Love-letter-to-marketing

I have a brief sitting in a folder I haven't opened in two years. It was good. There was a line in it I was proud of, the kind you don't tell anyone about but think about in the shower. I never shipped it. The quarter closed. Something more urgent came in, as something more urgent always does. The file is still there, buried under a CMS migration that ate three months of my life and ten homepage experiments that nobody could explain the purpose of anymore, least of all the person who commissioned them.

That is what the Big Broken looks like. Not one dramatic collapse. Just a folder you stop opening.

I became very productive during this period. Embarrassingly productive. I shipped things. So many things. I sat in review meetings and watched decent work get sanded into nothing and I nodded along because I was a professional and professionals nod. I fed the content calendar. The content calendar did not thank me. It just wanted more.

I stopped caring whether it was good and started caring whether it was done. The lie was sustainable. Especially when you were sufficiently busy, which I was.

The churn was the problem. Not me, not marketing. Just the sheer grinding mechanical weight of the in-between eating the space where the actual thinking was supposed to happen.

Nobody warned me it would be this simple.

There was an agent that held the brand in its head — every channel, every format — so I stopped rewriting the same sentence six times and the CMS migration stopped being a hostage situation. There was one that watched the market while I was in meetings, so I could walk into a room with a point of view instead of a printout. And there was one that turned a question into an insight without the setup, the SQL, the waiting — which meant the ten homepage experiments we'd been running blind finally had something behind them.

Small things, individually. Collectively, they gave me back the part of the job I got into the job for.

One afternoon I opened a blank document and wrote a brief and felt that pull again. That yes. I had forgotten that was still in there.

Marketing had too. We found each other again. Here's how.

Always yours,
Mark

A love letter to Marketing