Once, after explaining to a coworker how my team and I were focused on delivering our day-to-day work with excellence — and not on winning awards or on disruptive campaigns — they told me that no one should treat what they did "as a commodity."

That commodity word has stuck with me ever since.

I knew we had been providing real value. We consistently delivered quality work, month after month. Our work drove business objectives, and we had the data to prove it. We didn't win awards, but we did the work that paid the bills and freed up other teams to try to win awards. We didn't have to be the guy. We wanted to be the guy the guy counts on.¹

So we were essentially providing a commodity, right?

Yes, but also no.

Back in 2015(ish), a client once had some extra budget at the end of their fiscal year and, for whatever reason, wanted to spend it on new editorial content. This worked out to about 200 new articles, and they needed them all done within three weeks. In normal circumstances we might be doing 80 to 100 articles each month across half a dozen clients.

So this was more.

But we did it. We hired a bunch of freelancers, quickly onboarded them into our established process, and churned out 200 articles — without disrupting any of the regular work and without any of us having to put in 80-hour weeks. We delivered them to the client, who was ultimately completely satisfied.

I can assure you none of those 200 articles were amazing, but none were bad either. Given the circumstance, no marketing or content agency could really produce that work any better or worse than anyone else. Those articles were "a product or service that is indistinguishable from ones manufactured or provided by competing companies."

What wasn’t a commodity was the ability to deliver that work. We were the only available resource to deliver against that brief because we were the only resource with that reliable foundation, able to withstand the various stress tests that pop up from time to time. Our boring-by-design approach directly resulted in the agency getting a big chunk of unexpected revenue.

If you want to see how good a pizza shop is, start with their Margherita pizza.² Anybody can cover up mediocre sauce and average dough with fancy toppings and whimsical flavor combinations. But if they have the basics perfected, you know they'll be able to deliver on pretty much everything else.

It’s o.k. to treat marketing as a commodity. Deliver quality work, aligned with the brief, on time. Emphasize clarity, scalability, and efficiency to create a process-first approach to marketing. Sometimes the best thing you can do is the same thing as everyone else, just with more competence, consistency, and alignment to actual business objectives.

That’s what other departments do, right? I’ve never met anyone on the legal team trying to be disruptive or anyone in finance trying to reinvent what accounting is. They’re providing a valuable commodity, reliably and effectively. And they’re appreciated for it.

When marketers resist commoditization, they're resisting accountability, structure, and repeatable success. That doesn't make them better marketers; it makes them less useful.

If this resonates with you, consider subscribing. Each week I’ll share essays and commentary drawn from today’s marketing trends and my upcoming book Marketing Isn’t Special — all focused on improving how marketing is understood, measured, and valued.

If this doesn’t resonate with you, I would never begrudge someone wanting a less cluttered inbox.