Look, we gotta’ be straight with you: We all knew this was coming.

AI slop has taken over the Internet. Social media accounts from local businesses are full of AI-generated flyers (ugh!), and CCM gets approached regularly from potential clients who want to focus on AI slop content (we politely decline to work with these brands.)

And we understand. The allure of “free” or cheap, fast content production is real. Why pay for content production when you can use a free LLM to spit it out for you? Well, if your goal is to simply “put out content”, then there’s nothing wrong with it. But there are several problems with that strategy.

Charlotte Content Marketing was recently featured in the Charlotte Business Journal, and man…what an honor! CCM Founder Andrew Rusnak was interviewed about how our podcast production solutions drive leads and form stronger customer relationships, and he shared a bit of inside knowledge about the long-term benefits of podcasting for business owners.

You can read the full story here, but you’ll need a Charlotte Business Journal subscription. For those without a subscription, we’ve included some excerpts below:

“Andrew Rusnak, whose company Charlotte Content Marketing produces The Doc Dudes, says the human connection in podcasting just works.

“It’s a sales tool, yeah, but it offers the ability to showcase authenticity,” says Rusnak, adding that these “preselling opportunities for business” can be more effective than traditional advertising.

“People tune out ads, so how do you cut through the clutter and at same time provide value and relevant content? Podcasting is a way to do that. It’s almost a one-on-one where you are in room with them and able to ask questions.”

“Rusnak with Charlotte Content Marketing says some marketing teams are creating short reels or video clips that appear to be part of a larger podcast but were intended for social media all along. The value, he says, is that podcast content and social-media posts add to brand awareness in the way marketing teams are always chasing search-engine optimization.

“SEO used to just be about a website. These days we call it Search Everywhere Optimization,” Rusnak says. “We are not just focused on websites because with AI search, you’ve got to be hitting on all cylinders across all platforms, and it all has to tie in together. AI is training off of podcast transcripts. It’s an omnichannel approach to digital marketing.”

Although AI search has been a thing to one degree or another for a while now, it’s only really come into its own over the past 12 months. 2025 saw more people using LLMs as search engines more often, and this has led many business owners in the Charlotte Metro region to ask, “Should I be optimizing my content marketing strategy for AI?”

While we’d love to give a simple “yes” or “no” answer to that question, we’ve got another answer: “It depends.”

In this episode of the Charlotte Content Marketing podcast, founder Andrew Rusnak dives into the realities of social media marketing for 2026 in Charlotte and beyond, putting out a call to business to look beyond deceptive metrics and flawed content strategies.