There is a character in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men named Lennie.

Big man. Sweet man. Wouldn't hurt a fly on purpose. And he has this habit, this beautiful, tragic, inevitable habit, of finding small soft things and loving them. Mice. Puppies. Anything that fits in his enormous hands. And he pets them. Lord, does he pet them. With everything he has. With total and complete and suffocating devotion.

Until they stop moving.

Every time. Without exception. The thing Lennie loves most cannot survive being loved by Lennie.

I have been in this business for thirty-five years. I have sat in more marketing meetings than any human being should be asked to endure. I have watched campaigns born and killed and born again under different names. I have shaken hands with geniuses and with frauds and with people who were somehow both simultaneously.

And I am here to tell you something that will make you uncomfortable if you are honest enough to let it.

We are all Lennie.

Every last one of us.

Allow me to explain.

I was there, personally, physically there, when digital advertising was new and extraordinary and full of promise. I remember the first banner ad on hotwired.com. It felt like a magic trick. You know what the click-through rate was on that first AT&T banner ad in 1994? Forty-four percent. Forty-four. Nearly half of every human being who laid eyes on it clicked the thing. Not because they were stupid. Because it was new and new things command attention, and attention is the whole ballgame and always has been.

And then.

Marketers found out about banner ads.

Oh, God. They loved those banner ads. They loved them the way Lennie loved that mouse. They put them everywhere. They made them blink. They made them flash and bounce and follow your eyes across the page. They made them auto-play sounds at full volume. They made them impossible to close, you'd click the X and hit the ad instead and your blood pressure would spike and the advertiser would count it as an engagement. They built entire companies around the science of making banner ads more annoying in more innovative ways and charged a fortune for the privilege.

Today the average banner ad gets clicked by one human being out of every thousand who see it.

We loved it to death.

And listen, I could stop right there. I could let banner ads be the whole lesson. But I have watched this happen so many times, with so many tactics, that stopping at banner ads would be like describing the Titanic and only mentioning that it got a little wet.

Email. Do you remember when an email from a company felt almost exciting? When people opened things? I had clients in the late nineties running email campaigns with open rates that would make you weep today. Seventy, eighty percent. People read them. Responded to them. Called the number at the bottom.

Lennie found out about email.

SEO. Pop-ups, and the particular circle of hell reserved for the person who invented the exit-intent pop-up, which is a technology designed to lunge at you the moment you try to leave, like a bad date blocking the door. Auto-play video. Influencers. The LinkedIn connection request from someone you have never met who immediately sends you a six-paragraph pitch that reads like it was written by a hostage. 

Every single time. Identical pattern. Something works because it's new and human and unexpected. The good marketers find it. Then the bad ones do. And there are so many more bad ones. I'm sorry but there are. I have eaten their shrimp at their conferences and sat through their presentations and watched them take a living thing and automate it and scale it and drain every last drop of humanity out of it until the people it was meant to reach build walls so high that nothing gets through anymore.

And now.

Now they have found AI.

I can already smell it. Can you smell it? That frictionless, perfectly structured, relentlessly competent prose that says everything correctly and means absolutely nothing. Seventeen hundred words on any topic in any industry, all of them accurate, none of them alive. It is the banner ad of 2026, and Lennie has both hands on it and is petting it with everything he has got.

And don’t get me started on the AI-enabled SPAM outreach on LinkedIn and cold email. You’ve surely received the oddly personal message from someone you don’t know, which quickly transitions into a pitch before your eyes. Well, AI bots are now swarming our inboxes, with senders bragging about how they can send 20x as many emails. Which means it will become an ineffective tactic in 20x the time. 

Here is what breaks my heart about this specifically.

AI is genuinely remarkable. I mean that. What a skilled, thoughtful, disciplined marketer can do with these tools, using them the way a finish carpenter uses a power saw, with judgment and care and full understanding that the tool does not replace the craft, is extraordinary. I have seen it produce things that moved me. Things that were smarter, faster, and better than what came before.

But Lennie does not use tools like a finish carpenter.

Lennie hugs them.

And right now, Lennie has a prompt library and a content calendar and a HubSpot integration, and he is producing eighteen pieces a month, eighteen!, because someone showed him he could produce eighteen pieces in an afternoon, and nobody in the room asked whether any of those eighteen pieces deserved to exist. Nobody asked who was going to read them. Nobody asked whether a real human being on the other end of that content was going to feel seen or helped or moved or even mildly interested.

They asked how to schedule them.

A new study tells us that consumers are already four times more likely to walk away with a negative impression of a brand when they detect AI-generated content. Four times negative. And we are accelerating. We are scaling. We are petting faster.

The mouse is not doing well.

Here is the only question that separates the Lennies from the rest: Do you know why the thing works? Not that it works. Why. Because the why is everything. The why is what you protect when the bad marketers show up. The why is what keeps you from loving something to death.

Email worked because it was personal. The moment it stopped being personal it stopped working.

Banner ads worked because they were unexpected. The moment they were everywhere, they were invisible.

AI works, right now, today, in the hands of people who understand this, because it still feels human when it's done right. Because the reader cannot tell. Because there is still enough care and judgment and actual human thought behind it that it lands like something worth reading.

The moment that's gone, and Lennie is working very hard to make sure that moment comes quickly, it joins the banner ad. The pop-up. The exit-intent lunge. The LinkedIn ambush.

Another thing that worked.

Until we got hold of it.

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One last thing. The marketers who don't end up like Lennie are the ones who know exactly what they're doing and why. Not approximately. Exactly. If you want an honest, specific picture of where your organization actually stands with AI right now, before Lennie gets any further, Buzzhoney offers a B2B Marketing AI Maturity Assessment. No sales pitch waiting on the other side. Just the truth about where you are and what to do about it.

The good marketers always want to know the truth.

The Lennies never think they need to.

Click here to schedule a pre-planning session and learn more about the Maturity Model.

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