I put off starting this article on marketing AI armageddon for over a week.

The mental overload from infinite AI use cases is real.

To the point that, finally, to give this sense of chaos a tangible image, my brain time-travelled 2 million years back to Pleistocene.

The image that arose in my head at 9pm on a Wednesday evening was of a woolly mammoth.

A dead woolly mammoth, to be exact.

(Certainly not what ChatGPT would suggest. All for the better, perhaps…)

So here we are, in the early Pleistocene.

The planet is much warmer and wet. All across African savannahs, herds of proboscideans (mammoth ancestors the size of small trucks) are crunching on shrubs and twigs.

Then, sadly, one of them is taken down by an ancient pathogen.

There it is, laying in the tall grass, waiting to be eaten by the first Homo habilis to come upon a dead mammoth.

Imagine a hairy human ancestor—let’s call him Charlie.

Out on his daily hunt, Charlie finds the brown mountain of meat. He doesn’t know it’s a miniature mammoth. What he does know is that his fifteen children are hungry, and animal meat very yummy.

Now, put yourself in the shoes (pardon, an anachronistic pun) of Charlie.

You’re a tiny human standing beside a huge mammoth cadaver, unsure what to do about it.

At first, you walk a few circles around the animal, contemplating not whether, but how, to break it apart. You shrug, then shiver at the thought of having to tear the whole thing to pieces and carry it home. It would take you several days, 100 kilometres back-and-forth. You’d rather leave it there, go home to a cave and bring it up again.

Soon, it will all come to seem like a distant bad dream.

The AI marketing mammoth

The mammoth is a fitting metaphor to describe how most marketers feel about AI.

It’s something supposedly good. But it’s also horribly big. Too big to make heads or tails of it.

And yet, you read another LinkedIn post and decide to check out Claude Code. First, you shrug. Then, you shiver. And because it’s a capitalist tech-driven world, you take out your stone dagger (trackpad) and cut (tap) into the pelt (signup button).

Yuck.

This was my first thought, too, when downloading Claude Desktop 6 weeks ago.

Then, I took some days to read my favourite marketing newsletters’ recent archives. When I returned to the real world, my eyes were sore and my head haloed with an artificial 3D ring.

The AI overwhelm is real

The key reason for marketers being stressed out over AI is that we look at it as one huge beast.

While, in fact, it’s an entire marketing team.

Just like a mammoth has legs, trunk, and belly, your marketing team is made up of several specialists.

But read five posts on your LinkedIn feed, and your mind reels. AI-led sales outreach, blog post generation, ASO optimisation, marketing asset design, etc. etc. etc. And you, feeling like I need to do it all NOW.

Because only a loser couldn’t implement 10 commandments by 10 diverse marketing experts in one week. Because only the bad marketers, soon to be replaced by AI, would fail to set up 100 new Claude Code skills and foundations and grow their company’s blog traffic + inbound leads 700% MoM in three months.

Right?

Ummm… There used to be LinkedIn posts about CMOs explaining to CEOs why this can’t be done.

I want to return to that pre-AI world.

But of course, I can’t.

To stay competitive as a marketer in 2026, you have to adopt AI to some extent.

Deconstructing the AI marketing mammoth

The most helpful thing for me, when returning to the marketing realm after 8 months of writing my sci-fi novel, was to deconstruct the AI machine.

It’s really not that different from joining a new company as marketing lead. Which is exactly what happened as I joined Roleo as their part-time founding CMO.

If you’re a full-stack marketing lead, you want to do (read: rescue) everything at once. There are obvious fires to put out. Meanwhile, you’re supposed to build a long-term marketing strategy, set up KPI tracking, launch paid advertising, and set up social media accounts. Not to speak of product launch support and website revamp.

It’s the same way with AI.

The abundance of AI use cases in marketing leads to decision fatigue and paralysis.

According to thousands of LinkedIn posts by the “experts” who use ChatGPT to scrape and rephrase their “expertise” into “comment for skills” posts, you should use AI for everything.

• Competitive research
• Daily & monthly planning
• Paid ads design & optimisation
• Content marketing & ASO
• Website & assets design
• Outbound sales outreach
• Social media growth
• Media outreach & PR stunts

The advanced gurus even suggest that you to build your AI second brain.

Sorry, Kieran. While I consider you one of the best marketing AI experts, I choose to keep my single brain and plan my own life.

The best way to overcome the sense of helplessness is to break the “AI in marketing” project into small, digestible pieces.

Marketers who stress about AI are looking at it as a single project. The solution is to break it apart and tackle it project by project.

Instead of saying: “I need an AI control centre for marketing.”

You could say: “I’d like to set up Claude Cowork to help me with competitor research and blog article writing.”

What changes is the project’s magnitude. By verbalising the exact outcome, you give yourself the agency to finish it.

1. Identify 2-3 marketing AI use cases that would benefit you most (time savings or more quality output).
2. Create a timeline for building out a Claude Cowork (foundation + skills) project for each.
3. Take 3-4 weeks to build the Claude project, test it, teach it, and start benefitting from it.

Let the final point settle in.

Setting up Claude Cowork for high-quality output takes time. It can’t be copy-pasted from a LinkedIn post comment.

Which AI marketing use cases should you explore first?

It depends on your role in the company, and how advanced your marketing game already is.

Further, there are still some use cases where AI simply can’t replace human intelligence, creativity, and skills.

Like designing ad creatives or writing opinion essays. I didn’t use any AI to write this newsletter, only for spell-check later.

The image below shows how GTM teams use Claude Code. (GTM = product marketing, sales, growth, lead gen.)

Take 30 seconds to consider where AI is most useful for you. (Remember: you are one person, not a team of twenty.)

As a full-stack marketer working with early-stage companies, my needs are quite different from the above chart. I don’t work with sales; I have to deliver immediate growth.

If you’re a mid-level marketer in a large team, specialised in 1-2 things, let me tell you this: Big companies hire automation experts to set up complex AI systems, including for marketing tasks. These people are paid €250k/year plus.

If you’re in a team of 5+ people, it should be your CMO, not you, who sets up Claude Cowork for the marketing team. And ensures it’s aligned with the rest of the company.

How I’ve been using Claude this far

Here are the primary tasks I’ve used Claude for over the past six weeks, and where I found it helpful vs. adding to the chaos.

1. Competitive research: 8/10

Claude saved me 80% time by collecting all information in a spreadsheet. I still had to specify the competitors to check, collect relevant screenshots, review, analyse, and summarise.

2. Product marketing copy: 6/10

This use case only became useful after I set up a Claude Cowork project with detailed foundation files for brand voice, product features, competitors, and audience. It took me 3 working days and was totally worth it. I use it for drafting website and product launch copy, then rewrite everything in the end. It’s great for creating a logical structure and covering all important points. Also, for brainstorming 50 different headlines with a slightly different angle and wording.

3. Social media ideas & copy: 5/10

Horrible for original ideas. But once you set it up as Claude Cowork project, it can help with the first draft. Create brand voice guidelines, and provide detailed, original input. (No dropping in 50 LinkedIn posts by other people and asking the algos to copy them. In gastronomy, you can turn stale bread into delicious pudding; it doesn’t work in marketing.) In the end, I always rewrite the whole draft and use Claude for review.

4. Meta ads copy: 7/10

Actually pretty good, once you’ve set up Claude Cowork (see point 2).

5. Meta ads design: 1/10

A complete waste of time. Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Even the AI-design oriented tools like Figma, Adobe, Claude Design can’t properly render logos and align text. No shortcuts: learn Figma or hire someone.

6. Ideation & research: 5/10

I tried asking Claude for fun Latitude59 tech conference marketing stunts. It suggested some ok stuff. But ok is not good enough. In the end, it took me a 2h walk around East London to come up with the actual idea.

7. Charts & graphs design 8/10

I’m giving it a high rating because creating the visual below took me 10 minutes with Claude Design, from project setup to download. Caveat: I had to prepare a Figma file with brand assets and chart examples, which took me 2 hours. Plus you’ll need a CVI. Even so, huge time savings ahead.

