If you’ve been on the internet in the last few months, you know what I am talking about, and you’ve probably seen a meme or two. Two characters from some show, and the running joke is: “OMG, Hollander, you are so boring.”

[Yes, I love the show. I am one of those humans; if it is not your jam, that’s fine. This article really isn’t about Heated Rivalry.]

BUT, every time I scroll LinkedIn now, I think about it. Not because of my hockey obsession.

Because all LinkedIn content has become this meme.

Helpful. Thoughtful. Clearly structured. And completely, aggressively boring.

The Beige Problem Isn’t New (Marketers Just Have a New Culprit)

Here’s what I need you to understand: this is not a NEW problem. AI just makes it go faster. We get to make MORE boring content. AT SCALE! But marketers have been watching it happen in industries for decades.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my career in what I lovingly call “classically unsexy” industries. Logistics. B2B SaaS. Supply chain. I find logistics genuinely thrilling, but going to a packaging conference and then a huge retail conference, well, it is very clear where the fun budget went.

And in those industries? The beige problem is a way of life.

Look at energy companies trying to be cool and “environmentally friendly”. At some point, everyone decided the naming formula was “Energy/Solar + something vaguely optimistic.” SolarEdge. SunRun. EnergyStar. EnergyGo. They’re fine names. They’re also basically the same name.

Logistics? Ship This. Ship That. Ship You. ShipYo (I made that last one up, but I wouldn’t be surprised).

Automotive Suppliers? Car, Auto, EV, Electra-something. Every logo is a variation of grey, black, blue, with a splash of green for the sustainability vibes. Maybe throw a leaf in there.

Every few years, a new buzzword colonizes the entire industry, and everyone’s tagline is quietly updated to include it. We had “best in class.” Then “industry leading.” We had “omnichannel.” A word salad lacking creativity and the inability to answer the question WTF do you do? Now everything is “AI-powered” or “AI-anything,” slapped onto products that were perfectly functional before anyone added a chatbot to them. Some of them are very clearly automated and not agentic or AI at all.

My weirdest interaction was at a tradeshow last year where I point-blank asked a company how AI worked for their product (it was allllll over their expensive 40x60 booth.) The product person then said, “We use it to optimize the product”. When I asked how, the blank stare was very telling.

Funny enough, I was at that same tradeshow last week, and the answers weren’t much better! Everything is AI, but nothing is explainable. What do you do? AI stuff…….um, cool?

The pattern isn’t surprising. “Steal with pride” has been a marketing tactic for years. You copy your favorite competitors or industry leaders, hoping to mirror their perceived success. When everyone is watching everyone else and optimizing for “what works,” you end up with the same result. You don’t end up with a strategy, really. You end up with uniform marketing that all sounds the same.

AI didn’t really invent this problem, but it did give it a faster engine and a wider distribution channel.

Welcome to the Beige Apocalypse

Russell Quinan at TheorySF recently wrote a piece I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. He called it the Beige Apocalypse. His argument: when thousands of companies start using the same tool to write the same kind of marketing, the market fills with work that is technically competent, structurally sound, and emotionally identical. The marketing equivalent of beige carpeting. theorysf

Accurate. Painful. Correct.

What strikes me most is that we’re not even talking about bad content. AI-generated copy is usually fine. Grammatically solid. Properly structured. Logically coherent. It’s the written equivalent of a hotel lobby: inoffensive, functional, and designed to belong to no one. Not memorable.

And the particularly insidious part? Even the hot takes are manufactured now. theorysf You can feel it. The “it’s not X, it’s Y” format. The “I bet you haven’t thought about this” hook that leads to the most agreeable, risk-free conclusion possible. The provocative opener that resolves into a warm hug.

I started watching HGTV religiously in the early 2010s. Honestly, Love it or List it and the Property Brothers will always hold a place in my heart. But I remember somewhere along the way, every single house on every single show became beige/grey walls, white shaker cabinets, and open shelving with a single ceramic bowl. Eventually, I stopped watching. Not because the houses were bad. They weren’t. But I couldn’t tell one from another. Kinda like the Stepford wives. 😂 When everything is curated to be universally liked, nothing is actually interesting (I still maintain that Fixer Upper became popular because it started to break the mold by introducing “Modern Farmhouse” to the grey washing, and at least all that shiplap had some texture).

That’s what’s happening to content right now. The bad news is that we are all competing for attention in an overstimulating landscape, and you just can’t do that with beige warm hugs.

Humans and Humor Still Win. Astronomer Proved It.

Here’s the thing about Heated Rivalry. It went viral because of the humans. The characters. The FEELINGS. (okay, the glutes) The film production. The non-AI-generated story. It won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding New TV Series because it wasn’t like a million other reboots, sequels, or AI-generated slop.

