A version of this story appeared in Total Annarchy, my fortnightly newsletter that helps you be a better writer, storyteller, marketer. Get it in your inbox; you’ll love it.

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This week I was at the National Agri-Marketing Association in St. Louis, Missouri, where I gave a brand-new speech on how we prove the power of a slower, lasting marketing move. (Waves to new NAMA friends!)

The night before the speech, I was in my hotel room. I had just drifted off to sleep when suddenly the WOOP-WOOP-WOOP of a police siren went off a foot from my head. Like my bed was being pulled over for speeding.

Which was confusing. Until I realized the siren was actually an emergency alert alarm sounding on my phone:

TORNADO WARNING!!!
TAKE SHELTER NOW IN A BASEMENT OR INTERIOR ROOM!!!
PROTECT YOURSELF FROM FLYING DEBRIS!!!

Up until this week, my entire knowledge of tornadoes was through my annual viewing as a child of The Wizard of Oz. So in my dumb, sleepy stupor I thought: How bad could it be…? No hotel alarms sounding. No knock on the door.

And: Would it really be so bad to be transported somewhere wild and colorful and cinematic—like Munchkinland?

Anyone who has actual lived experience with tornadoes would not be so cavalier. But here I was… a rookie weighing the pros (take shelter) and cons (stay put).

PRO: THAT SIREN
CON: But I’m in my pajamas.

PRO: YOU ARE ON THE 19th FLOOR
CON: But I’m tucked under the covers with my glasses off.

PRO: YOU COULD DIE
CON: But… it’s a steel and reinforced-concrete building?

I put it to an internal vote of my (sleepy) brain and (snug) body: We decided we were comfortable. We voted to stay put. We voted Munchkinland.

Also, you should know that in a fight-or-flight emergency, my nervous system chooses a secret third path: duvet.

Which obviously leads us to email marketing.

The power of email hasn’t changed. But the weather around it has.

The New Email Climate

Quick history lesson (because facts are important. Did you know that it’s a myth that tornadoes usually bypass cities because of city heat?):

A lifetime ago—27 years!—Seth Godin published his seminal book Permission Marketing. That same year, my company, ClickZ—among the first serious digital marketing publications—held one of the first email marketing conferences ever.

Seth defined permission marketing as the privilege of delivering “anticipated, personal and relevant” messages to people who actually want them.

It sounds basic now. But in 1999, it was a siren going off on the nightstand of every marketer.

Permission used to be enough. If someone subscribed, that itself was valuable because it gave you direct access to their attention. Especially in a world where an inbox got roughly four emails a day.

That’s no longer true. Today, most of us live in our inboxes. 

When AI Manages the Inbox

Stroll with me into the very near future… a world where inboxes have a new AI robot in charge.

In this new land—a kind of Automaton Munchkinland—we don’t live in the inbox anymore. Maybe we barely check the inbox at all.

Instead, messages are filtered, summarized, collapsed, prioritized, pasteurized, pulverized, and possibly purified. All before a human ever sees them. A human is summoned only according to certain set parameters.

The path looks like this:

For marketing, that means permission doesn’t guarantee visibility anymore.

Deliverability does not guarantee it, either. It’s not enough to make sure all your T’s are crossed and I’s are dotted so you land in the primary inbox, high-fiving all the other emails who’ve dropped in alongside you. YOU MADE IT is no longer the goal.

And that raises an uncomfortable—but important—question:

So what happens to email marketing? Are we dead in the path of this storm?

No. St. Louis hasn’t been hit with a tornado in years, right?

But the sirens are going off.

The Sirens Are Sounding

The new goal is neither access nor deliverability. It’s being consciously and expressly chosen.

It’s a person manually selecting your shiny, fresh email and telling the robot: Yo. Save those for me.

Your relationship with the recipient is the difference between being seen… and being skipped.

For years, we optimized for deliverability—how to get in. Now we need to optimize for selection—how to be chosen.

The old way vs. the new way:

Visibility is now based solely on value. They choose to read you.

Email is still the GOAT—but the advantage is no longer email itself. It’s what email enables when it’s chosen.

And that asks us to shift our thinking:

From messaging → making meaning
From broadcasting messages → corresponding with people
From scale first → story first

Marketing needs to show up differently:

• Individual personality over brand. People choose people, not logos. Your quirks are the signal through the noise.
• The From line matters more than the Subject line, because the storyteller is the new correspondent. Make your newsletter from a person. More than that: Make it sound like it is.
• Humanity over polish. The perfectly crisp email sans fingerprints is forgettable.
• Fewer messages with clearer intent. Every send should have a reason to exist. If you can’t name it, neither can your reader. (We talked specifics on that here.)
• Work that earns selection—not just work that clears the hurdle of the spam filter.

Pro tip: Pull up your last three email sends. Look yourself square in the eye and answer this question with unflinching honesty: If an AI assistant were triage-reading these emails in an inbox, would it flag this for my reader? Would the reader think… Nay, nay. This one is for me? Is the work genuinely worth their time? That, my friend, is our new bar.

• A voice your readers would genuinely miss. Would they miss your emails if you stopped sending them? (Try it.)
• Specificity that feels unmistakably you. Anyone can write about the storm. Only the person who lived it can write about choosing Munchkinland from under a hotel duvet.
• A perspective no summary bot could give. If an AI could have written it, an AI will summarize it and your reader will never see it.

It’s weird to realize that the inbox you’re delivering to isn’t the inbox your reader actually reads. There’s a layer between you and them. And that layer is making ***decisions.***

But that’s the world we now live in.

The Storm Is 5 Miles Away

In St. Louis, the storm passed 5 miles outside the city. Right now, the storm is 5 miles away for email, too. 

You still have time to act. Do not pull the covers over your head. Do not be sleepy me in my bed.

What changed isn’t really email; it’s actually attention. Attention has always been scarce, and now it’s also curated. The algorithm that rules your social feeds is also in the inbox.

I’ve heard smart folks like Dan Oshinsky at Inbox Collective and the team at Litmus talking about this for a while now. It’s getting more urgent.

The only email strategy that actually works from here on out is being someone your reader would genuinely miss if you stopped showing up.

That’s a relationship problem, a writing challenge, and—if you’re willing to invest the time—an opportunity.

When speed becomes cheap, judgment carries a premium. That’s true in marketing strategy. It’s true in content. And it is especially true in email.

Also it’s true of tornadoes.

It turns out St. Louis was hit with a tornado less than a year ago, in May of 2025. Yikes.

This week, it might’ve bypassed the city completely. I was able to pretend it wasn’t happening. 

Next time, I might not be so lucky.