While many pros recommend using Claude Code, you can do most marketing work with Claude Cowork. It’s got chat-based interface instead of Terminal.

“Just three months after launch, Cowork (32%) has already surpassed Claude Code (31%) as the primary Claude product among GTM operators we surveyed,” Maja Voje and Kyle Poyar reported in April 2026.

The survey of 200 GTM specialists confirmed that many prefer Cowork, especially for content creation, product and growth marketing.

Where I wouldn’t use AI as a marketer (and a human being)

Roughly 75% of the AI use cases the LinkedIn experts hype, I’d never use myself.

They either take more time than they save, or produce low-quality results.

1. Reporting & ad account optimisation: I prefer to do it manually every week, and process the information with my own brain.

2. Website & ad design: It’s just not working yet. I made some graphics with Claude Design for this newsletter. Not sure I ended up saving time.

Meanwhile, I was working on rebranding Marketing Fix this week, and did everything manually on Figma. Claude was helpful for researching premium typefaces. I then browsed are.na for hours to research colour swatches, editorial style, and typography. Finally, I designed everything manually on Figma.

3. Social media & newsletter writing: I’m a writer, after all. And I find something deeply degrading about serving other human beings “content” written by a machine. Just as I wouldn’t serve my friends Snickers and McDonald’s fries.

4. Human-to-human communication: I understand why sales teams contacting 100s of people each week automate the process. You can do it with Apollo, Clay, etc. But as I only send 5-10 work-related texts per week, I prefer to write them myself.

The stuff you don’t need AT ALL

I’ll end my rant-slash-therapy-session by repeating my unswayable belief:

There are many overcomplicated marketing AI use cases nobody actually needs.

Here’s an example of the type of LinkedIn post we’d all be better off without.

What it does is expand a single Claude Cowork use case into 20 “agents.”

Most of these are useless to your decision-making. They only add noise and extra work.

And extra anxiety.

Instead of creating 20 AI agents, you could simply set up a Claude Cowork project with a solid foundation and 5-6 skills for ideation and content creation. It writes all the assets in one task, instead of being uselessly broken down into 10 different details. Plus you might set up some bot for reaching out to collaborators and answering comments, if the volumes are high.

The branding, reporting, and designs you still have to do manually. That is, if you want them to be any good.

How to get started?

You probably already have.

It’s me who returned to marketing after a hiatus, and had to begin learning from scratch.

But in case you want a reset, or are still in the overwhelm phase, I recommend that you start following 4-5 people who are real experts on the subject.

Here are my go-to marketing newsletters on AI:

• Maja Voje: GTM Strategist
• Kieran Flanagan: Marketing AI in Action
• Ruben Hassid: How to AI

I will also be sharing detailed breakdowns of how I use AI for marketing tasks in Marketing Fix blog and Substack.

Help to keep me motivated by inviting other marketers and founders. Share Marketing Fix.

Coding skills vs. taste

There’s a new discourse about taste being the AI era’s most valuable skill.

I agree.

When anyone can generate marketing text and visuals in a single prompt, curation and authentic ideas become key differentiations.

As a marketer, you should be well aware that as long as your product is alright, original branding is what makes it stand out.

What can’t be prompted is something that didn’t exist before you created it.

“Writing, good writing, will therefore always be a place where something unknown, something which didn’t exist before, is given existence,” the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian author Jon Fosse wrote.

Instead of sweating about learning to code, become genuinely curious about art, dance, books, film—whatever you fancy.

Spend time away from your screen, in the real world. Because the people you’re marketing to, god bless, are still not running on AI brains.

Here’s a list of the best books I read a few years ago. Perhaps you’ll find something to get you started.

Further reading recommendations:

• Marketing Audit: Free Checklist of 95 Questions
• The Marketing Tools I Use Every Single Week
  

The post Dismantling the AI Marketing Mammoth appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

“Goodbye to All That” is the title of an autobiographical essay by Joan Didion. While I share very little of Didion’s sentimental outlook at leaving New York in the mid-1960s, I’ve always felt a strong affinity with the essay’s title.

I’ve always been one to say adieu: to projects and jobs, to places and dreams.

And now, it’s time for me to say goodbye to marketing.

At least for the next 2 years, for I’m finally ready to take the leap of faith and focus on writing my debut novel.

It feels a little bit insane and a great deal scary

It feels like the absolutely right thing to do.

It feels like… Freedom and purpose, which I’ve lacked for a long time.

On leaving marketing

There are two key reasons why I’m leaving the marketing world for at least the next 24 months.

Reason 1: I no longer enjoy working on marketing in its current AI era, where the sole goal is automation and efficiency. Meanwhile, creativity and integrity are as good dead. Perhaps, things will have (re)turned for the better in 24 months. I remain an optimistic pessimist.

Reason 2: I find meaning and purpose in art, literature, poetry. Reading, thinking, and writing make me feel that the real world, external to the screen, still exists. I’ve been working on my debut novel for the past 3 weeks, and it makes me feel grounded, focused on one thing, instead of jumping between messaging apps.

What about the ongoing projects & the Marketing Fix newsletter?

All my marketing-related projects are going into a looong hibernation. So there won’t be any more Marketing Fixes for the foreseeable future.

Also, I won’t be taking on any new consultation projects.

So, what’s next?

Some people go on jobbaticals. Some take breaks from work to have kids.

All I want is to return to a world free of the always-on hustle and noise. To think, experience, and work on something meaningful.

I returned to London in early September with an idea for my debut novel. Since then, I’ve been going to the British Library five days a week.

Writing a novel is like having a full-time job, and I can’t remember the last time I felt so inspired and determined.

And so, I decided to use my savings to buy 24 months of freedom.

Not to “hang out” or travel, but to work harder than ever.

If you’d like to follow my writerly pursuits and be notified about my upcoming poetry pamphlet, come join me here or say hi on Instagram.

How I’m feeling:

What I’m fearing:

But hey, it’s better to fall
than waste away your life
not having any fun at all
​
Et voilà, a little poem to end this post.

Thanks for reading!
Karola

Related: I Gave Up on LinkedIn. Should You?

The post Goodbye to All That Marketing appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

If you find the marketing tool market overwhelming, let me assure you that you’re not alone.

In a recent Marketing Fix newsletter issue, I wrote about the Era of Subscriptions and how I realised that my annual marketing tools budget is ca $6,000. Ugh!

I figured it might be helpful to share my marketing tool stack with other practitioners, too.

Perhaps, this expert-tested and carefully curated collection will help you find your next virtual helper – and save you many hours.

Below, you can find my go-to tools and software in 5 categories:

1. Marketing tools for ideation, copywriting, and visuals
2. Social media and email marketing tools
3. Web design, optimisation, and SEO software
4. Tools for creating courses, workshops, and videos
5. Productivity and time tracking apps

But first, I’ve included some thoughts on the subscriptions industry, as well as recommendations on how to select the best marketing tools for your project.

If you’re looking for the list of tools, scroll right down.

Welcome to the Era of Subscriptions, A.K.A. order a puppy for 5 hours

Early 2020s. The main subscription-based articles in our lives are SaaS tools and gym memberships.

Year 2025. Most of us are signed up for 20+ subscriptions. 

“No way, the number can’t be that high,” you say?

Now consider your recurring payments to mobile apps, newsletters, video streaming, music, news, magazines, podcasts, groceries, coffee, Amazon Prime, health & beauty products, gym & classes.

The greatest evil must be Apple’s iCloud Storage, designed to grow YoY.

Name one thing that can’t be found in subscription format.

Animals? Wrong!

How did we end up in a world where even toothpaste is subscriptionised?

Over the past 5 years, the subscription economy has been fuelled by many things, among them Covid-induced laziness of the Western urban population and laws allowing marketplaces to elude social taxes of precarious workers.

No small role was also played by the tech investors dreaming of hockey-stick growth charts of ARR.

The best way to procure the ARR as a brand with a physical consumer product? Introduce monthly subscriptions.

Welcome to the Era of Subscriptions.