Another Example:

In July 2025, a DataOps startup called Astronomer accidentally became famous. Their CEO and head of HR were caught on the Coldplay kiss cam, visibly trying to hide from the camera. The internet, naturally, lost its mind.

Most companies in that situation would have issued a measured statement and hoped everyone moved on. They did too, at first. A canned response that seemed very AI-coded. Classic safe move.

Then Astronomer leaned in.

Within one week of the viral moment, Astronomer released a tongue-in-cheek video ad produced by Ryan Reynolds’ agency, Maximum Effort, featuring Gwyneth Paltrow (who was once married to Coldplay’s Chris Martin) as their “very temporary spokesperson.” medium The video opens as if Paltrow is about to address the scandal. She doesn’t. She pivots, straight-faced, to what Astronomer actually does. The audience is in on the joke. The brand is in on the joke. And the result was millions in earned media for a company most people had never heard of. As of today, there are still articles being written about this company and the situation.

The lesson that sticks isn’t about PR strategy. It’s about the specific ingredient that made it work: humor makes us human. Memory is built on novelty; that's why we remember vacations and not the daily grind. Tech companies are not known for creative marketing, but injecting humor reminded the world that even a data infrastructure company can have a personality. medium

No AI prompt generates that instinct. That was a human call. A brave one.

And that’s the real gap opening up in marketing right now. It’s not about who has the best tools. It’s about who still has the nerve to sound like a person. AI will give you safe content (and some jokes), but do you really want safe if it is going to stagnate your business? Considering how many times I have heard “think outside the box”, I don’t think so.

The Thing AI Cannot Give You

AI does not believe anything. It predicts patterns. It assembles probabilities. Belief is a human activity. theorysf

Marketing, unlike finance, operations, or legal, is fundamentally a subjective discipline. It lives and dies on personality, taste, and the willingness to say something that might not land with everyone. The moment you optimize purely for safety and broad appeal, you have already lost what makes marketing worth doing. AI-generated content is generally pretty safe (unless you run afoul of Grok’s dark side).

We’ve started seeing the workarounds. Creators are adding intentional typos to seem more human. Writing prompts designed to make AI “sound less like AI.” Entire LinkedIn posts that are just... performing casualness. It’s the content equivalent of wearing a “I’m not like other girls” t-shirt.

Maybe the problem isn’t the tools at all. Perhaps it is the reflex. The reflex to generate, approve, and post without asking: Does this actually sound like me? Does this say something I actually believe? Would I say this out loud in a meeting? As a marketer who has felt the pressure to just deliver, it is tempting to just generate items off my to-do list.

However, even if it is business-to-business (B2B), it is still human-to-human. The person reading your post, opening your email, clicking your ad, is a person. They came to work today with things on their mind. They’re bored, stressed, or trying to solve a problem. They have exactly zero patience for content that sounds like it went to the same finishing school as the last forty things they read.

Give them something that doesn’t.

Okay, enough explaining, let’s do something about it.

5 Ways to Stay Human

Not hacks. Habits. The good news is that none of these require you to throw away your AI tools. They just require you to stay in the room with them.

1. Talk before you type. Open a voice memo or dictation app and talk through your idea before you write a single word. What would you actually say to a colleague? What’s the real observation here? Use direct quotes from yourself. “I saw this, and I thought” is a complete sentence. Your experience is not something AI can write for you.

2. Train your tools on your actual voice. If you’re using AI to help draft content and you haven’t given it examples of your writing, your quirks, your specific frameworks, and the words/phrases you’d never say, you’re getting a generic output. Spend thirty minutes doing a proper voice brief. Your outputs will be measurably different. 90% of the internet is written as “friendly and professional,” so maybe don’t start there. More importantly, read it out loud before you post it to make sure you sound like you (so in my case, slightly sarcastic but still caring).

Good Resource: This article on How to Train AI on Your Brand Voice:

Unpromptable.

How to Train AI on Your Brand Voice

You’ve been prompting AI to “write in a friendly, conversational tone.” That’s not your brand voice. That’s everyone’s brand voice…

Read more

3 months ago · 49 likes · 22 comments · James Presbitero and Dheeraj Sharma

3. Give it the ideas. Own the opinions. Ask AI for a list of angles. Ask it for frameworks. Ask it what questions your audience might have. Then decide what you actually believe about any of it. An AI can give you five angles on pricing strategy. It cannot tell you which one you’ve watched blow up in a client’s face at 9pm on a Tuesday.

4. Add at least one paragraph that no AI could write. Make it a non-negotiable. Before you publish anything, there must be one section that is specific, personal, and weird in a way that belongs only to you. A real story. An actual opinion. An analogy that you invented because it’s how your brain works. If you can’t find a paragraph to add, then add a few real sentences throughout.

