It Takes Two to Tango: Why Better Content Starts With Better Capture

By Henry McIntosh, Founder of 2112 Marketing and Noteworthy · Updated 2026-06-23

TL;DR. Generic AI content is forgettable and good agencies are expensive (rightly so), so most teams are stuck between the two. The way out isn't better writing. It's better capture of the insight your senior people and clients already hold. A quick disclosure: Twenty One Twelve built Noteworthy, a product that solves the issue, but I've tried to make the argument hold up whichever way you solve it.

A while back we asked a client to record himself talking through a new regulation. I'd watched this man hold a room of hundreds without notes. Genuinely compelling in person. Put him in front of a camera with a script, though, and the result was, in his own words, "the most wooden thing ever."

That moment taught me something I've not been able to unlearn. Great content isn't a writing problem or a talent problem. It's a capture problem. The insight was all there, in his head, ready to go. The method we used to get it out killed it. It takes two to tango: the right person, and the right way of drawing the insights out.

Most teams never fix the capture step. They fix everything around it instead, and wonder why the content still falls flat.

Why does so much B2B content sound the same?

Because most of it is now built from the same raw material, run through the same models.

A large language model works from what already exists. It doesn't think; it amalgamates, recombining everyone else's content into something that reads as new. Feed it nothing original and it gives you back a polished version of what your whole category already says. That's not a knock on the technology. It's just what the tool does.

The effect is measurable. In a controlled study of 293 writers, people given AI assistance produced individually better work, but their output was 10.7% more similar to one another at the group level. A parallel study of consultants found the same thing: higher average quality, but a marked narrowing in the variety of ideas. Everyone improves a bit. Everyone converges a lot. People have started calling this the great flattening, and consumers have begun to notice: when they spot AI-generated content in a brand's marketing, they're four times more likely to trust that brand less rather than more.

Buyers see the sameness even when marketers don't. Dentsu's research found 71% of B2B marketers believe they communicate a distinct position, while 68% of buyers say brands "roughly act and sound the same." That gap is the whole problem in one statistic.

So why not just hire an agency?

The solution we've run at Twenty One Twelve for many years is to run interviews with experts, but when you're dealing with large, geographically diverse teams this can become time consuming, logistically hard and very expensive, quickly. What we realised was there was no middle ground between the DIY approach and the expense of using an agency or a copywriter - which, by the way, is still the best option. And so we built the solution - Noteworthy. Noteworthy is now used by agencies, freelancers, in-house marketers and founders, because it helps them get quality insights and to a workable first draft much faster. It also gives them multimedia content - it automatically curates video clips from every interview, which helps clients stand out against the sea of sameness.

What actually breaks in the middle

The bottleneck isn't writing. It's getting time with the right people, and using that time well.

The best insight in any business sits with its busiest people: the founder, the senior operators, the clients whose stories the market would actually trust. Marketers, meanwhile, are starved of that insight. Getting it out means scheduling around impossible diaries, often getting questions signed off, running the interview, then turning it into something publishable. It's slow, it's a logistical grind, and you're usually behind before you've started. I've lived this on the agency side and watched in-house teams live it too. The pattern is identical.

And even when you do get the time, content rarely gets the focus it needs. You've a whole marketing plan to execute, so the deep, anecdote-rich conversation that would actually make a great piece gets squeezed into whatever minutes are left. That's the moment most "expert-led content" dies.

This is also why the obvious tools don't quite solve it. A note-taker captures a conversation, but it's built to transcribe, not to interview, so unless someone is actively drawing the person out, much of what it records isn't usable, and pushing the raw transcript through an LLM rarely surfaces the insight you actually wanted. Capture and extraction are different jobs.

Why original insight is worth the effort

Because it's the one thing buyers can't get anywhere else, and it changes decisions.

Good writing and slick distribution help, but neither rescues a piece that has nothing fresh to say. Original insight, the anecdote only your founder can tell, the pattern your client keeps seeing, is what gives content weight. And senior buyers respond to it. In the Edelman and LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership research, 75% of decision-makers say a piece of thought leadership led them to research a product or service they weren't previously considering, and 60% say they'll pay a premium for an organisation that consistently produces valuable thinking.