Annual subscription fee: $7,600+

Having recently adopted many new productivity and marketing tools (free + paid), I was curious to see how much the invoices in my inbox and bank account add up to.

I found a sleek (and free) Subscriptions Tracker template on Notion Marketplace and entered all my expenses under 7 categories.

​

Work & Marketing software:

• Ideation, copywriting, and visuals
• Social media and email marketing
• Web design, optimisation, and SEO
• Courses, workshops, and videos
• Productivity and time tracking

Lifestyle & intellectual interests:

• Productivity & task management
• Lifestyle, health, and arts

Monthly spend: €618

My initial reaction was a big “Ughhh!”

I knew there were a few expensive marketing tools there, but I wasn’t expecting the total sum to be this much.

Alright, it’s not that bad, I thought, when looking at the per-month aggregate.

But then I switched the chart input to calculate the yearly budget…

Annual spend: €7,429

​

​

The resulting sum is, frankly, horrifying

How on earth!?

And I don’t even subscribe to food delivery or streaming services…!

You’ll find the full list of my subscription expenses below.

But first, a bit of life philosophy.

How much is too much to pay for marketing tools?

After overcoming the initial mini-shock, I went deeper and considered what value each tool adds to my work and life:

• Enabling work projects
• Increasing productivity
• Improving daily life

And so on…

If you’re planning to do the same exercise, here are 3 POWs that might be helpful.

1) Pragmatic: cost / value

Am I making more money thanks to a tool than I spend on it?

2) Productive: cost / time

Saving money feels great, but isn’t your saved time even more valuable?

3) Emotional: cost / happiness

Is the subscription making a significant improvement to your quality of life?

Cheap = expensive

These days, ever more distractions compete for our 16 hours of daily waking time.

There also seems to be more worthwhile projects these days, compared to 10 years ago.

In personal life, this means more friends to catch up with, events to socialise at, articles and books to read, recipes to try, cities to (re)visit, exhibitions to see, barre classes to attend, cafes to linger at, and moments to capture and share.

On the work side, I’m a freelance marketing consultant who also maintains a blog, newsletter, and creates marketing courses.

I wince at the thought of all the hours I’ve spent on LinkedIn to build new connections, write and design posts, and keep in touch with colleagues and clients.

Don’t even mention Instagram…

Saving money feels great until you realise your time is even more valuable.

When selecting the tools for my work, I’d rather spend a bit more to get the industry’s best.

Going with a cheaper option might save you €/$/£100 here and there.

But product limitations (fewer features, low-quality design) + the extra time spent are simply not worth it.

As to productivity and lifestyle subscriptions, some save you time while others, in fact, waste it.

Ask yourself whether that Netflix subscription is actually making you happier – or smarter…

Ok, let’s return the focus on marketing software now.

Investing in tools = investing in growth

Over the past 6 months, I’ve spent ca €2,500 on:

• Marketing and productivity software
• Substack newsletters
• Marketing & design templates

The sum seems rather exuberant in retrospect.

And yet, there’s no other way I could have delivered all my projects without this investment.

Perhaps, I could have chosen a cheaper blog theme than Blocksy Pro (€289/lifetime). Or a cheaper course platform than Kajabi (€209/month). Or used Mac’s free screenshot tool instead of Cleanshot ($29/lifetime).

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, I would have saved ca €500.

Certainly, I would have paid in tens (if not 100+) of extra hours, lower-quality branding, and the resulting lost opportunities.
​

Do I regret spending a little fortune on software & tools in 6 months?

No, the investment has well paid off.

I’m even considering getting two extra tools: 🐒

• Superhuman to declutter (and de-stress) my inbox experience, flooded with too many newsletters
• Notion Pro for better LinkedIn giveaways & course resource management

In order to make money, you need to spend money

I was reminded of this point of view last weekend, while weeding my garden.

I was listening to a recent Delivering Value podcast episode with Maja Voje.

She said that it took her years to realise: “In order to make money, you need to spend money.”

The logic rings more true than ever.

Over the past 6 months, I have…

• Worked on two long-term marketing consulting projects
• Wrote a 360-degree marketing audit for three companies
• Rebranded my newsletter to a new strategic focus and design
• Switched my blog theme and redesigned most of it
• Created and launched my first-ever marketing course
• Grew my LinkedIn account to 13k+ followers with 2-3 posts/week

​
​The list is not a complaint. Nor is it a boast.

We all have to work, and many of us enjoy the process.

I love learning new skills; I thrive when (self-)challenged.

The list is the key reason why I looked up and tested tens of new marketing tools and began paying for several of them.

I also made several one-off purchases of other marketing experts’ resources (like Maja’s GTM Checklist) to improve my skill set faster. (These are not included in the Notion doc.)

Below, you can see the full list of the paid and free tools that I use in my marketing projects and personal life – my Mary Poppins bag of marketing tools.

My Mary Poppins bag of marketing tools

First, an important clarification…

The Mary Poppins “purse” is a model of the ’60s carpet bag.

Among other paraphernalia, it contained a hat stand, a mirror, a houseplant, and a floor lamp.

Thx God the marketing tools are virtual. The only thing they weigh down is one’s bank account balance.

All the marketing and productivity tools mentioned are ones that I currently use or have used for some client projects.

I hands-down recommend them all.

Without further ado, here they are.

1. Marketing tools for ideation, copywriting, and visuals

​Figma PRO: Design for website, ad creatives, social media posts, newsletter, etc.

​Canva: Design tool for marketers who haven’t yet learned to use Figma

​Adobe Firefly: AI-generated images, e.g the featured images in this blog

​Adobe Express: Editing images, e.g. removing background and changing size

​Grammarly: Checking spelling mistakes in my Google Docs, newsletter, social posts

​CleanShot: Taking high-quality screenshots and adding special edits + recording GIFs

​ChatGPT: Researching ideas and topics, getting copywriting angles (never the full text)

​Miro: Workshops and brainstorming for consulting projects

2. Social media and email marketing tools

​KIT: My go-to newsletter marketing tool for Marketing Fix

​Sparkloop: Newsletter referrals for Marketing Fix

​Taplio: The very best LinkedIn tool for analytics and content generation

​Texts: Mac desktop app that consolidates all your messages, e.g. from LinkedIn and Instagram

​Octopus CRM: My go-to tool for growing LinkedIn follower base with automated invitations and welcome messages

​Instantly: The best sender domain warmup tool to ensure your emails land in the Inbox

3. Web design, optimisation, and SEO software

​Blocksy PRO: Super flexible & high-quality WordPress theme used for this blog

​Wisepops: Hands down the most flexible and good-looking pop-up tool

​Lasso: Website add-on for beautiful product offer layouts

​Wappalyzer: Browser extension that shows all the tools and pixels on any website

​Moz: Top SEO tool, I use their free browser extension for optimisation & research

​SemRush: Top SEO & PPC tool, I use the free version extension for research

​SimilarWeb: Web and SEO analysis tool, I use it for site traffic analysis

4. Tools for creating courses, workshops, videos

​Kajabi: All-in-one course management platform, best in the industry

​Tally: Typeform-style tool for collecting user feedback and doing website surveys

​Senja: The very best tool for collecting and showcasing testimonials

​Typeform: Top website form tool with lots of features and layouts

5. Productivity and time tracking apps

​Calendly: Meeting scheduling

​Teamweek: Now Toggl Plan, I’ve used it for task management for 5+ years

​Toggl: Time tracking for freelance projects and every other work-related task

​Notion PRO: Project management and documentation + content management

​Slack: Better turn your phone notifications off

​Evernote: Desktop app that I use for note-taking and drafting texts

​
Et voilà, this was my list of marketing tools and software that I use daily.

The awful – or good – thing is that looking at this list, there’s nothing I’d willingly give up.

And yet, I’m going to play Easter Egg hunt this weekend and hide some of those from my bank account for good.

This time, too much is too much.

Wondering what to do next?

Get bi-weekly marketing and growth advice by joining 15k+ marketers in the Marketing Fix newsletter community.

