Marketing got louder.
Buyers got better at tuning out.
Every year there is more of it, and every year less of it lands. Budget rarely explains that. Choices do, made carefully, thousands of times over.
Open your inbox. Count the unread.
Every one of those was sent by somebody hoping to be read.
Each one had a budget behind it. A meeting. A deadline. Somebody's afternoon. And each one arrived saying more or less what the last one said, in more or less the same words.
That is what a great deal of marketing has quietly become. Constant, uninspiring, easy to skip. Competent work that was always going to be skipped.
Caution did this. Every step was sensible.
Everybody sets out to make something that works. Forgettable arrives one careful decision at a time.
Somebody checks what the market leader is doing, because that feels responsible. Somebody adds the word premium, because it tested fine. A committee takes out the one line that made a person feel something, because the proof was thin and the downside was easy to picture.
Each step is sensible. The result is a category where five companies say the same thing, and the buyer, left with one visible difference, chooses on price.
Safe is the risk, spread thin enough to feel like prudence.
Curiosity comes before conviction.
Attention is attracted, and the pull is the work.
People decide because something made them curious enough to look closer, and because what they found was worth the look.
That is the entire mechanism. Frequency is for sale. Interest is earned.
So the work is to make them curious, and then be worth it.
Four choices, made the other way.
Six things, in this order.
Find what your whole category agrees on. Then do the other thing.
Sharper, rather than louder. Volume is rented by the day.
Leave a gap people want to close for themselves.
Attention you keep, rather than attention you rent by the click.
A customer buys once. An evangelist explains you to strangers for free.
Change what people assume about the category, and the category becomes yours.
Three times, in three different rooms.
You talk to me. That is the whole structure.
The person you meet is the person who does the work.
We get on a call. I ask a lot of questions about your business. You ask a lot about how I work. We both find out whether this is a fit, and if it turns out otherwise, you hear that early rather than a proposal.
When a project needs a designer, a director, a media buyer or a developer, I bring in people I have worked with for years. What stays constant is who is accountable when it works.
Think this way too? Then we're alike.
Tell me what your category always says, and I will tell you what I would say instead. A straight conversation, free, and yours to end whenever you like.