The bar is rising, though. Decision-makers read a lot of this content and rate little of it highly: in the same research, fewer than half call the quality of what they read good, and only 15% call it very good. Producing more average content doesn't close that gap. Capturing genuine insight does.

What "sounds like you" actually means

It means keeping the texture of how a person really talks, not sanding it into corporate dross.

When people worry about AI content, this is the fear: that it makes everyone sound like a press release, or worse, like a published author who's suddenly discovered the em dash. Authenticity is the opposite of that. It's the slightly rough phrasing, the way someone actually builds an argument out loud, the anecdote they reach for without thinking. Capture that and the content sounds like them. Lose it and you're back in the flattening.

This is the part I find hardest to prove on a page, and I'd rather be honest about that than overclaim. The proof tends to show up in behaviour. One person I nudged into recording video interviews, who'd been doing nothing with content before, emailed me the next day, happily surprised at how far their engagement had jumped. Across several early users we've seen something like a 3x lift in engagement. I won't pretend that's a controlled experiment; a good chunk of it is simply that they now post consistently, and that they're using a richer mix, video included, rather than text alone. But consistency and format only get traction when the underlying content is worth reading. Capture is what makes the habit sustainable.

When you shouldn't reach for a tool at all

Here's the honest version, since I have a stake in this.

I built Noteworthy, which is one answer to the capture problem: it interviews your experts and clients and turns the conversation into working drafts. Some come out good enough to publish. Some still need a human to refine them, and that human-in-the-loop step isn't a limitation, it's the point. The goal was never to replace marketers. It was to empower them, to take the logistical pain out of capture so the human can do the part that actually needs judgement.

But it isn't always the right tool, and pretending otherwise would undercut everything above. If your content is part of a wider campaign, with strategy, design and orchestration wrapped around it, an agency genuinely earns its fee. If you have a marketer who's a brilliant interviewer and leaders who reliably give them time, protect that and don't add software to it. And if content isn't a channel that moves your market, don't build a content operation to look busy. Be clear-eyed about which of these you are before reaching for any solution, mine included.

What stays true across all of them: fix the capture, and the rest gets dramatically easier. Skip it, and no tool, agency or AI model will save the output. But if you're intrigued, join the Noteworthy beta for free for a limited time - benoteworthy.io

FAQ

Is AI to blame for content all sounding the same?

Partly, but it's more accurate to say AI accelerates a problem that already existed. Models recombine existing material, so without original input they pull everyone toward the same centre, an effect documented in controlled studies showing AI-assisted work becomes more similar at the group level. The fix isn't avoiding AI; it's feeding it genuine insight first.

Can't a note-taker or transcription tool do the same job?

Not quite, because capturing a conversation and conducting one are different tasks. A note-taker records whatever is said, relevant or not. Drawing out the sharp, usable insight takes an actual interview, structured questions that prompt the anecdotes and opinions a generic recording never surfaces. That's where Noteworthy comes into its own.

How do you stop AI content from sounding robotic?

Start from how the person actually speaks and preserve it, including the slightly imperfect phrasing. Robotic content usually comes from over-polishing, smoothing a real voice into something grammatically perfect that no human would actually say.

Is this only useful for founders?

No. In practice marketers tend to get the most from this approach, because they can capture insight not just from their founder but from internal experts and clients, then turn it into content across formats. Founders are a key source of insight; marketers are often the ones who operationalise it.

Where should a time-poor team start?

With one good interview, not a content calendar. Pick the single person whose thinking your market most wants to hear, capture thirty focused minutes properly, and turn that into a small batch of content before trying to scale the habit. To accelerate your progress, join the Noteworthy beta.

Henry McIntosh is the founder of Twenty One Twelve Marketing and Noteworthy, we work with companies targeting remarkably hard to reach audiences, with deep expertise working within and selling into pharma and financial services. Noteworthy was built to solve the problem we kept encountering at Twenty One Twelve - how do you consistently create great content? Join the Noteworthy beta to discover more.