Recommended articles for further reading:

• My 20go-to marketing newsletters
• 105+ LinkedIn ad examples from top B2B brands
• My 55+ predictions for 2025 marketing trends

The post The Marketing Tools That I Use Every Single Week appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

In 2025, social media has become an ALL IN or ALL OUT marketing channel.

By ALL IN, I mean that to get results from organic social media (Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn), brands (read: marketers) need to work hard.

By hard work, I mean a 100% dedication to a social platform: 3-5 high-quality posts per week that can compete with big brands’ social teams & digital creators.

As I argued in my LinkedIn post (now 60,000+ impressions OMG (✪‿✪)):

In 2015, social media marketing was an intern’s job because the CMO was busy with strategy and paid ad campaigns. In 2025, social media is still an intern’s job because the CMO doesn’t know how to do it.

The Great Complexification of social media marketing 2015-2025

In the past 5 years, paid ads have become easier to manage as Meta and Google add automation.

Meanwhile, the complexity of social media marketing has skyrocketed.

↳ Social media is now 10x more competitive v.s. 5 years ago. Think professional creators posting high-production videos, hyper-engaging brand UGC in Reels and TikTok, celebrity collabs, etc.

↳ People who started marketing careers in 2010 struggle to keep up with Gen Z social media aesthetics, discourse, lingo. It’s become hard for 40y olds to talk the language of 18y old consumers. (I’m 31y and even I think it’s hard…)

↳ In 2025, social media marketing is complex and high-value expertise that companies hire special talent & teams for. Even the size of Facebook posts has become more complex.

In my article on 2025 marketing trends, I wrote: “The key social media trend in 2025 will be: less is more. 

I am not so sure about that anymore.

But surely, what is out is easy audience growth from posting unoriginal ideas with basic static designs.

What does “good” social media mean in 2025?

Here are 5 brands winging the social media game.

Check out their IG profiles if you’re not quite sure what “good social media marketing” means these days. Hint: lots of videos.

• ​Oatly​
• ​Liquid Death
• ​Feeld​
• ​Sephora​
• ​ClickUp

What does it mean for marketers?

As a small brand’s marketing manager, you probably don’t have the skill set of a seasoned social media marketing expert.

So, it’s quite hopeless to compete against big brands and professional Instagram creators on your own.
​
You just don’t have the time to keep up w/ all best practices, come up w/ hyper-creative ideas, and create (write, film, design) high-quality social media content. You also don’t have a video production team.

Should you give up on social media?

Hold your horses. But do consider the ALL IN or ALL OUT approach.

↳ Go ALL IN for a 3-month test period. Although some social media agency people commented under my LI post that it should be a 6-month period, I don’t buy it.

↳ Look at social media as a 3-month experiment into which you invest €3-5k per month.
​
​↳ Shift some paid ads budget to social media. Say you spend €10k per month on paid ads. Shift €5k of that budget to social media as an experiment for 3 months.
​
​↳ Hire a freelance social media expert or agency for that 3-month period and let them work their magic. They’ve got the knowhow, social-media-creative brain, and teams and tools to create high-quality content.
​
​↳ See how far the experiment takes you in 1-2 channels you’ve asked the experts to manage. You may as well see that this €5k is better spend on social media expert’s fee than paid advertising. You can measure the results via general high-level results, blended CPA, and obviously social media growth KPIs.

Suggestion: Subscribe to the best social media newsletters to keep your finger on the pulse.

Pay to play

In 2025, social media is one of the most lucrative growth channels.

But as with any marketing channel, paid or organic, you’ll have to pay the entry price in order to play the game.

This article first appeared in my marketing newsletter. Subscribe here to be the first one to read new posts.

The post Social media in 2025: Go ALL IN or go ALL OUT appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

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TL;DR: Marketing trends will continue to shift A LOT this year…

Writing about 2024 marketing trends, I focused on the Big Five of trends, including Gen Z social media, UGC-style content, AI hype going down (I was wrong) and sustainability going up.

An important shift form the early 2020s is that marketing strategies, tactics, and channels have become increasingly differentiated among B2B v.s. B2C, virtual v.s. physical products.

Also, there’s a whole new space of AI marketing tools, the Everything Bagel Magic Powder to sprinkle on tasks that must become more efficient. Will we want to go on eating, daily, fast-delivery but low-quality dishes that all taste the same?

In 2025, I decided to do the annual fortune telling slightly differently…

As I failed to finalise my personal INs and OUTs list in time for the NYE (I got as far as hypocrisy: OUT and coconut: IN), I’m going to make up for this oversight in my business-realm predictions.

Opinionated as ever, here come my predictions for 2025 marketing trends in six categories.

My experience being primarily in brand, marketing, and growth strategies for Seed and A-round tech companies, the forecasts are probably most relevant to the techy-unicorny world.

However, there will be food for thought (bagels!) for marketers/founders in all industries.

Check this out (if you want to prepare yourself for 2025): Marketing Audit: Free Checklist of 95 Questions

And learn to become better in marketing from these 35+ TOP Marketing & Growth Newsletters that I recommend.

AI will be a huge marketing trend in 2025, as it was already in the second half of 2024.

The question is: do we actually want the resulting average-content tsunami to wash over our inboxes & feeds?

IN:

• More AI tools to automate more tasks & be more efficient. What’s done with the time saved with “efficiency” remains a mystery.
• More lame, inhuman, uncreative content flooding all social media feeds until, around 2027, the last human logs off their Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn accounts.
• A few actually useful AI tools that automate intern- and specialist-level tasks. Like AI-compiled media monitoring reports, AI-scraped + enriched lead lists.

OUT:

• Creativity + personality in advertising, social posts, sales pitches >> leading to worse results for marketing teams using AI tools.
• Manual reporting + spreadsheet’ing that leads to better understanding of what’s working and what isn’t.
• Engagement on social media and elsewhere. There is simply too much CONTENT.

Also IN:

• Ad creatives done with AI tools (the top Q4 2024 trend was UGC-style video ads) that perform worse than ads done by experienced graphic desigers.
• Democracy: more small brands able to launch digital ad campaigns without hiring an agency.
• AI-written marketing & sales emails that sound like your grandfather’s been let loose behind keyboard: awkward.
• C-level people’s inboxes flooded by 10x more spammy sales & marketing emails >> leading to new AI-powered inbox curation tools get lots of VC interest.

​

By the 2nd half of 2025, everyone is so tired of AI that we finally begin thinking with our own heads again.

Bad marketers will be unable to restore their creative brain cells. Good marketers get lots of job offers and/or a raise.

The key social media trend in 2025 will be: less is more. Think high-quality content that really makes people (you yourself) want to engage with it.

IN:

• All social channels: posts and videos that either a) entertain or b) teach something new and original get most engagement.
• Instagram & TikTok: More (big-)brand collaborations with celebrities + other big-name brands.
• Instagram & TikTok: Reels videos bring 90% or more of total reach. UGC-style videos continue to get highest engagement.
• Instagram & TikTok: Meme-style videos and images with brand insertions.
• LinkedIn: “Comment to get X” style posts get highest engagement. B2B creators give away even more valuable stuff. More people begin to give away free stuff until the entry level gets too high for most.
• LinkedIn: Even more C-level people building a personal brand. Errr, their marketing team building their personal brand >> more hiring for social media positions.

Big IN:

• Reddit! More of us resort to Reddit as the last humans-only social platform with trustworthy information.

OUT:

• All social channels: Easy growth for brands with unoriginal ideas/product that can’t hire a good social media marketer and/or agency.
• TikTok: Fatigue on both consumer + marketing team level >> fewer collaborations with TikTok content creators.
• Instagram: Brand accounts with mediocre content stop getting any engagement on their feed posts. It’s a MUST to do creative & fun Stories + Reels.
• LinkedIn: Video posts are out. We’re finally ready to admit the algos don’t love them.
• LinkedIn: Carousel posts that were bread-and-butter in 2024 get low engagement.
• LinkedIn: Personal-story style posts with overflowing fake emotionality. “I had tears in my eyes when reading your comments.” Please, get a grip on yourself and/or book a therapist consultation.

