Partner credibility
Performance benchmarks
Use-case proof
Objection-handling assets
Customer outcomes

These are not "nice to have" materials. In the AI era, they are discoverability assets, sales assets, trust assets, and conversion assets.

The buyer does not need another vague claim.

The buyer needs enough proof to believe the claim, defend the claim internally, and move forward with less perceived risk.

What PlaybookM Is Really About

PlaybookM is built around this belief:

Marketing teams do not need more disconnected work. They need clearer visibility into the work that matters.

That means activities should not live in scattered spreadsheets, buried Slack threads, disconnected calendars, and campaign tools nobody fully trusts.

A marketing activity should have structure.

It should have an owner.

It should have a start date, end date, status, audience, funnel stage, channel, revenue motion, cost classification, success metric, and confidence level.

Not because marketers need more fields for the sake of fields. Nobody needs a form that feels like it was designed by a compliance committee trapped in an airport.

Because without structure, marketing cannot prove what it is doing.

And if marketing cannot prove what it is doing, it will always be vulnerable to the Red Queen race: more output, more explanations, more reporting, more scrambling, more budget pressure, more activity theater.

The goal is not bureaucracy.

The goal is operational clarity.

The Practical Test

Before adding another campaign, ask five questions:

Does this activity map to a real business priority? If not, it is probably noise.
Does it support a specific audience, stage, or revenue motion? If not, it is probably too vague.
Does it create or activate proof? If not, it may be content without credibility.
Can sales, leadership, and marketing all understand why it exists? If not, it is probably under-briefed.
Will we know whether it worked? If not, it is not an experiment. It is just activity wearing a lab coat.

The discipline is not doing less for the sake of doing less.

The discipline is refusing to do more simply because more is available.

Stop Running In Place

The Red Queen race feels productive because everyone is tired.

That is the trap.

Exhaustion is not evidence of progress.

A full campaign calendar is not evidence of strategy.

A larger content engine is not evidence of credibility.

A bigger martech stack is not evidence of operational maturity.

Marketing leaders do not need to win the contest for most activity. They need to build a system that makes the right work visible, accountable, measurable, and credible.

Successful fishermen understand that casting an ever-wider net is not always the best way to catch the fish you need.

Successful marketing teams should understand the same thing.

The point is not to run harder.

The point is to stop running in the wrong race.

Sources

Photo by Fiona Murray-deGraaff on Unsplash