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I recently had a conversation with someone who kept using the word "disruptive" to describe their marketing strategy. Every other sentence it came up. Disruptive creative. Disruptive approach. Disruptive branding. After about twenty minutes of this and the sense of drama it created, I wanted to ask: disruptive to whom, exactly? Disruptive compared to what?

The word has been so overused that it's basically lost its meaning, which is a shame, because the concept behind it is actually worth thinking about.

Let me try to give it some of its meaning back.

There's a real difference between disruption and destruction, and I don't think enough people in business or marketing stop to figure out which one they're actually doing.

Disruption is questioning the way things work. It's looking at your category, your approach, your messaging, your channels, and asking whether there's a better way to do it. It's experimental. It's iterative. It challenges assumptions without necessarily throwing everything out. A disruptive strategy can coexist with what is already working. It's about adding a new angle, testing a new idea, and finding a smarter path through the same terrain. Disruption can be a test with big implications, or an entirely new idea working its way into the mix.

Destruction is different. Destruction is blowing up the road entirely, and hoping something better gets laid down in its place. It's starting over. It's saying that everything we've done is wrong and that we need to rethink it from the ground up. Sometimes that's the right call, but it requires a specific kind of organization, a specific kind of leadership, and a very high tolerance for pain and uncertainty. Most businesses, if they're honest with themselves, are not built for that. Neither are most people. They think they want it, but when it gets real, they want the road back.

Here's the thing: most companies that say they want to be disruptive are actually doing something far less interesting. They're making small changes and calling them bold. They're tweaking their media mix, refreshing their creative, or trying a new channel, and they're presenting it internally as a big swing. That's not disruption. That's iteration with better PR. That’s safer, of course, but less impactful.

Real disruption takes courage because it means being willing to be wrong in public. It means letting something underperform long enough to learn from it. It means not pulling the plug the second the CFO gets uncomfortable (and they do). Most organizations simply cannot hold that position.

So which one is right for you? Probably disruption, if you're being honest. Steady, thoughtful, evidence-based disruption, the kind that challenges your assumptions without requiring you to set the building on fire.

Does this conversation even matter anymore in the age of AI?

Think about it this way. A lot of what we called "strategy" in media and marketing was really just the story we told about execution. The media plan, the channel mix, the targeting approach. We built elaborate documents to give people confidence that we'd thought everything through, and then the second things went live, we were optimizing in real time anyway. The plan was a performance. The real strategy was what happened after (see my article last week in Mediapost).

Now AI is absorbing all of that. Platforms are capable of doing the planning, the pacing, the optimization, the real-time budget shifting, all of it, autonomously and more efficiently than any human ever did. Which means the how and the where are increasingly able to be out of our hands.

What's left? The why and the what. The brief. The thinking that happens before any of this starts.

And that's exactly where the disruption vs. destruction conversation now lives. Not in your channel strategy or targeting parameters, because AI will optimize them regardless. It lives in the brief. It lives in the thinking you bring to why you're doing this in the first place, what you're saying, and who you're actually trying to reach in a human sense, not just a data sense.

No algorithm is going to decide what your brand stands for. No agent is going to write the idea that turns a campaign into something people actually remember. That's still yours to own.

So be disruptive there. Be relentlessly curious about whether the story you're telling is the right one. Question your assumptions about your audience and your message. But don't blow it all up for the sake of feeling bold. This is where you value still resides, regardless of the tools and machines that level the playing field.

Disruption builds something better. Destruction just makes a mess.

Thanks for reading.

Cory.