12 Inspired Endocrinology Life Lessons from Oprah Winfrey’s Heirloom Furniture
Or, what if some things aren’t actually marketing lessons?
Dear Marketers, PR people, Community Managers, SEOs and Assorted People Who Write Online:
We need to talk about newsjacking, preferably before millions of people around the world chuck their smartphones away in disgust and never click a link again, turned permanently off by the glut of self-promotional “thought leadership” articles piggybacking on trends that are not at all about marketing.
Do you see this? Don’t do this.
Prince’s death instantly sent marketers into paroxysms of mourning, expressed, of course, in the best possible way for their personal branding. A mad rush was on to capitalize on the legacy of a great artist before it stopped trending. Editors around the world frantically assigned mostly-unpaid writers to turn Prince’s legacy into trite content marketing like this:
It’s a shame there aren’t more Prince fans in PR because digital PR isn’t going anywhere. You need to learn from the digital experts at your agency. And while you may not like all that high-tech stuff, at least you can appreciate it. You know, like this guy, who released 39 albums in 35 years.
Prince did not give one single, solitary fuck whether or not your PR agency embraces digital. I promise you that. Prince did not make 39 albums in 35 years by bogging himself down in advice from (or to) someone whose Twitter bio reads “#news guy gone digital.”
PRNewser’s now-deleted Tweets defended their decision to publish this piece, until hours later they took it down:
I understand how this happened.
I was managing a community of half a million content producers at the time, so I got a front-row seat for an Internet that almost overnight went from “a place where experts are published on a handful of sites” to “a place with an insatiable appetite for content, written by anyone, on any topic, delivered through self-serve publishing tools a toddler could use.” That led to some incredible storytelling, but it also created a digital land grab of unprecedented proportions.
In a fashion that couldn’t be more true to the roots of marketing as an opportunistic and creative discipline, marketers immediately drew three accurate conclusions:
- We are going to have to produce a lot of content to build any sort of reputation in our industry.
- The most valuable, sharable, and readable marketing advice is generally basic, repetitive, and fundamental.
- Therefore, we are going to have to come up with lots of new ways to say the same thing over and over while making the audience think it’s new.
Compare this quote:
Staying within the status quo leads to vulnerability. People respond to the new and novel and let go of the old. Be different. Make your company and brand a new experience. Companies often put themselves in a box which traps them into being the same, instead of finding ways to be different. If your customers are consistently evolving shouldn’t that drive brand innovation and reinvention? If you want to stay relevant, it most certainly should.
With this quote:
How many times have you pitched an idea only to have other people run with it, because you didn’t speak up? Don’t ever do that again. The only reason people tell you it’s impossible is because they have never seen you do it. Go pitch, stunt, write and call that reporter.
And this one:
Gather trustworthy mentors around you and take their advice. Doing so will give you the confidence necessary to disrupt. If you’re doing something new and you’re doing it well, industry stalwarts will be shaken — but it’ll pay off.
They hang together pretty well, right? You could easily republish these three paragraphs as the first stanza of a single article and get away with it. In reality, those three quotes come from, in order, “Marketing Lessons from David Bowie,” “5 Life Lessons Learned from Prince,” and “10 Start-Up Tips from Hip-Hop Lyrics.” They read cohesively, because there are only so many ways to say the exact same thing.
It’s time we stopped the madness.
Picture your Twitter feed as a sea of links in a theoretical future where everyone is just as desperate for branding juice as content marketers:
- What Jennifer Aniston’s Divorce Can Teach You About Buttercream Icing
- Nuns are the Phlebotomy Role Models You Never Knew You Needed
- 7 Life Lessons for Martial Arts Instructors from Alice In Chains Lyrics
- Elementary Educators Should Be More Like Josephine Baker — Here’s Why!
- Dorothy Parker’s 14 Hidden Tips for Mechanical Engineering
The worst part is, publishing nonsense like this reliably draws praise — praise that conveniently links back to the praise-giver’s own blog. We’re creating an echo chamber full of people pretending they actually like reading the same.goddamn.article over and over with increasingly far-fetched twists. We’re creative people, so a few of these articles are funny, witty, or meaningful. But the majority are dull, clichéd, and offensive to anyone actually interested in the topic being hijacked.
So what now?
Place your hand over your heart and repeat after me:
I will wait until I have an original idea to pitch an article.
I will write about the deaths of public figures only if they have genuinely had a transformative effect on my life or if I know something new about them that people grieving their death would love to hear; if so, I will share the personal, real, and intimate details of what the deceased person meant to me, or I will keep silent. I will never remove my honest self from my writing and replace it with marketing maxims.
If my assignment is to remind the audience of the fundamentals of marketing, I will do the hard work of writing an interesting article about the fundamentals of marketing — I will not trick people into reading my advice by wrapping it loosely in the day’s Trending Topics.
I am good enough, smart enough, brave enough, and interesting enough exactly as I am. I don’t need a twist or an angle. I need to learn something useful, apply it in the real world, distill my results into real insights, and share that experience with people who care.
There. Now, don’t you feel better? I know I do.
(Hat tip to Dino Baskovic, who took the screenshot included above, and to Jeremy Pepper who first noticed the PRNewser article.)
