Archduke of Marketing Essentials, Mark Ritson, has had a pop at the industry’s shiny object syndrome and reminded us that marketing consistency beats disruption every quarter. À la Coca-Cola, the company so good at marketing everyone forgot to notice:
“It delivers 2.2 billion servings a day, operates 32 billion-dollar brands, and has raised its dividend every year since Lyndon Johnson was president [...] We have built an industry obsession with noisy, disruptive Davids. All the while never stopping to wonder at the rare Goliaths that keep smashing it [...] We confuse the dopamine of a viral campaign for the discipline of a compounding business. Obsess about solo stunt advertising at the expense of consistent, strategic marketing."
When I grow up I want to be like Jasmine Bina. She’s got a brain the size of Alaska, always writes a metric tonne of sense, and makes many look like they’re forecasting the future with a finger to the wind:
“Trends, technologies, data points, and headlines all have their place, but these are confirmations of what’s already surfaced. The actual future is being written in the interiority of peoples’ hearts and minds. It’s misguided to think the future is somewhere ahead of us. It's already inside us, distributed across millions of people who are feeling the same unnamed thing at the same time [...] listen to that field, and have the nerve to translate it before it becomes obvious.”
Neil Perkin was in stellar form at our UK event a couple of weeks back. And he’s kept the streak going with his recently penned piece on interpreting results with a spoonful of caution.
“When the British Army started issuing steel helmets to protect soldiers in 1915, in many instances head injuries went up, not down [...] Fortunately, they realised that what was actually happening was that more soldiers were surviving hits that would have previously been fatal, turning deaths into survivable wounds [...] It's a pattern that repeats. Sales cycles that lengthen because you've stopped chasing easy-but-doomed deals. Engagement survey scores dropping after improvements in psychological safety because people finally feel able to be honest [...] Sometimes what looks like failure can actually be evidence of something else.”
For those who, like me, answer “how does AI work?” with a mumbled “it's basically just pattern recognition” and cross your toes that nobody asks a follow-up because you have no earthly idea what that really means, (pretty meta that that in itself is just pattern recognition when you think about it… just don’t ask me how.) Rob Ennals’s tutorial is for you.
It’s an interactive explanation of how AI works, written in a way that doesn't make your brain feel like it's been running uphill on a treadmill for 5 hours.
Wild ice skating has now taken up residence on my bucket list. The scenery. The lighting. The clear ice (although tbc if this part would give me heebie-jeebies in real life). Majestical.
Alison Friend’s witty dog portraits made me properly cackle into my coffee this morning.
Faisal Al-Athel, take a bow. ChatGPT in a nutshell.
Bon weekend,
Fran