Branding in 2025 will take some interesting turns, from anti-AI storytelling to multi-million brand collaborations with film stars, pop artists, and top 1% social media creators.

IN:

• Anti-AI brand storytelling. “There is no AI” inside our product becoming a relevant value proposition to large customer segments.
• Brands with original—borderline insane—storytelling. Think Liquid Death and IKEA. Big props Bolt’s brand team who boarded the train already in late 2023.
• AI-powered (visual) brand generation. Unsure yet if this is a good or a bad thing. Certainly, we’ll end up with more of the same and boring. But more brands can launch faster.
• Big-name brand collaborations with movies, celebrities, other big-name brands. Developed as multi-million advertising campaigns, both online and offline.
• B2B influencer marketing. LinkedIn Content Creator is now a valid (and lucrative) job title.

OUT:

• AI-led brand storytelling. Guess what… Not everyone wants AI algorithms to choose what they eat, listen, watch.
• B2C influencer marketing. The ROI just doesn’t justify it, and people don’t engage with obviously sponsored content.
• Great product being enough to win new users’ attention & love. In the overcrowded, all products need an engaging brand narrative and strategy to get it before people’s eyes.
• Especially in B2B software: Best products no longer take over competitors’ clients. The first movers will lock in most users as it’s too time- and energy-consuming to change tools/things for just another 10% improvement.

A very sad OUT:

• Sustainability and CSR. We tried, people didn’t care, we were the people.
• Greenwashing is finally out. Everyone’s tired of being treated like an idiot by brands saying their product is sustainable because it’s packaged in recyclable cardboard box.

​

In 2025, we’re finally admitting our hypocrisy as consumers: “green” equals not buying. But instead of not buying, we’ll simply stop talking about fake sustainability nonsense.

On the bright side, second-hand and vintage apps + platforms will continue to thrive. It’s cheaper, more original, and delivered to your doorstep. And (!) things produced before Y2K (2000) have 10x superior quality v.s. current Big Retail output (same goes for luxury brands).

In advertising (both offline and online) there will be a drop in spending across platforms. Not only has the ROI of paid ads declined over the past five years – there is also less budget to spend.

IN:

• PR and publicity continues to be a high-ROI marketing investment. In case you have something interesting—or crazy—to say.
• Medium-size brands (in addition to household name brands) shifting to soft storytelling and brand campaigns v.s. performance marketing.
• Advertisements (online + offline) with huge IN YOUR FACE TEXT blocks on single-colour backgrounds as our collective attention span deteriorates further to invertebrate level.
• Google Ads continue to outperform other digital ad channels.
• More marketers launching Reddit ads, now that there’s a bigger audience on the platform >> buy Reddit stock NOW?

OUT:

• Digital advertising on Meta + TikTok keeps getting more expensive and less efficient. >> But is there a better option, especially for small brands? Organic social + top-quality content + cold sales seem like top contenders.
• Static ad creatives with clear messaging still outperform most video ads.
• As in any other year, advertisements with ultra-creative copywriting and design that perform worse than ads saying “get 20% your first order”—or better yet, ads saying “SALE.” Will creative teams and ad agencies ever learn?

​
​High-level OUT:

• Money. At times of shaky economy, companies will cut spending in all areas, and marketing is one of the first to take the hit. We’ll probably see more layoffs (specialist-level people replaced with AI) and advertising budget cuts.
• Growth. The cost-cutting festival will also mean slower growth for most companies. Especially as market is reluctant to spend.

​

Not to lose faith! Many successful companies were launched during recession. And it’s because of low competition, lower advertising costs, access to talent that they could expand so fast. Think Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest, Instagram in 2008.

In 2025, high-quality web and brand aesthetics become key to earning customers’ trust, as well as getting their attention in the first place.

Do not rely on AI for your creatives.

IN:

• Small brands using AI tools like Canva for marketing creatives and wondering why their marketing isn’t working.
• AI-generated photos and CGI animations that are, in fact, an improvement from stock photos & videos.
• Many cool aesthetic trends, from 3D to Y2K retro style to frosted-glass effects >> innovation won’t stop but is affordable to well-funded brands mostly.
• Template-based websites for small and just-launched brands that look better than what average branding agencies produce. Premium-level $100 templates on Squarespace, WordPress, WebFlow have gotten good.
  ​

OUT:

• AI design tools will eventually lose users as they fail to deliver high-quality creatives.
• Social media experts & paid social marketers who can’t use Figma. Hate to break this to you but Canva templates are just not good enough. They never were.
• Collaborating with large we-do-it-all agencies >> shift towards boutique agencies & freelance experts to work with high-level experts v.s. have juniors on your campaigns.

​

As I observed in a LinkedIn post, it was sad to see Adobe’s annual design trends report shift from cool stuff to AI stuff this year. For aesthetic inspiration in 2025, I recommend these two reports on Behance. One. Two.

Traditional blog-based content marketing is dead in 2025. Content marketers will need to diversify into newsletters and social media marketing.

IN:

• Newsletters! Brands launching their own Substacks or other-platform newsletters that are so good they compete with media publications. See more: 25+Best Marketing Newsletters in 2025.
• B2B brands publishing less but higher-quality content. Think extensive guides, free courses, trend reports v.s. 800-word blog articles.
• B2C brands launch their own media publications, either news-style or video platforms that compete with big media companies vis à vis quality and audience numbers. See
• Marketers using AI tools for content writing. Hate, no, happy to break this to you: no AI tool can write text 100% as good as one written by an experienced writer.
• BUT good writers can use ChatGPT (you really need no other tools) to accelerate their research + writing process.

All my predictions here are AI-free. I wasn’t even tempted to ask ChatGPT “what are the marketing trends in 2025?” It would simply scrape other blog articles, mostly by junior marketers. Would you really want to read those?

OUT:

• For most brands, publishing a blog for SEO purposes is passé. AI-powered search results kill lots of organic traffic, content marketing becomes more technical and complicated.
• People coming to your blog directly. Nope, you’ll have to work hard on marketing any piece of content to attract people to it: social media, newsletter, paid ads.
• Podcasts as marketing strategy is finally out. There are too many good established ones competing for the time we all save thanks to AI tools—and that we spend watching Netflix or YouTube…

Personal IN:

• Whenever googling stuff like “best toaster” or “best recipe for x” adding the word “Reddit” to the end of my query and trusting people in Reddit forums to get honest, human, useful information.

…

​Thanks for reading!

Want more articles like this? Subscribe to my weekly newsletter with 15,000+ readers.

The post 55+ Predictions for 2025 Marketing Trends appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

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Are industry trend reports worth the marketing investment?

Last week, I wrote about creating a 30-page industry report for a B2B brand I’m working with.

It took me ca 55h to research, write, design, and promote it, plus report on results.

Was this enormous undertaking worth it?

Many B2B software behemoths (HubSpot, Adobe, Salesforce), by launching and promoting “X Year Trends in X” reports seem to validate the strategy.

But what about the small B2B brands just entering the market?

Based on my experience, the strategy indeed does work. But there are also many caveats, lots of IFs.

Before you decide whether trend report is something to test out in 2025, there are many aspects to take into consideration. By the end of this newsletter, you’ve read my two cents on the subject.

But first, let’s continue from where the previous newsletter stopped. We covered the full creation process from initial idea to final design.

Now, we’ve ended up with a PDF-format 2025 Sales x AI Trend Report.

What’s next?

Before kicking off the promotion strategy, there’s an important question to answer…

​

What’s your end goal?

Let’s start by what should not be the end goal:

1) Having a beautiful trend report to add to the blog / website. Nobody will find it unless you go out of your way to promote it (the same goes about your blog articles, guides, and case studies…)

2) Spending $0 on getting new leads from downloads. Calculate your team’s salaries and agency fees for 100h+ work hours.

3) Getting leads from downloads to add to your blog newsletter list. There are many many cheaper (and efficient) ways to do it.

Ugh, so what is the goal of investing in a trend report? Or let me rephrase… What is the goal of any marketing activity?

