Is it possible to be honest in marketing?

Even more than the usual new year to-do lists, good-intentioned goals, and rarely-held resolutions, there seems to be a shared sense of urgency for what 2021 will be.

So many of us found ourselves this year in conversations you might file under the theme of: “how can they think that?”

As people’s narratives became so wildly polarized, and so intensely based in opinions rather than facts, I’ve questioned the role marketing has played in what sometimes feels like a race to nowhere. 

It seems increasingly difficult for people to understand the difference between marketing and media.

People are wired to engage in motivated reasoning. We react to inconvenient truths as if they were personal insults. We assume we know more than we do. It’s all part of why stories so easily sell us on bad ideas. And, perhaps, nothing shows us the dangers here like the rise of QAnon, a masterclass in marketing and game theory.

Marketing and news media are each using these same tactics. So people have lost sight of the difference between the two. And it’s become increasingly important for marketing to be handled not only effectively, but ethically. We have to look at our work not only in the terms of our own teams, but in its place in the larger world. 

As I consider what I want out of this new year and what I want for the world, I’m asking myself whether it’s possible to do the work that I do...honestly. I don’t have a quick or easy answer. But I’ll pursue two intentions that I hope will get me closer to a clear answer.

Be attentive.

Being attentive is a way of life. Paying attention is a chore. 

I want to be attentive. I want to dig deep into thorny problems. I want to be more attentive to my ideas, and the ideas I absorb. 

I don’t want to spend hours paying attention to overflowing digital feeds of bite-sized information and dashed-off hot takes. Because I don’t want to feed into that, either. This might be feeling a bit too Lloyd Dobler. Even still, in my work and the work I publish here, I want to be attentive. To what voices I allow in, what I put out, and what place that all holds in the larger world.

I’m going to weigh more carefully the value in an article I jot off in an hour, vs. one I work on, hour after hour, writing session after writing session, parsing and editing and finding and re-finding the thread.

Maybe the hard-fought content, if less frequent, is more valuable than any pithy or search-friendly piece written quickly in the hour allotted.

I’d rather, as my team often says, go slow to go fast. We miss too much when we trade deep thinking for quick-hitting ideas dashed off in time to join that hot thread.

My shift into being more attentive won’t turn back the tides in a post-truth society. But what if we’re collectively shifting towards this, together? It might be happening already.

My friend Margo wrote about her aim to think deeper. My friend Rob sent me this piece on the erosion of deep literacy and its effects on our capacity to think. The inimitable Seth Godin wrote about adopting a different urgency. Which all brings me to my next focus.

Let’s be students of storytelling. 

We need storytelling. Marketers need it to fulfill our purpose; to connect and convert.

Storytelling can be powerful and positive. It’s what’s led to Drift’s historic growth. It’s how we inspire people to support just causes.

But, stories can also be misused, misinterpreted, or overly simplified.It’s not just about the power of stories to sell us on bad ideas. It’s in the narrative fallacy. It’s in the dangers of oversimplifcation. It’s in the general deterioration of factfulness in the world.

So, in the coming months, I’m going to make myself more of a student of storytelling. 

This’ll partly take the form of deep reading. (So far, my reading list includes What Great Storytellers Know, Storynomics, and several others. Send me your recommendations.)

But it’s also going to take the form of deep questioning. For everything I encounter, and the stories I create, I’m going to ask myself a series of questions. Who or what is being painted as the evil enemy? Why? Who or what is this story serving? What’s being left out? Which human instincts are being taken advantage of by this story? How would this story read if any of the answers to those questions were different?

As marketers, can we put out stories that are honest and effective in the traditional sense of growth-driven marketing? Stories that are effective and don’t continue to push our world deeper into this post-truth era?

I don’t know. Here’s what I do know.

What we do matters. What each of us puts out into the world matters.

I am an idealist. I believe we’re all interconnected in deep ways. I believe most people are doing the best they can, most of the time. I believe each of us matters. I believe that what we each do matters. 

Whether you’re like me or not, you’re reading this because you’re thinking about the new year. And you’re thinking about the new year because, in essence, you want to know how you’ll matter. You want to know how what you’ll do will matter. You want to know that, at the end of the year, you’ll be able to look back and say it was worthwhile.

If you didn’t make things better, how can what you did matter? How can how you chose to spend your time, pay your attention, do your work, or share your voice...matter?