I get uneasy when someone asks me if I’ll help their friend who wants to get into marketing.
I want to help. But the help I can offer isn’t the help they seek.
Wanting to land an agency job is different from marketing. I’ve done both and I can tell you that what agency folks call “marketing,” isn’t.
If you want to get good at marketing, study people. Then, sell me this pen
If you want an agency job, move to New York, go out in Meatpacking around 11PM and make some new friends. They’ll know someone who knows someone and you’ll get a job.
To work at an agency is to attend meetings for a living and broker deals over drinks with people you or your colleagues are sleeping with. The field hasn’t evolved much since Mad Men days, with the exception that we can now measure things, but we choose not to.
Agencies are in the business of making clients happy. It helps if your marketing works, but “works” depends on your goal. Your campaign delivered results if the result you were aiming for was “making my boss happy.”
Worse, “marketing” gets lumped in with “producing assets.” Create an image, edit a video, make a logo. Production is part of marketing’s role, sure. But in the same way that wearing cleats is part of soccer.
Marketing is the art and science of engineering connection and creating the kind of tension that leads to sales.
You don’t need to work in marketing to be good at marketing.
You need to understand people.
I’ve thought a lot about this as people are being laid off in droves and replaced by AI. I don’t know what I think about it. It’s never a good feeling to watch your friends lose their jobs and struggle to find work. But I’d be lying if there wasn’t a part of me going, “Guys. What did you think was going to happen?” Year after year of manufacturing slop and calling it par for the course. You made this course. You built this.
When you reduce everything into a formula, create frameworks for duping people, when you lie about results and exaggerate what you’re doing, and manufacture bombast and sensationalism and seggs and fear – you made yourself replaceable and so you got replaced.
This is not true of everyone. There are many talented folks who needed a job and did the content thing because it paid. There are many talented humans who found themselves in positions where they had to compromise because they didn’t have a choice. My qualm is not with them.
They are collateral damage in a bigger problem. And the problem is not AI.
I’m not afraid of what AI can do. I’m afraid of what we are refusing to do. What we, in many ways, have always refused to do.
Think for ourselves.
And find a better path forward.
