I'm going shorter this week. Intentionally.

Less is more — that's what I'm testing. Tell me if you like it.

She said something that reframed how I think about the whole game:

Media isn't the outcome. It's the system.

Most communicators treat content like a scoreboard. More posts. More reach. More impressions. But Rachel's point is that media is the engine — and what it powers is trust.

Her formula: (People First + Media Driven) × AI = Trust at Scale.

The insight I keep coming back to: if people aren't at the center of your content, you don't have a brand. You have a commodity. Because messages can be copied. Strategies can be replicated. People can't.

→ Rachel is the founder of Share Your Genius. Worth a follow if you're building a content engine for your organization.

Let me tell you what dedication to getting better looks like…

I was in Amsterdam this week for an executive roundtable dinner. But someone I'll call Foxxy Cleopatra — a communicator I've gotten to know through the DDC community — made a serious effort to come meet me earlier in the afternoon.

We sat down in a café, ordered some very Dutch snacks (not that kind of Amsterdam coffee shop, not that kind of “snack” 🙂), and she started walking me through her situation.

She had moved into marketing after years on the sales team. No formal training. No playbook handed to her. Just energy, ideas, and ambition — and a company that eventually created a role for her because she kept asking great questions.

Coming up on two years into this, her boss wants to see ROI. She has plenty of initiatives running. All of them good. All of them worthy. None of them clearly connected to the one thing her boss cared about: revenue.

Sound familiar?

So we did what I always do when someone's lost in the whirlwind — we opened up the DDC framework and started with the end in mind.

Her boss's goal: grow revenue. Her boss’s edge: a handful of star salespeople who already believed in the brand, reposted everything, and showed up to speak at conferences. Natural evangelists.

I asked her how she was supporting them directly.

She wasn't. She was treating everyone on the sales team the same — spreading her energy evenly across all of them. Noble. But not effective.

Think of it this way: if you have ten candles and ten cups of water, you'll never make tea for anyone. But if you put all ten candles under one cup? You get one hot cup. That person tastes it. Then another. Then another.

So we launched Operation Golden Boy.

Using Meltwater, Foxxy now scans the market daily — competitor news, industry signals, customer conversations, key topics her prospects care about. She packages it into a daily intelligence briefing and a weekly summary. She runs a bi-weekly readout for the sales team.

She's not posting and hoping the algorithm rewards her. She's feeding the people who are closest to the conversion — the star players who can take that intelligence directly into their customer conversations.

This is what Rachel was talking about.

Media as a system. People at the center. The content isn't the goal — the outcome is. In this case: more pipeline, better win rates, a contribution she can actually point to.

That's the W. And it's the question I always come back to: how do you know you helped win the game?

If you recognize yourself in Foxxy's story — the whirlwind, the boss wanting ROI, the feeling that you're spinning plates — that's exactly what we work through at Run Club every Thursday.

I'm in New York on March 11 for a free DDC masterclass.

I'll be joined by Antonio Ortolani, who's going to walk through something every communicator needs: how to design a measurement framework that actually earns leadership trust.

Limited seats. If you're in the area, come.

Can't make NYC? Here's what's coming up:

→ Join us live — The DDC Run Club meets every Thursday. Free, virtual, interactive. 8am LA / 11am NYC / 4pm London. 250+ communicators registered, learning together every week. REGISTER FOR FREE

→ Know someone who needs to hear this? Forward this email. The best thing you can do for a colleague stuck in the measurement trap is show them there's a way out.

→ What outcome are you struggling to connect to? Reply to this email. I read everything.

See you Thursday at Run Club.

Dino

(I’m off to pack my suitcase for another action packed week where I’ll be in DC, Atlanta, and NYC!)