Paying for Reach That Builds the Category Instead of the Brand, with Mack Reynolds (Shuttlerock)

Influence Weekly · Oct 29, 2026 · 30m

Scroll your category’s feed for ten minutes. The same faces, the same talking-to-camera POV, the same three beats. Some of those creators are on your roster. Some are on your competitor’s. The reach reports look fine, so nobody flags it.

Here is what nobody puts on the dashboard: that work may be buying attention for your category instead of your brand. Finance already cut your production money and asked for more content than you have ever made, so the easy answer is to keep running the people who already work. That is the version of the spend you cannot see, and it is the one that costs you…