Let’s get one thing straight: most marketing blogs sound like they were written by committee. Over-polished, overly cautious, and crammed with buzzwords that mean absolutely nothing. But marketing isn’t sanitized—it’s messy, full of contradictions, and, sometimes, it’s downright uncomfortable.
Welcome to Unfiltered Marketing Musings, where we skip the jargon and tell it like it is.
Trend Watch: The AI Gold Rush
Let’s talk about AI. Everyone and their grandma is adding “powered by AI” to their pitch decks like it’s the secret sauce for success. Is it? Sure, sometimes. AI is great for scaling repetitive tasks, optimizing ads, and pretending you’re ahead of the curve. But here’s the rub: AI isn’t creative. It’s just a glorified parrot.
The best campaigns still come from the places AI can’t touch—human instincts, gut feelings, and those wild 2 a.m. ideas that seem too risky but turn out to be genius.
Question to ponder: Are you using AI to enhance your creativity or to avoid it altogether?
Hot Take: Metrics Are Killing Your Mojo
We’ve become obsessed with metrics: click-through rates, open rates, engagement rates. But here’s the thing: not everything that matters can be measured. Your audience’s trust? Their emotional connection to your brand? The way your campaign made someone feel? Those don’t fit into a tidy dashboard.
Offbeat insight: What if you ignored the numbers for a week? Just a week. Focus on creating something you’d be proud of, metrics be damned. Then see what happens.
The Eternal Debate: Bold vs. Bland
Let’s be honest: most brands play it safe. They’re too afraid of offending, too worried about standing out, and too eager to please everyone. And what happens? They fade into the background.
Take a lesson from the brands that dare to be polarizing. Sure, they’ll lose some customers, but the ones who stay? They’ll become raving fans. Bold doesn’t just get attention; it earns loyalty.
Challenge: What’s the one thing your brand could say or do right now that would scare your legal team? Start there.
Fail of the Month: The Chatbot Apocalypse
A well-known retailer (no names, but you know who you are) rolled out a chatbot to handle customer complaints. The problem? It didn’t know when to stop. Customers were being thanked for their “patience” in response to furious complaints about faulty products. The result: a PR nightmare and an uptick in customer churn.
Lesson: Technology doesn’t replace empathy. If your bot can’t fake human compassion, maybe it’s time to hire more humans.
Thought-Provoking Question: Is Your Brand Memorable or Mimicry?
Here’s a tough pill to swallow: most brands are just echoes of their competitors. Same templates. Same copy. Same “authenticity.”
But you don’t build a memorable brand by following the herd. You build it by taking a hard look at what makes you different—and leaning into that with unapologetic confidence.
Ask yourself: What’s the one thing your brand does differently than anyone else? If the answer doesn’t come to you in five seconds, you have work to do.
Rant-to-Resource: Turning Frustration Into Fuel
Let’s channel all this unfiltered energy into something productive. Starting next month, I’m launching a premium newsletter where these rants get paired with actionable strategies. Think of it as a roadmap for turning What the heck are they doing? into Here’s how we’re doing it better.
Plus, there’ll be exclusive tools, worksheets, and case studies for those who want to take their marketing game up a notch.
Final Word: Marketing Needs More Honesty
Enough with the sugarcoating. Enough with the “best practices” that are really just tired clichés. Marketing needs voices willing to say what everyone’s thinking but no one’s saying.
If you’re tired of playing by the rules and ready to break some, stick around. It’s going to get raw, messy, and—most importantly—real.
Want More? Subscribe to the newsletter, book me for a no-BS speaking engagement, or check out my curated list of marketing tools that don’t suck. Because in the end, great marketing doesn’t just follow trends—it rewrites them.