Getting new customers and $$$, ideally at a positive marketing ROI.

Perhaps it helps to see this graph I stole from the internet.

Getting new leads won’t matter if you’re unable to convert them into customers.

Getting lots of readers (if not gating the trend report download) won’t matter if you’re unable to convert them into customers.

Getting lots of LinkedIn engagement won’t matter if… Wait, this actually turned out alright for us. But there’s also a but here which we’ll get to later…

Just be honest with yourself here, and focus your marketing resources on things that drive growth, i.e. revenue.

This could be a trend report! This could also be paid ads or…

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Trend report promotion strategy: the goals

Let’s start from the 2025 trend report marketing strategy we took with Sera‘s team.

As we’re in marketing experimentation stage, the project was one of our experiments. And it wasn’t just a whim: I’ve seen it work for other B2B brands over years.

So, our initial strategy was to create an attractive industry report on 2025 sales x AI trends that:

1) Helps to establish Sera as an industry thought leader in the AI SDR space.

2) Have an endless resource for 20+ future blog posts, guides, and social posts

3) Get new leads from downloads to convert into paying customers.

The third one, of course, is the most important one.

​

Trend report promotion strategy: the channels & budgets

As our ICP (ideal target customer) was decision-makers in small to mid-size B2B companies, the obvious channel for promotion was LinkedIn.

Note that you should already know who your ICP is, although you can also use an e-book promo campaign for ICP discovery. A rather expensive way to acquire the knowledge that founders should have knows from Day 1…

So, LinkedIn ads it was.

And not just LinkedIn ads but LinkedIn Lead ads.

I won’t tell you the exact budgets but we tested on several markets, and started out rather small, planning to optimise / increase budgets after initial results came it.

As to LinkedIn Lead ad campaign setup, we tested both the new Accelerate campaigns and the good old manual setup.

The Accelerate campaigns, not to speak of horrible UI trying to push AI-written ad copy – not good – this campaign type took way too long to start delivering reach. So after 24h, I changes all campaigns to regular Lead Ad campaigns.

​

As with any paid social ad channel (and display ads), the campaign’s success is 20% setup (keep it broad) and 80% creative.

As to the ad creative itself, it’s success depends 10% on text 90% on image. Nobody reads ad copy these days, unless it’s in the image.

So let’s talk about…

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Trend report promotion strategy: the ad creatives

How to design ad visuals that convert?

The first thing I did was spy on competitors’ LinkedIn ad creatives, as well as see what well-established brands in other B2B industries are doing.

As a result, I had my desktop full of 50+ screenshots. After filtering out the best ones, we had a Figma file with 15-20 ideas to copy.

​

Good marketing isn’t about reinventing the wheel but having enough experience and knowledge (and common sense) to distinguish the best examples from stuff you know doesn’t work.

I designed 10+ different ad creatives for the campaign, and chose 6 final ones to experiment with. Below is one example.

The must-have elements I wanted to have in all ad visuals:

1) Huge text in image, immediately communicating the value and subject.

2) Download CTA with pointed arrows in the visual to draw the eye to the obvious action.

3) Sneak peek visuals of the report to convince the viewer it’s insightful and has high-quality design >> is trustworthy.

​

Trend report promotion strategy: organic social media

Of course, paid advertising isn’t the only way to promote a trend report (or blog post or e-book or newsletter, etc.)

Perhaps, it’s not even the most efficient channel…

The day we launched paid ad campaigns, I helped to create several LinkedIn posts for Sera’s team to share.

We tested LinkedIn posts with just one image, as well as a carousel-style PDF post. See the full PDF post here.

​

You’ve probably seen some LinkedIn carousel posts get hundreds of likes, comments, and shares.

However, the LinkedIn post by Sera’s CEO didn’t reach the viral effect.

Why?

Because building up a LinkedIn personal account with lots of followers and high engagement takes time. We’d only started working on this (an important project!) a few weeks ago and he had can 1,000 followers at the time.

Now, compare this with the results of the LinkedIn post I did to hail the trend report – which received so much great feedback from my network. Thx you all you know who you are! ʕ•͡-•ʔ

​

The post got 119 comments and reached 17,912 people.

I spent some good hours responding to all the comments and DMs from new and old contacts that wanted to get the trend report.

And it was absolutely worth it. As to date, at least one lead that came via this post has become a customer.

Also, another takeaway I’d like you to, well, take away: One LinkedIn post about a quality report isn’t all you can do.

You can reformat the content into 20+ posts over time, and keep the leads and reach coming.

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Trend report promotion strategy: landing page + newsletter

Sorry peeps!

This is where I’ll have to leave off this time.

I had no intention to extend the trend report project into another newsletter but…

1) I’m on a Tartu-Tallinn train and it’s hitting the station in 10 minutes.

2) It’s Thursday evening and I’m on my way to Xmas dinner with my two most important people in the world: sister and mom.

3) I really wanted to send the newsletter this Friday morning as promised.

So after a Christmas break, I’ll be back with Part 3 that covers the full landing page + automated newsletter setup process and advice, as well as the final results and takeaways.

Have a lovely, giving, kind, surprising, restful holiday season! ☆.。.:・°☆.。.:・°

The post Industry Trend Reports PART 2: Promotion appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

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Ever downloaded an industry trend report or e-book?

As for me, I’ve downloaded 100+ of those….

Why?

The landing page text might say things like “we polled nearly 1,800 designers and developers from four continents…” (Figma) but, of course, I never read the promo text.

Because it’s the impeccably designed cover that gets me.

Like 8 billion other human animals, I’m a visual creature. The design team at Intercom wins the beauty pageant – as well as my email address that I exchange for the PDF – the email that will receive tens of marketing newsletters over the next 3 months until, finally, I open one of them to scroll down to the almost-transparent unsubscribe link.

So why do I download trend reports and e-books? (Why do you?)

Perhaps, it’s the human curiosity, the FOMO that scares you to miss out on some very important shifts in the industry, game-changing tactics, considerably pleasant ways to waste a few hours of your working day.

Be it as it may, trend reports (and other kinds of e-books) work. Especially in enterprise-level B2B sales where their purpose isn’t as much education but…

Leaving the impression of an established, industry-leading brand.

And, naturally, collecting hundreds of potential future clients’ emails. (You already know what to do next with those…) 🌚

​

THE question is: Do trend reports lead to sales & revenue growth?

The short answer is: Yes.

But let’s rephrase the question: Are trend reports worth your marketing team’s time, effort, and the ad budget that goes into promotion?

The answer shifts to: Maybe.

It takes A LOT of time to create a trend report. The reason I know is because I just wrote, designed, and promoted one.

Together with Sera, the super promising Estonian startup building AI SDR (you should check them out!), we decided to create the 2025 Trend Report: How AI Will Change Sales Operations.

​

The joke’s on me because Sera’s team is essentially three people. And, obviously, there are no designers. (In Estonia, the first designer enters the game as ca 60th hire – hence the high success rate of local tech companies.)

So when creating the 30-page trend report, 70% of my time went into designing the thing.

As a result, I learned so much about cutting corners with Figma Library templates and unearthing legit-looking 3D icons for $80. More on this later!

As I use Toggl to track the time spent on clients’ marketing projects, I can more or less present the breakdown of a trend report creation timeline.

Time spent on creating & promoting a trend report:

• Research + discussions with team: 8 hours
• Writing the content (drafting with ChatGPT Premium): 10h
• Designing the PDF from zero: 16h
• Designing ads + social content for promotion: 6h
• Setting up ad campaigns: 1h
• Designing, copywriting, and setting up landing page + website popup: 4h
• Setting up post-download email automation: 4h
• Random back-and-forth + reporting: 6h

In total, we have… 55 hours. 🥲

And let me assure you that if there was a team of 3-5 people (plus extra stakeholders) working on the project, the time spent would be at least 5-6x higher.

Now, add to this resource pillage the paid advertising budget…

… and what your get are pretty damn expensive leads.

So you better know exactly what you’re doing when starting to work on an industry trend report.

Time for the first Moomin break.

Should you create & promote a trend report?

