For those of us happy to cocoon at home with our remote jobs, especially marketers who built digital-first strategies post-pandemic, the return of in-person meetings and relationships that require social skills is as welcome as unasked-for pineapple on a pizza delivery.
However, like it or not, personal relationships are becoming more valuable precisely because information is no longer a scarce resource. What is in short supply is trust.
As co-founder of people ops startup Gather, Alex Hilleary found himself repeating the same thing to HR leaders: “You should really talk to so-and-so.” Someone needed advice on remote work policies, so Alex connected her with someone who’d just solved it. Another was wrestling with equity compensation; Alex knew someone three months ahead of that exact problem.
Hilleary did this for months before realizing he’d accidentally built a community. What he was doing wasn’t something an algorithm could do. He was using his judgment about who needed to meet based on problems that weren’t easily categorized. That kind of curation — knowing things no coded program can surface — is becoming more valuable.
Judgment and strategy
Marketers see the same patterns play out in their own communities. Practitioners need judgment about strategies, not just information about tactics. With AI content abundant and cheap, human judgment is a competitive advantage. Nothing can beat hard-won wisdom from someone who tried the thing you’re considering and can tell you about the consequences no one mentions in public.
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“The single greatest value I get from Pavilion is judgment,” said Kathleen Booth, a member and former SVP of marketing at Pavilion, a community for go-to-market professionals. “Not content in the abstract, and not tactics in isolation, but access to other senior GTM leaders who are wrestling with the same messy, high-stakes decisions I am and are willing to talk honestly about what’s working, what isn’t, and why.”
For marketing leaders navigating constant change, this peer-to-peer judgment is increasingly essential.
The death of the generic “middle ground”
Marsha Maxwell connects scientists with companies that want to recruit them or sell to them. The business development and partnership leader at the American Physical Society knows that physicists with fluid dynamics expertise are needed by chipmakers like NVIDIA for real-time CAD simulations, by Mercedes and BMW for braking systems and by Boeing and Lockheed for aerospace engineering. Her knowledge comes from understanding both the science and the business problems, and from judgment developed over years of making connections.
Scientists need in-person conferences. That’s where they build the relationships that lead to research partnerships, job offers and major equipment purchases. Browsing vendor booths, asking questions and getting hands-on with new instruments is an essential part of life for grad students and early-career scientists, who “don’t really network online — they just don’t,” Maxwell said.
Marketing leaders face the same challenge: generic advice floods their feeds, but they need specific guidance from peers who have navigated similar decisions.
Hilleary, now the CEO of the online content marketing community Superpath, noted that “posts in public spaces (read: LinkedIn) have an agenda, are filled with AI slop and aren’t optimized for the right, nuanced answer.” AI can’t tell marketers whether a specific conference is worth attending, or how to handle a messy reorg or whether to pivot strategy mid-quarter.
Generic digital networking and public social media are becoming noise. The only truly useful channels are hyper-curated digital communities where humans filter every interaction, and in-person gatherings where trust can actually compound.
Judgment in practice
Booth said Pavilion conversations “get into second-order effects, tradeoffs, and the human side of leadership. That peer calibration has saved me from costly mistakes and given me confidence to make bolder calls.”
Marketers navigating first-party data strategies, AI integration, or attribution model changes need that kind of structured peer support most: judgment that requires experience, context and being honest about what actually happened.
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Maxwell’s pitch to companies isn’t, “Here’s a list of scientists with relevant credentials.” They can get that from LinkedIn. She knows the talent pipeline they’ll need in two to three years and how to build relationships with those people now. That forward-looking, strategic matching requires understanding that takes years to develop.
“My job is to figure out what their goal is and get them in front of the right audience,” Maxwell said. It sounds simple. It also requires knowing things you can’t find in any database.
The power of saying no
When Alex Hilleary took over Superpath, he inherited 300 paying members in a space that had once been a free community of 20,000. Most people would immediately try to scale back up. Alex isn’t.
“Communities get too large,” he said. “If you are successful, they grow, and then it stops working,” like subreddits that deteriorate as they gain subscribers. The culture dilutes and eventually, no one trusts the space.
Maxwell follows the same discipline. The American Physical Society is a 125-year-old organization with 50,000 members, but she doesn’t try to get every company to sponsor every event. She focuses on strategic relationships.
“We have 800 organizations that have been with us for 30 years,” Maxwell said. Some meetings have grown rapidly, like plasma physics and optics, depending on government funding priorities and hot technologies. But the core value proposition hasn’t changed: companies need access to scientists, and scientists need to see what’s available for their work. That requires physical presence.
In a world where AI can scale content infinitely, community builders are getting more selective. Value comes from curation, not volume. For marketing leaders choosing communities to invest in, this curation signals quality.
Trust compounds in person
“In-person is where trust compounds,” Booth said. “Online spaces are great for information exchange. In-person is where nuance, empathy, and authentic relationships form.
“The side conversations, the unscripted moments, the ‘Can I run something by you?’ chats over coffee — those create a level of candor that’s very hard to replicate digitally,” she explained.
Alex is adding more in-person meetups to Superpath specifically because members told him they need it, beginning with events in metro areas with the largest concentrations of community members. Marsha evaluates which companies to pursue based on intuition about whose goals align with available opportunities.
Booth put it plainly: “Human connection is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a leadership advantage.”
The leadership advantage of intentional communities
Booth described what she’d like to see more of from Pavilion: “Structured support for leaders navigating inflection points, not just roles. Things like stepping into a first CMO seat, leading through an AI-driven org redesign, or managing a team through rapid change. Those moments are where judgment matters most, and where shared experience is invaluable.”
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Alex talks about helping Superpath members “make sense of and stay ahead of the changing content marketing landscape.” The value isn’t the information, since everyone has access to the same articles and tools, but in having people who’ve already tested those tools tell you which ones are worth your time and which problems they actually solve.
The job-to-be-done is no longer information distribution. It’s judgment calibration.
This shift matters, especially for marketing leaders. As AI tools proliferate and digital channels fragment, the marketers who will thrive are those building strategic judgment through curated communities — both online and in person.
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