⏳ The problem is the physician executive's time
Personal branding, thought leadership, and how to address the biggest change to content marketing in two decades
Here’s something I’ve seen a hundred times: the marketing department needs the physician executive’s time, but the physician executive doesn’t have any more time.
For years, part of my special sauce within companies was extracting thought leadership from busy executives. I would spend around 30 minutes on the phone with them, and from that conversation (which they’d often describe as word salad), I’d be able to produce a substantive, thesis-driven op-ed or blog that supported the company’s business goals.
As time went on and I got to know them better, I’d be able to produce even more just from brief conversations. Today, there are certain physicians who I don’t even have to ask. If I see a piece of news, I already know what they’re likely to think about it.
Plus I know their business and their content strategy, and the trust is there.
Which means that, given certain circumstances, I can ghostwrite with virtually no input from the physician—just the review at the end. That may sound scary in some scenarios, but it also solves for one of the biggest problems: a physician executive’s limited time.
I. How marketing is changing
I’ve been banging this drum for more than a year: the nature of online search is changing rapidly. The cause is AI. Marketing departments need to respond.
Think about your own search habits. Personally, I’ve moved more than half my searches away from Google, using a combination of Perplexity.ai, Elicit.com, and LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT as replacements.
Perplexity.ai in particular is capturing a lot of my searches. I pay $20/month for the privilege. If I could invest today in this company (it’s pre-IPO), I would. In fact, I still might.1
The point is, without Google owning a monopoly on search, content marketing strategies that rely on SEO to drive traffic, with the aim of boosting downstream business metrics, are on their way out. When your audience is no longer using Google to search for answers, it’s no use continuing to invest huge resources in gaming the Google algorithm.
To be clear: it’s not that a traditional SEO-driven strategy won’t work; it’s that, as of now, it’s a legacy marketing strategy. It’ll hang around for a few years, possibly entrenched in certain kinds of industries (or certain kinds of searches) longer than others, but its relevance is fading.
II. Marketing must have a face
So, how do companies respond?
By putting a name and a face to everything. By communicating that there are real humans behind this, with real points of view. That’s been standard marketing advice for years, but now it’s more existential.
No one wants to hear from the “corporate” voice, if they ever did. Our brains are fine-tuned to scroll right past the company-branded LinkedIn post (no matter how many “impressions” LinkedIn is telling you it got). And be honest: how much traffic is your corporate blog really getting? How many downloads of that white paper?
The only opinions we truly listen to, that capture our attention and most importantly our loyalty, are personal opinions. We are in desperate need of direction from people we trust.
The answer is to elevate individuals, strengthen their brands, allow them to have a clear point of view, and align their communications with business goals.
This is the only way to capture attention and develop trust in a world oversaturated by content, especially now.
If that kind of strategy sounds risky, consider why the company exists in the first place: because it has a critique of the existing order. But the more that critique gets passed through committee and watered down, the less clear it is. And if the distribution method for that critique is via a corporate brand, it’s even less likely to be heard or remembered.
III. How my secret sauce can be replicated
So, the problem is that you need to shift away from SEO-based strategies. To do that, you need to elevate and reinforce the voices of individual thought leaders. But all of these executives (many of them doctors) have limited time and bandwidth to jump into marketing.
This always creates a bottleneck, and these bottlenecks strangle the effectiveness of marketing messages, which need to be out there early, and often.
Physician executive time is extremely valuable, but marketing needs them to be writing, publishing, even making videos and doing podcasts. What’s the answer?
The secret sauce that I talked about above is difficult to scale—it’s based on knowledge, experience, and trust built over the course of years-long relationships. That said, there is a way to systematize this, with a little help from AI along the way.
If you want to talk directly about this, feel free to book time—but the answer is going to come down to three basic things:
1. Developing a “theory of the world”
As I explained in a previous post, thought leadership starts with clarifying your critique of the existing order. Your critique is the answer to this question:
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Writers who consistently publish online aren’t making up thesis after thesis each week—they are testing an existing thesis against new information. Sometimes events happen or data are released that confirm their theory of the world; other times the new information produces cracks in the theory. Either way, it’s a story.
Over time, trust is built by being honest and transparent about where your theory is right, where it’s wrong, and how you’ve revised it over time.
Once you’ve got this clarified, you will have endless topics to write about. The content calendar won’t necessarily write itself (in fact a content calendar that goes too far into the future should be a red flag; it means you’re deciding what to write independent of what’s on people’s minds), but having something to say will never be a problem.
But this brings us to the real problem. Once you always have something to say, you need to find the time to write about it.
2. Execution (which is always the real secret sauce)
I lied before about my secret sauce. It’s not only being able to extract meaningful ideas from “word salad” interviews with physician executives.
It’s also sitting down and executing.
When I worked within organizations, I was always the one who blocked out large swathes of time to write. When everyone else was in meetings or responding to emails, I was the one with head down in the laptop furiously typing away.
More often than not, the executives I ghostwrote for made few changes. They were happy to have their expertise and ideas offloaded. Edits were made, and stories published, week after week, with outsiders wondering how our corporate blog was able to keep humming so consistently for so long, with so many different physician voices in the mix.
For the last five years, it’s been even easier from the outside. I’m not pulled toward the mysterious tractor beam of more and more meetings like full-time employees often are. This is why outside consultants get hired: they’re able to focus on the execution.
So, there are two ways to do this:
Hire internally a strong writer who can develop long-term trust with the executive team, pay them well, and excuse them from as many meetings as they need. Or,
Hire an outside person who specializes in only this.
3. AI as a force multiplier
Some of my clients are aware I’ve been an ardent and early adopter of AI for certain tasks. But of course, there are problems when AI is misused. For example, using AI to do something you haven’t done yourself (which means you have no idea how to direct or correct it).
When it comes to writing, AI has all but replaced the entry-level easy stuff. In fact, the plain truth is that a lot of junior-level marketing functions can very much be replaced with a capable AI. Research tasks I would ordinarily have given to a marketing assistant five years ago, I can accomplish in a few minutes with the right tools.
However, at the upper end of the quality scale, we are in a hybrid moment. This is where a strong writer and subject matter expert plus AI tools can double or triple their productivity.
For example:
Claude’s “Projects” function lets you upload “project knowledge” that you can then query endlessly, for any and all future content.
I can upload automated transcripts from hundreds of hours worth of presentations and ask endless questions or generate endless summaries about the content therein.
Elicit.com can surface and summarize academic research from across the world, filtered in whichever way I see fit, and produce summaries of key findings.
Perplexity.ai can be directed to canvass all of Reddit, or all of YouTube (or all of the Internet) for answers and opinions, delivered in neatly footnoted paragraph-long summaries.
These tools never get tired. They never sleep. And they take endless direction.
They are the best marketing assistants humanity has ever created—each available for the low price of $20/month. They’re worth it.
IV. Takeaways
At the end of the day, positioning company executives as thought leaders isn’t the kind of thing you calculate specific ROIs on.
Instead, think of having trusted industry voices with huge online footprints consistently delivering compelling messages online as something like a secret weapon. Everything flows from it—PR opportunities, invitations to podcasts, requests to republish, brand recognition, industry influence, followers, stroking of egos, even the occasional lawmaker calling to ask for advice (yes, it’s happened to me).
Without such a weapon, you’re pretty much left in the cold—competing with the entire rest of the anonymous Internet for a share of dwindling search volume, hoping to drive traffic, hoping these web searchers fill out a form, or download a white paper, or book a meeting.
With such a weapon, people email you directly, asking: can you help me?
The answer is yes.
If you want a primer on how it works, feel free to reach out.