Here are 5 reasons not to:

1. It costs a lot of time, consider the alternative things your team could do with it.
2. You need to have industry expertise (or be great at learning fast from other industry leaders (fairly easy, tbh)).
3. Once the PDF is ready, you have to promote it. Otherwise, nobody will find or download it.
4. You need to keep milking the report for weeks if not months to justify point 1.
5. The leads that come in via download need a lot of nurturing before converting.

But then again…

Here are 10 reasons why trend reports are worth it:

1. You’ve exhausted other acquisition channels or maxed out the spending to ROAS limit.
2. You’re a new startup and want to quickly establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
3. You’re willing to invest in the long game, and turn leads into clients via marketing automation.
4. You’ve never tried it before – marketing is all about experimentation.
5. You want a high-quality resource to share with existing leads and include in outreach emails.
6. You invest in a long-form content piece to turn into… LinkedIn posts, webinars, blog articles, etc.
7. You gather and visualise statistics that gets picked up by other blogs and media publications, resulting in high brand reach & awareness.
8. You use the trend report as one stage in your marketing funnel, not as a one-stop acquisition channel.
9. Your marketing team is too big and has no higher-ROAS projects to focus on (cut the headcount).
10. You establish your annual trend reports as a thing people look forward to, à la Spotify Wrapped or Adobe’s Creative Trends report. And make them so fun / innovative others will do the distribution for you.

To sum it up: Trend reports are worth it if you do them well.

​

How to create an industry trend report that people want?

For better or worse – and this is my aesthetic brain typing – the content of a trend report is 20% of its attraction and efficiency. The rest is design (40%) and marketing (40%).

Here’s the zero-to-one process I followed when creating the AI x Sales trend report for Sera.

#1 Research

The obvious first step was to ask Sera’s founders what we should talk about.

Just as obvious as the founders not being marketing people so they gave me free rein. I was on my own, again.

So I went to spy on the competition, as well as the established B2B SaaS brands that I know to do great marketing (and design).

The best spy tool was LinkedIn Ads Library. For example, when I checked which ads HubSpot and Intercom are running, I quickly found their latest trend reports (set up as LinkedIn Lead ads).

To see the LinkedIn ads any brand is running, go to their Business page, navigate to Posts, and click “View ad library.”

When doing the initial research, I was looking at:

• Headlines and subjects of the trend report
• Structure of chapters and content
• Layout and design ideas
• Landing page + download form setup
• Marketing communication around the report

I created:

• A Google Docs with screenshots of various trend report ads, landing page URLs and content ideas
• A Google Drive folder with downloaded trend reports to keep referring to
• A Figma file with screenshots of good cover design + layout examples

This was about all I needed to be ready to write & design one myself.

Time for the second Moomin break.

How to write an insightful industry trend report?

Industry trend reports are essentially a grown-up version of e-books.

They’ve got to be longer, more insightful, and involve lots of statistics and charts.

Ideally, you’ve got lots of industry data – or customers to send a survey to.

As a startup, you have neither.

So I suppressed my anti-AI attitude for one day and asked ChatGPT to find statistics on relevant topics.

Like a good journalist ever, it wasn’t particularly forthcoming on its sources.

It became slightly more forthcoming once I’d upgraded to the Premium plan.

In any case, using ChatGPT, I regret to admit, saved me lots of time when writing the trend report (in a Google Doc).

Important to note: I rewrote most of the text ChatGPT provided, and prompted it to rewrite chapters 10+ times to get less jargony, repetitive, and much much more detailed and original.

After a long day’s work, I had finalised the content draft and shared it with Sera’s team for review.

And now we’re getting to my favourite part…

How to design a trend report PDF?

I began by looking for the easy options.

Canva had no good templates for e-books or other PDF formats.

Neither did the Google search for “e-book templates” yield any crop.

So I went to Figma Library and found some helpful magazine layouts.

What was most helpful was using the screenshots of other trend reports to create templates for the project. I could copy the right font size and alignment, as well as get inspiration for simple design solutions.

I’d also like to thank my past self for investing in a $80 package of fully customisable 3D icons I found in an online creative market. They really made a difference in the report looking expensive and trustworthy.

(My WIP Figma file looked a lot messier…)

Coming up with the initial style, design elements, and typography was so horribly difficult that after two hours, I gave up, thought why do I do this to myself, and decided to continue the next day.

The positive thing is that once I’d figured out the first 3 slides the next morning, it got a lot easier to design the rest via duplication and playing around with the branded colour scheme.

I’d even go as far as to say that designing the report became fun and gratifying.

By Sunday evening, I had the 30 pages designed and, once again, posted the result in our team Slack.

The founders approved.

It was time to make some final adjustments and export the PDF.

I uploaded it to Google Drive as “accessible to everyone with link” and started preparing (designing, uff!) the ad campaigns + social media (LinkedIn) posts.

How to promote a trend report?

I suppose you agree that this newsletter is becoming exhaustingly long.

So I’ll stop here, and send another dispatch on the promotion + results in the coming weeks.

While you wait, I’ve compiled a little award for those who reached the end of this soliloquy – a Figma file with some Library finds that were super helpful to me.

I also included some LinkedIn lead ad examples + good layout examples from my initial research process.

You can access the Figma file here. Sorry, this is only for newsletter subscribers!

The post I Created a 30-page Industry Trend Report. Here’s what I Learned appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

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What are the biggest marketing trends in 2024? 

Such questions, however fickle, help us plan better, get more results, and be prepared when change happens.

Coming up are my top five predictions on how marketing will change – or continue shifting – in 2024, from macro-level changes to specific topics close to my heart. I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts and feedback, feel free to DM me on LinkedIn.

TOP 5 marketing trends in 2024:

1. Gen Z social media is now a must-have
2. Creator marketing & UGC keep growing
3. The AI hype will calm down
4. Results & quality beat scalability
5. Real sustainability over greenwashing

But first, a few words about 2023. Because, as they say, to understand the future we must look to the past.

In 2023, I worked with several tech companies, both B2C and B2B, on their growth strategies and marketing campaigns. One thing I noticed is that it’s become a lot harder to get results at a high ROI. That is, it is hard to get those good results if you rely on the best practices that worked five years ago.

I also gave an interview to TULI where I spoke at length about work-life balance and greenwashing in marketing. And launched a weekly marketing newsletter to share my thoughts & experience.

For years, there have been so many small brands popping up, investing mostly in digital ads, and competing for social media users’ attention without being original or innovative. There is also so much more noise in general: more of everything (publications, news, films, TV series, products, and so on…). 

So how to survive in 2024 as a brand? How to maintain a positive marketing ROI? 

In 2024, marketers will keep shifting their efforts towards brand marketing instead of digital performance ads that have become up to 10x more expensive than back in 2020.

In parallel, new social media opportunities keep popping up like fungi after rain. 🍄

Keep reading to learn how to navigate the biggest marketing trends of 2024 and keep growing your user base and revenue.

1.  Gen Z social media is now a must-have

In 2023, all social media giants – Meta, TikTok, and YouTube – released plenty of new formats and features to boost brands’ sales and profits.

Most of these updates were not for the ad products but organic social platforms (and ways of driving purchases through organic engagement). Meta launched Threads, TikTok added an integration with Amazon – and these are just two examples out of tens of updates.

And the changes paid off: an increasing number of young consumers are changing their browsing and purchasing habits.

For example, 57% of Gen Z users say that they prefer to use TikTok as a search engine, not Google: the social media platform’s more relatable and personal.

In their 2024 trend report, TikTok predicts that there will be a shift towards greater brand-led social change and transparency. Users want to see brands living up to their words and promises. 

A fun example of this in 2023 was the Northface campaign on TikTok. 

Meta launched Threads in July 2023 and the platform has already 100 million monthly users. Brands have been slow to move to the platform. However, even if you’re not ready to commit to posting on Threads, it would be smart to register your brand’s presence there to secure a good user name and handle.

