POV
The marketing opinions I’ll happily repeat for the next five years, and defend in the comments. Some you’ll nod along to. A couple will cost me a follower. Every one earns its place by being useful, not safe.
More from the sketchbook:
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The antidote to the algorithm
The BBC’s new director general, after more than a decade running Google in Europe, wants the BBC to be “the antidote to the algorithm.” Good line.…
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We’re selling widgets to Brenda in Staines
Marketing teams have a tendency to take themselves more seriously than the work warrants. Here’s the line I use to recalibrate the room.
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I went in expecting a spoonful of nepotism
A senior colleague’s son, fresh out of uni, recommended for a marketing role. I assumed the worst. I was completely wrong.
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Nobody needs to know you used AI
The AI-disclosure debate asks the wrong question. Nobody needs a “made by a machine” badge. They need to know a real person is answerable, and that…
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Don’t become a different person when you become a manager
New managers think they have to become a different version of themselves. They don’t. Here’s what actually changes, and what should stay exactly the same.
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Detectable isn’t disposable
This year AI became detectable: watermarks, EU rules, a “seems like AI slop” button. Useful. But detection answers a question that was never the one that…
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My first hire told me he was bored
My first hire told me, to my face, that he had never been more bored. He was right about himself. What he taught me about hiring…
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The redundancy you’ve already cried about
Marketing is the first department cut when the business hurts. Here’s what the conversation is actually like, and the mechanic that gets you through it.
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I failed postmodernism. Then AI proved my lecturer right.
I flunked the postmodernism module in my first year and had to retake it in summer school. Twenty-odd years later, the most postmodern thing I have…
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Slop by any other name
LinkedIn just gave everyone a button to flag “AI slop.” Useful. But the machine was never the problem, and a pile of likes was never the…
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I thought it was a fad. Then I drank the Kool-Aid.
I called AI a fad, then generic slop. I was wrong twice. What changed my mind, and why the tool only works if you bring your…
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Field of Dreams was a film, not a go-to-market plan
Building a great product is not a marketing strategy. The product graveyard is full of better mousetraps nobody ever heard of. Why distribution, demand and the…
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The marketing team is the product. Everything else is the packaging.
When marketing underperforms, the instinct is to change the agency, the tool, the framework. The constraint is almost never the framework. Why the most under-rated lever…
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There’s no such thing as a half-win in marketing
Click-through up, impressions up, everyone nods, then nobody can say what it sold. Why a campaign that hits its target and misses every commercial KPI is…