5. Bring the analogy. I love an analogy (and similes). AI can explain things accurately, but it is not great at reaching into your specific frame of reference and finding the comparison that makes something click. That part is yours. When you catch yourself trying to explain something complex, ask: What does this remind me of? How can I explain it to a friend/toddler so they would understand immediately? Start there.

The Brands That Win Still Sound Like People

There is going to be a split. You may have noticed it already (or maybe not!).

One group will use AI to produce endless, technically competent content. White papers. Thought leadership about thought leadership. Posts that begin with “In today’s rapidly evolving landscape.” They will be everywhere, and they will be forgettable.

The other group will use AI for the research, the outlines, the first drafts, the logistics. And then they will do the hard, irreplaceable, human part. They will decide what they actually believe. They will say it in their actual voice. They will make the human call, like Astronomer did, when everyone else would have hidden.

The brands and people that shape culture are the ones willing to make a room slightly uncomfortable (in a good way, not a creepy way). They’re the ones with an actual opinion, a specific story, a willingness to be wrong in public.

AI will keep getting better. The content it produces will keep getting more polished. And none of that will matter, because “polish” was never the problem.

Maybe your content was already fine and polished. But it just wasn’t human enough to be remembered.

Stay human out there.

⭐ Until next week, stay curious and don’t let the squirrels win.
- Katherine, Chief Chaos Officer

Everyone is suddenly fractional.

Or at least, that’s what my LinkedIn feed would have me believe. Nary a consultant insight, just fractionals everywhere. The weird part is seeing marketing specialists in my network with 3 years of experience suddenly labeling themselves as fractional CMOs. 🥴

A few weeks ago, I read a Forbes piece on why fractional leadership is exploding as full-time jobs fade. Good article. Made some solid points. Then, in the same week, I had three separate conversations with senior-level operators who were all asking the same question: “Is fractional actually a real thing, or is this just a fancy word for unemployed?”

That question deserves a real answer. So here it is.

Why Is Everyone Suddenly Fractional?

It’s not a coincidence. A few things converged at once, and they didn’t happen in a vacuum.

First, the layoff math got brutal. Companies discovered they could replace one senior operator with AI tools and two junior hires for roughly the same cost, sometimes less (not smart, but happening anyway). If you’ve been at the director or VP level for a while, you’ve probably felt this math personally or watched someone next to you feel it. The number of fractional leaders in the U.S. roughly doubled between 2022 and 2024, going from around 60,000 to 120,000 practitioners (Column). That’s not organic growth. That’s a reaction to the market right now.

Second, the return-to-office wave hit people who had already made life decisions based on remote work. Moved to a cheaper city. Built a life around flexibility. Then the mandates came. About 50% of CHROs expect an increase in RTO mandates going forward (SHRM) which means this tension is not easing up. For people who built their lives around location flexibility or work-life balance (hello, childcare?), fractional work became the obvious workaround. I have yet to meet a fractional who is in the office 2-3x per week (if this IS you, reach out, because I have questions).

Third, the market actually wants what fractionals sell. Gartner forecasts that by 2027, over 30% of midsize enterprises will have at least one fractional executive on retainer. About 25% of U.S. businesses have already adopted fractional hiring, with that number expected to climb to 35% by 2025-2026. (Fractionus). Companies are actively trying to do more with less headcount. Some focus on AI, but the smart ones are seeking out leadership skills instead. A fractional exec gives them senior-level thinking at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire. They can scale the engagement up or down based on what the business actually needs that quarter.

Three pressure points hit at once. That’s not a trend. That’s a tipping point. And a logical outcome of the “do more with less” environment we have been seeing for the last several years.

Okay, But Is It Actually a Real Job?

Yes. Emphatically, yes.

But let’s clear up the terminology, because people use these words interchangeably, and they are not the same thing. I am planning a deeper post on this later this week, but at a high level.

A fractional executive is embedded, ongoing, part-time leadership. You show up regularly, own a function or initiative, and operate as part of the leadership team. Think fractional CMO, fractional CFO, fractional COO. You’re not on the org chart as a full-time employee, but you’re not just dropping in with a deck either.

A consultant is typically project-based. Here’s a problem, here’s a deliverable, here’s an end date. Good consultants are incredibly valuable, but the relationship is transactional by design.

An interim is part-time or full-time for a defined period. Usually brought in to cover a gap, manage a transition, or stabilize something that’s on fire.

An advisor sits at the highest level of abstraction. You’re sharing perspective, making introductions, and providing guidance. Not executing.

All four are legitimate. They serve different business needs and require different operating styles. And if someone tells you fractional is just a polished word for consulting, they’re either being lazy, or they haven’t worked with a good one.

Two Types of Fractionals (And Why It Matters)

Here’s something the LinkedIn content machine skips over: not everyone who calls themselves fractional is doing it for the same reason.

