Michael Levitz
May 29, 2025
That familiar moment: coffee in hand, procrastination over, cursor blinking, blank page staring back at me. It's "Accessory Tuesday", and I'm supposed to publish a blog and email on accessories. But something feels off. My audience has been talking about a Netflix series all week, and my last three accessory emails have diminishing returns.
Yet here I am, trapped by a decision made nine months ago in an annual planning meeting (that I proposed and championed).
Putting some distance between me and Accessory Tuesday, my struggles weren't about creativity or writer's block. They were about playing a game with outdated information.
In game theory, there's a crucial distinction between full-information games (like chess, where you see the entire board) and partial-information games (like poker, where you make decisions with limited knowledge). Content marketing is decidedly the latter.
Every day, your audience's interests shift. Competitors make their moves. Industry news breaks. Search patterns evolve. Yet most content strategies operate like the game board never changes.
But how come a few marketers consistently win? They always seem to know what to say. Are they getting lucky? Are they just wired differently into their audience?
They've figured out how to gather better information, faster. Instead of recycling what they know, they're leaning into the blind spots and anticipating what the audience wants.
Here's where content marketers can get trapped by their own success: they find something that works and get stuck.
You discover that "productivity tips" emails get great open rates, so you send productivity content every week. Your audience engagement stays steady. Until it doesn't. You know you're managing decline, paying the opportunity cost of not exploring new territories. But it's too risky and time-consuming to walk away from something that was working.
This is the classic exploration (testing new topics and approaches) vs. exploitation dilemma (doubling down on what's already working). The best content marketers do both: when you find something that works, lean into it. But keep one foot in exploration mode so you're ready when the audience needs something fresh from you.
Imagine walking into a casino with ten slot machines. You have $100 to spend. How do you maximize your return?
Try this: put a dollar in each machine first and see which pays out. Shift more money toward the winners while still occasionally testing the others. Then shift money as the winners cool off and different machines heat up. That's a multi-armed bandit strategy.
Your content topics, or your editorial calendar, are those slot machines. Only it's more interesting, because you have many ways to play a single topic: strategy, argument, teaser, image, copy.
The question is: are you working the machines, or are you feeding dollar bills and getting free drinks while running out of money?
We found an interesting pattern in the most successful content marketers: They start with assumptions about what will work based on past data, then continuously run small tests to update their understanding of what's likely to succeed. Instead of betting everything on one approach, they're constantly evaluating the probability that different topics and formats will outperform others.
Instead of asking "Will this campaign work?" they ask "What's the expected value of this approach compared to alternatives?"
This shift from the traditional thinking (will this campaign hit my KPIs?) to probabilistic thinking (which approach gives me the best odds right now?) changes everything.
This is called Bayesian thinking. Instead of looking for definitive answers, you constantly update your confidence levels about what's likely to work.
Before you write your next piece of content, ask yourself:
The reason this approach is more accessible now than ever? The tools exist to gather this information at scale. Cultural trends, search trends, and competitive intelligence - that data has been democratized.
The marketers who embrace this data-driven, probabilistic approach to content aren't just avoiding the blinking cursor problem. They're playing a fundamentally different game.
While their competitors are stuck executing rinse-and-repeat editorial calendars, they make real-time decisions based on market conditions. They're not just hitting deadlines where sending the email or posting the blog is successful. They're calibrating their message to meet their audience.
And sometimes, that means skipping Accessory Tuesday to talk about the new Netflix show everyone is watching.
What's your biggest challenge with content planning? Are you stuck in exploitation mode, or have you found ways to explore new approaches systematically? Share your thoughts below.
Michael Levitz is the co-founder of Forecast.ing, a content prediction platform that helps marketers identify high-performing topics using data science and game theory. He previously led content strategy for global brands like Pampers, Samsung, and Verizon during his time as a Managing Director at R/GA. Michael co-hosts the AI content marketing podcast Forecast.ing the Brief, and his insights have been featured in Forbes, Inc., and TheStreet. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
