WTF am I doing? aka: Why I'm a verbally constipated marketer

Warning: Swearing abounds in this piece. Including F-bombs. I went full New Jersey. I’m aggravated.

I haven’t written in a while. A long while. I gotta admit, I’m stuck. I’m at an impasse. I’m verbally constipated.

I finally realized why: I’m just… tired.

Things I’m tired of:

Bleating about scale

Marketing doesn’t scale. Content spinning didn’t do it. AI doesn’t do it. Or rather, they do it, but for a very short time. Then your customers figure out your marketing sucks, Google figures out you’re cheating, and you’re screwed.

You can scale process.

Reduce round trips.

Get marketing, engineering, and leadership teams working together (crazy talk, I know).

Learn to spell. Learn to write. Treat everything like content, and treat content like it matters.

Or ignore all this. Because scale! Scaling the scale of the scale scale!

The bullshit

We’re marketers. We’re all full of a certain amount of bullshit. It’s a professional requirement. That doesn’t mean you need to bury us in manure up to our necks.

As I wrote this, I got a call from Network Solutions. Did you know they’ll optimize my site for up to ten keywords, guaranteed, for only $99.95?!

Someone else can track AI visibility for “high volume prompts.”

Oh, and of course: You don’t need a website any more.

Oooorrr we could all agree marketing is really hard because the ultimate target is the customer, not an algorithm. And the algorithms aren’t all that easy, either. We could clearly explain what we know. We could shut the fuck up about the rest.

Cough splutter. Yeah, I couldn’t keep a straight face either.

The assumption

Never mind easy answers. Not everything has an answer. My gods, people. We don’t actually know how the hell Google does anything. We have no idea exactly how AI decides what to cite. And we don’t know how people will respond to one message or another.

We’re pretty dang smart, and we can make some pretty great guesses. But we don’t fucking know. If we did, we wouldn’t give it away in blog posts and desperate YouTube shorts.

Instead, here’s a crazy idea:

Practice technical hygiene. Have a website that’s fast. That works.

Live the brand. Don’t be full of shit.

Talk gooder. Most content sucks, and it’s all content. You’re probably using AI to write product descriptions, emails, social posts, video scripts, etc. etc. It’s garbage. Stop it.

The death of nuance (about AI)

AI is a steaming pile of ecological dog pooh.

It’s also amazing, and it makes certain things easier.

I will die straddling those two hills.

Let the outrage commence.

(Also, stop using the word agentic. You don’t know what it means.)

Enough whining

I’m not writing because I don’t want to bleat about scale, and I don’t want to shovel bullshit. Nor do I want to whine about the state of our craft and how we talk about it. But here I am. Last post about this, I promise. My next post will be full of rainbow-excreting marketing fairies.

Oh, and if you want something a little more uplifting, but still not full of shit, check out Teach The Shit Out Of Everything.