There are fractionals by circumstance and fractionals by design. Two very different animals.

Fractionals by circumstance got pushed out of a full-time role and are using fractional work to stay employed and marketable while they look for the next thing. Nothing wrong with that. It’s a smart play. However, their goal is ultimately a full-time seat, and that affects how they show up, how they price, and how they manage client relationships.

Fractionals by design have made a deliberate choice to build a portfolio of engagements rather than one job. They have their own company. They want variety. They want the leverage. They want autonomy. They’re not waiting for a full-time offer. They’re building a business intentionally to last more than just a few months.

Why does this matter to you as a potential hire? If you’re hoping to convert your fractional engagement to a full-time role at the end of the term, it’s worth asking directly. A fractional-by-design person is probably not your future full-time CMO. A fractional-by-circumstance person might be. Neither is bad. They’re just different.

And if you’re considering going fractional yourself: know which type you are before you start. It will shape everything from how you pitch to how you price.

The Sandbox Advantage

Here’s my honest take on why fractionals can be more valuable than full-timers in specific situations. Not all situations. Specific ones.

When teams have been together for a long time, things go stale. Not because the people are bad, but because familiarity is the enemy of fresh perspective. You stop seeing what’s broken because you’ve been staring at it for three years. Part of my practice is walking into exactly those situations. I’ve played in enough different sandboxes that I can spot what’s stuck faster than someone who built the sandbox themselves. Rinse-and-repeat marketing is a common strategy that eventually stops working.

That’s not a knock on long-tenure teams. It’s just proximity. The closer you are to something, the harder it is to see it clearly. Especially if you have been looking at it for 5-20 years.

“A fractional leader brings “battle-tested” playbooks from other companies. When your Fractional COO sees a supply chain bottleneck in your firm, they likely solved that same problem for their other client last month. You aren’t just paying for their time; you’re paying for the aggregate wisdom of their entire portfolio.” SilverScoop Blog You’re not just paying for hours. You’re paying for an encyclopedia of frameworks and hard-earned lessons from other companies (fun squirrel fact: my parents owned a whole set of encyclopedias, and I am the only one who used them).

Should YOU Go Fractional?

Honest answer: Maybe. Let’s break it down.

Reasons that point toward fractional:

You’ve been doing the senior-level work for a while, and you’re hitting the ceiling where companies can replace your role with two cheaper alternatives. The math is working against you as a full-timer, so flip it in your favor. You have a specialized skill set, or niche, that’s in demand right now and hard to find. Maybe you have ADHD, and the variety of multiple engagements actually keeps your brain engaged in a way one job never did. You want autonomy over your time, your clients, and your direction.

Reasons that point away from it:

You’ve hit your mental capacity ceiling, and adding business development to your plate would break something. You took a course last month and think this is a fast path to easy money. (It’s not.) You believe a fractional life is less work than a full-time job. (Also not.) You need the stability of a single employer to function well, and that’s actually fine to admit. You don’t have a network to draw clients from yet, and you haven’t thought about how you’d build one. You want to “log off” at the end of the night and not think about business.

The most common reason people tell me they don’t want to be fractional is stability. But for everyone who says that, I also hear: “I’ve been laid off three times in two years.” Which is exactly why stability, at this point, is something of an illusion. If you have a fractional contract, its termination clauses protect you. Unless you prenegotiated it in a salary role, severance and layoffs can happen out of nowhere with only a “It’s not you, we just have to reorg.” But I understand the fear is real regardless.

The “Am I Ready to Go Fractional?” Quiz

You know those quizzes in the back of a 90s magazine? “Are you a summer or a winter?” “What kind of friend are you?” Completely unscientific. Weirdly accurate.

I made one of those. Except instead of telling you your celebrity soulmate, it tells you whether you should go fractional, consult, or stay full-time.

It asks the stuff people skip over when they’re romanticizing the leap. Do you have runway? Does your experience actually match the title you’d be billing at? How warm is your network really? (Spoiler: this is the variable that matters most, and the one people most consistently overestimate.)

Free quiz for subscribers (no email collection!). Grab it below.

Take the Quiz

The Takeaway

Fractional isn’t a trend. It’s a structural response to a labor market that stopped rewarding tenure and started rewarding flexibility. The people who are winning at it may have ended up in it for different reasons, but their approach is intentional. They’re the ones who decided what they wanted their work to look like and built a practice around that.

If you’ve been thinking about it, now is genuinely a good time to figure out if it’s right for you. Not because LinkedIn says so, but because the market is actually buying.

Action Item:

One thing to do in the next 24 hours: Take the quiz and write down your honest answer to this question: Am I fractional-curious because I want something different, or because I’m running from something uncomfortable? Both can be valid starting points. But knowing which one you are will change what you build.