Marketing, media, and earning attention the old fashioned way

Plus serials, red cardigans, and rosemary-almond crust recommendations.

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A few years ago, there was an outbreak of “growth hackers” on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium. The phrase even started cropping up in job descriptions. To be sure, it was a garbage word that was a way to make “marketing” sound a bit sexier, less corporate, and more masculine to the tech audience, and to justify the millions of dollars getting plowed into the performance budgets at some startups. But it was also a relic of what we now know was a specific and fleeting time on the internet: eyeballs were cheap and for the harvesting on Facebook and Google, and anyone could math their way to a hockey-stick chart on an investor deck if they had enough will and cash to get there. 

At the beginning of this year, I was leading marketing for a company with the biggest monthly growth spend I’ve ever managed, and it suddenly didn’t matter. We were just throwing cash into a void, and we weren’t the only ones. All year, businesses built on the underlying assumptions of that previous growth era have been breaking. A VC I spoke to in February, right around when every marketing team started throwing up the red flag, told me that they’d told all of their portfolio companies to just try turning off digital ad spend for a week to see what happened. For most of them, nothing did. 

The days of easy and relatively cheap growth are gone, and the growth hackers seem a bit quiet these days. And to that I say: good! It was boring, and borrowed time from the beginning. 

Not to rub my AI crystal ball too hard here, but this moment feels a lot like past moments when the internet and content tides shifted. The reigning consensus of everyone I’ve talked to over the past few months is that they’re not sure what to do next. Video’s too expensive, audio takes too long to grow, no one has the attention for long-form, virtual events are so 2020, do you invest in SEO if it’ll just be an AI wasteland in 18 months, do we have to TikTok, and what the hell is even happening with LinkedIn. Everything feels like a shouting match. And these are companies that are good at content! 

All of these things are both true and false. There are no cheat codes. You need to earn attention, with things really worthy of it. 

Media, meet marketing.

I started Reliable Narrator, the studio, and the newsletter because I think the path forward is in the place where marketing and media overlap. (I am, of course, biased. I’ve spent my career bouncing back and forth across that line.)  

Media, with its embedded commerce departments and sophisticated subscription funnels that qualify readers based on the articles they’ve read, increasingly looks like marketing. And as algorithms and CAC:LTV equations break, marketing increasingly looks like a media business, complete with podcasts, research verticals, TV shows, magazines, and newsletters.

The wall that’s always gotten the attention between marketing and media is the one dividing “church” and “state,” so to speak. That divide ensures that a publication’s reporters can, for example, critique the environmentally destructive practices of an oil company, and not have that coverage undermined by the knowledge that their paycheck that month is covered by the revenue from that same oil company buying advertising on the same website.

This is a good divide to maintain, and I think editorial integrity and ambition are more important to the business of media than ever (as well as just, you know, democracy). I see the other walls that divide the two disciplines as more porous, because at the end of the day, media and marketing are in business for the same commodity: our attention. 

At their worst, they create cacophony and clickbait. But I also think they can learn from each other. Media can learn from marketing’s deep curiosity and laser-focus on audience, as well as its approach to creating focused and cohesive product ecosystems and content strategies that intentionally move users on journeys. Marketers can learn how to earn attention, and develop relationships with customers and prospects based on value provided rather than eyeballs commandeered. They can learn to tell a story actually worth telling.

This newsletter will cover the how of all this. How to find the most interesting angle, how to speak to people, how to grow, how to monetize, how to staff, how to use the robots. Also the shoulds: should you newsletter, should you podcast, should you TikTok. I’m also planning to feature interesting people doing cool work from around the media and brand ecosystem, because there are many of them! (In fact, if you’re reading this, that’s probably you.)

I’ll cover both business and consumer-oriented operations, and brand, growth, product, revenue, and editorial, because I’ve worked on all of them and so that’s how I think about these things. But I also think most of the differences in the arenas of our attention these days are artificial, and any good strategy should take into account who something’s for, how it’ll grow, and how it’ll make money. 

My hope is to also get at bigger questions about our attention. How do you create things worthy of others’ attention, and make things that are worthy of attention financially sustainable? How do you inform and inspire and educate, and move people forward from point A to point B rather than into a virtual black hole? 

I’ll see you back here in two weeks.

Cool idea up for grabs

Substacks as serials! The two big ones I’ve seen are DraculaDaily, which broke up the classic novel Dracula into bite-sized chunks delivered to your inbox, and Patti Smith’s gorgeous ongoing creative writing project, The Melting (which she’s recently shifted to short-form audio). I think this is so cool and would love to see more people and brands play around with this as an approach. I think there’s so much room for creativity and audience interaction, and it poses a really clever way to cultivate a habitual readership for loyalty-focused businesses (ahem, every membership program).

Rants, Raves, and Recommendations 

🍑 This rosemary-almond crust on everything: I’ve been obsessed with Clare de Boer’s Torn Peach Cake, but alas, peach season is so fleeting. Turns out you can swap the fruit in this with whatever is more seasonal and still achieve the most perfectly moody, custardy, sophisticated-but-casual bite of autumn. I’ve tried figs, and plan to dabble in pears and apples, too. (An aside: I could write an entire college thesis about this video of Clare and Martha Stewart silently chewing and licking their fingers together.)

🤖 It’s weird more people aren’t talking about how Google quietly updated its algorithm to no longer penalize AI-generated content. While previously it surfaced and prioritized content “written by people,” Google now says it’ll surface content “written for people.” SEO’s by far the best use-case for AI generated content in my opinion, and this just opened the flood gates.

If you have time for one long read, make it this deep-dive on A24. In a world where it feels like the volume is turned way, way up, they’re proving that quality, unique voices, and point of view matter over everything.

🍒 Perhaps you too are on the hunt for a cherry red cardigan? An informal cost-value analysis conducted by yours truly has revealed this Reformation one is the best bet if you’re going for cashmere. But may I offer this $50 ribbed wool number from Uniqlo for your consideration?

Is Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce just a comms strategy designed to bury bad coverage about her in search results? Not no. But good for her, she seems like she’s having fun while doing it. I also love this entire analysis of celebrity PR strategies.