The Marketing Valley
You don’t control the hit. You control the at-bats.
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” — Seneca
You’ve been here before. You launch a campaign you’re genuinely proud of, with a sharp angle, a clean landing page and an email sequence you rewrote four times.
It lands with a giant, deafened thud.
So you try the next initiative: a new channel, a webinar, a content push, a partnership you spent weeks lining up. Each one goes out on time and done right, and the needle barely moves.
I call it the marketing valley.
Here’s the worst part: the valley gets deeper the better you’ve done before.
If you’ve never had a campaign "pop" (as the kids would say), a flat quarter is just a flat quarter. But if you’ve had the launch that filled the pipeline in a single weekend, or the post that sent signups through the roof, every initiative after it gets judged against that one, like the younger brother who got his masters, but didn't get his doctorate (neither myself, nor my brother have a masters or a doctorate, but I'd imagine that's what it'd feel like. My brother does have hair, though. Maybe it's like that? I digress).
Your confidence is shot and you stop running campaigns all together because you're addicted to the itching anticipation of hitting that high again.
Buddhism has a name for this: the hungry ghost.
A creature with an enormous belly and a mouth the size of a pinhole. It’s always starving and never full. That’s what chasing your best campaign feels like. A good month doesn’t feed it, and neither does a solid launch, because you aren’t hungry for results anymore. You’re hungry for that level of satiety, and nothing below it even registers as food.
The valley isn’t really the problem. The problem is expecting control, the belief that the right hook, cadence or format will produce the next hit on schedule. It won’t. You don’t control when something strikes, whether it strikes twice, or how long it lasts once it does.
It can come from nowhere. In 2020 a guy named Nathan Apodaca posted a TikTok of himself longboarding down the road, drinking Ocean Spray straight from the bottle and mouthing along to “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac. That October, “Dreams” had the best U.S. week in its entire life: 13.4 million streams, according to Billboard.
A song from 1977. Forty-three years old. When the album first debuted in 1977, it sold more than a million copies, but in a single weekend it got 13 million searched streams.
Fleetwood Mac didn’t plan that, and no label marketing team did either. A dude with cranberry juice did something weird and it exploded.
It can leave and not come back. Metallica put out the Black Album in 1991 and it became the biggest record of their career by a mile. They never stopped shipping: Load, Reload, St. Anger, Death Magnetic, all the way through 72 Seasons, and most of them debuted at number one.
None of them landed like the Black Album.
And their biggest cultural moment of the last thirty years? Stranger Things put “Master of Puppets” in a season finale, and a song from 1986 hit the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time ever, thirty-six years after release.
The band that never stopped making new things got its comeback from an old one, picked by somebody else.
You don’t get to choose.
So what do you actually control?
You control the at-bats. Showing up consistently doesn’t guarantee a hit. It just means you take more swings than the person who ships when they feel inspired. Over enough time, that’s how the odds work.
But don’t let consistency become your new hit machine. If you’re only shipping every week because it’s supposed to bring the big one back, that’s the same expectation of control in a nicer outfit, and the hungry ghost will eat that too.
Keep going because you care about the work. The hits, the droughts and the random 43-year comebacks aren’t yours to schedule.
You don’t control the hit. You control the at-bats.
So step up to the plate this week. Ship the thing.
— Zach
