Lately, I have been contemplating a fair bit of what it means to be a marketer and do marketing today.
The internet (and social media in particular) has become enshittified and AI slop has taken over all aspects of working and being online. We've collectively become so addicted that the scroll is the first and last things many people do in the day. If not that, then it's checking the smart watch, checking in on email/slack/socials ("need to make sure I didn't miss anything!"), or catching "the news" on TikTok, X, etc.
What's worse is that this behavior has all become so normalized that we talk about "shorter attention spans" as if the symptoms of addiction are something we have to accept, rather than being the alarm bell they actually are.
Marketers talk about the need to write shorter, quippier sentences and produce shorter, catchier videos and altering how we fundamentally communicate so that we can "go viral"... rather than using the medium of social media to engage with humans and be, well, social and human.
For marketers, this means being online more and more, engaging with the same extractive and addictive algorthim feeds we're trying to manipulate. (One must learn how to speak Algorithm, after all.)
Bravo, us. What a time to be alive.
But more than the suck factor of doing this kind of marketing, I'm not even sure it's working anymore, given how many marketers complain of rising CPLs/CPAs/CAC, lowered ROAS/ROI, and the ever-increasing need to produce more quantity of "content." (Hence the need for AI solutions because we must go faster and faster to keep the machine going brrrrr with fresh content.)
But there's also signs of a shift:
So really, things are looking up. There is still space for this kind of being online.
The questions I am pondering today, and perhaps for the rest of this year, are questions like:
How can we collectively "do" marketing (online and off) without extracting from, exploiting, and making addicts of our audience?
How can we build communities which aren't reliant on algorithms (read: Big Tech gatekeepers)?
How much data collection is too far in terms of marketing? How can we make the data we do collect less exploitative and more privacy-sensitive?
Will anyone want more "slow" and "human-first" ways of doing marketing, enough that I could feed my family doing it?
What does "slow marketing" look like? Communities? Direct mail? Events? Lightweight sites? Newsletters?
Could this form of relational marketing is actually better — better for the environment, better for the humans consuming the marketing, better for the company, better for communities?
How might we organize our teams, our workplaces, and our lives to allow for this kind of marketing? Could we create more time for deep work, for community, and for connections? If so, what would that look like in the age of always-on communication?
I'm not sure that I yet have a full picture of what all this looks like, but I'm guessing it's going to mean a return to what worked before: community, local engagement, consent-based marketing, and fewer algorithms.
In the meantime, I've joined the Trust-Made Growth Guild to further this conversation, for myself and others. I'm also still leaning into my New Thought-inspired marketing ("intuitive marketing") and testing ways in which intention + intuition + imagination create more converting marketing campaigns. The old school way.
I welcome any and all discussion around this topic. If you've figured out what this looks like, I'd love to hear from you. If you haven't but want to, I'd love to hear from you, too.