If you’re not in B2C marketing but B2B, a similar approach applies to LinkedIn marketing. There was a huge shift in 2023 towards audience-building on LinkedIn. However, note that you should not try to build your company’s LinkedIn account but your team’s accounts. That’s because personal LinkedIn accounts’ posts have a lot higher organic reach. 

And even on LinkedIn, the less-traditional formats like carousel posts and video perform the best. You cannot rely on static images and blog post shares anymore.

When it comes to new social media features, the fastest movers and first adopters will reap the highest benefits, growth, and profit. The same applies to reacting to daily trends and viral content.

When working in a small marketing team, committing hours each day on chasing social media trends might seem like a huge waste of time. To hack the system, follow brands with active social media teams and lots of viral content to keep your hand on the pulse.

Another thing you could do is outsource your social media content creation to people who do it daily and on a professional level: content creators.

Actionable takeaways:

1. Get serious about organic social media marketing. Test new formats on top platforms.
2. Find the best-performing social channel (Reels, TikTok, LinkedIn) and post new content 3x or more per week.
3. Create less social media content but with higher virality potential. Put more effort into scrappy videos over static posts.

2. Creator marketing & UGC keep growing

Not everyone is great at filming 5 video clips per day and one of them going viral. But some people really are. 

In 2024, influencer collaborations on social media are no longer about paying €€€ for a single post or promotion. 

Rather, the leading brands are securing long-term collaborations with content creators who become something in-between a brand ambassador and a freelance content-creating team member.

Long-term content collaborations work better for many reasons:

• Creators become familiar with your product and audience, and as they what content performs best, they create more of it.
• Creators have a long-term interest in delivering results to continue the collaboration.
• You only need to brief the creators once a month, not every time you hire another influencer.

There has also been a shift towards UGC-style ads in paid digital advertising. So many Meta ads now look like selfie videos, telling how “this product changed my life.” And they actually work. So here’s also a tip for paid ads: try UGC-style video ads.

Actionable takeaways:

1. If you haven’t already, sign 2-3 TikTok, YouTube, or Reels content creators to collaborate on video content for your brand.
2. Get serious about measuring your creator collaborations’ performance and creating clear and detailed briefs for these partners.
3. Test creating UGC-style videos for social media and ads in-house with your marketing team to build that increasingly critical creative skill in your own team.

3. The AI hype will calm down

If you had to sell chocolate chip cookies, you would not use a marketing slogan saying “These cookies are made of wheat.”

However, it doesn’t seem to be a problem for marketers and founders to say that the greatest benefit of their product is: “This product is built with AI.”

In the 2nd half of 2023, I heard many stories of startup founders who talked about creating a product with AI. What product? They didn’t know – it didn’t matter as long as there was AI. I found it funny every time I heard another founder telling me that. Of course, they were bound to fail, building an AI-using product for something that already functions without it.

But this doesn’t mean that all AI-powered innovations from 2023 and beyond are useless.

It’s all about finding the right balance. 

And, in my opinion, in 2024 this balance will shift towards less AI, not more AI. As we move into the next year, everyone has an AI hangover. Even the LinkedIn influencers who grew their audience on posting about Chat GPT hacks have fallen silent. People are full of AI hacks, and still doubtful of whether it actually helps them. 

Personally – and I think using AI is a highly personal choice – I do not use AI-powered tools for content ideation, writing, nor designing creatives. Even though Canva and especially Adobe have launched advanced AI design tools, I want to have more control over my designs.

As someone said: AI’s not going to take your job. But someone who knows how to use it will. I’ll add a caveat: Neither will someone who’s completely reliant on AI ever take your job.

The main selling proposition of AI tools is “Save time.” But for what are you exactly saving that time? For watching Netflix? For using another AI tool?

There are many bad tradeoffs in using AI-powered marketing tools in order to “save time” or “accelerate results” or “personalize marketing” or “optimize smarter.”  

• You may save time with AI-powered copywriting or design tools but the results are always worse than when done by a skilled human. You also have less control over output.
• Using AI, you lose in originality. You also lose a lot of control over what’s happening in the background, being unable to tell if you’re actually getting better results or not.

And, most importantly, I never use AI for ideation or writing. Why? For the simple reason that I do not want to outsource my capability to think with my own head.

I sometimes like to use Chat GPT to suggest rephrasing in some sentences I’ve already written. I also like to use it for official emails, recommendation letters, etc. so it tells me what the format should be. I always rewrite all the text provided by the AI to make it more creative, professional, and in my own style.

Actionable takeaways:

1. If you haven’t tried the popular AI-powered marketing tools yet, give them a go: Jasper AI, Grammarly, Canva, Chat GPT itself, Userbot, Howler, etc. 
2. See if the AI tools actually save you time and give original ideas. If yes, keep it going. If not, you’ll know this was all another hype cycle.
3. Ask yourself if you’re just using the AI tools out of sheer laziness or because of the hype. It might be convenient but will also hurt your own writing, thinking, and marketing skills.

4. Results & quality beat scalability

Between 2019-2022, most brands enjoyed fast-paced growth, often from digital strategies. And the easier it seemed to launch and grow new businesses on social media, the more there appeared.

However, already in 2023, I saw many marketers struggle with keeping up the high ROI at previous scale. The ad platforms simply did not deliver as well anymore: the price went up and the ROAS (return on ad spend) dropped.

The hangover period is going to persist for at least the first half of 2024: it will be continuously hard to grow with low effort and at a high scale.

However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t grow at all. My prediction for 2024 is that the marketing teams who work hard on high-quality campaigns will get the highest results.

Less is more, again. Instead of posting 5 times a week on social media and getting 0 engagement, craft 1-2 videos per week, but make sure they have the potential to get high reach and engagement. 

The shift in Bolt’s social media strategy is a good example of keeping up with the times: back in 2019, we used to do iPhone giveaways on social media. In 2024, giveaways are passé, now it’s about quality video content, brand building, and creator collaborations.

Even the brands that have historically relied on digital performance ads are turning towards brand campaigns. Nest Commerce’s analysis of their clients’ ad spend in 2023 showed a trend towards higher brand investment.

Instead of a bit of everything, make bold bets on high-quality brand campaigns and social media posts with virality potential.

No well-performing marketing campaigns come to life in a few hours. It takes time to come up with good ideas and make them happen. Therefore, create an annual and quarterly marketing plan that helps you stay on track.

Read more about seasonal marketing planning.

Last not least, the quality-originality-authority approach also applies to content marketing and SEO. Publishing blog artiles written by AI will not get you ranking on Google.

Google’s EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) framework gives priority to content coming from long-term experts on a subject, providing original information not available anywhere else (like other blogs).

Actionable takeaways:

1. In 2024, aim for quality over quantity, results over scale. It is alright to grow slightly slower if the alternative would be not growing at all.
2. Consider shifting resources from performance to brand building, and make sure your content and creatives are aligned with this change.
3. For the first time, try planning ahead for the entire year. Understand the seasonality in your business and invest more during high-demand periods.

5. Real sustainability over greenwashing

Consumers are increasingly interested in supporting socially responsible brands.

However, if back in 2022 you could get away with saying “We’ll plant one tree for each purchase,” in 2024 people will recognize this as greenwashing.

In fact, careless tree planting does more harm than good:

• Many service providers that offer tree planting do it poorly, planting monocultures. The planting of only one tree species overlooks the complex network of interactions present in the old-growth forest ecosystems. 
• Planting a tree does not undo the carbon footprint of the product you’ve purchased. It only makes you feel better about yourself.

The only green thing to do is to not purchase new products.

However, this is not how the world works. Even though I believe in degrowth, I realize that people need jobs.

So the least you can do in 2024 is to be genuine about your sustainability efforts. Instead of outsourcing tree-planting or buying carbon credits, think about how to actually improve your production pipeline, as well as the carbon footprint of product delivery.

From sustainable packaging to minimized returns and shipping in bulk, you can make your product lifecycle greener. Offer free product repairs, sell products that are made to last long in the first place – there is so much that can be improved.

I called this 2024 marketing trend “Genuine Green” because I see honesty as a key here. Do not talk about environmental topics or make social posts on World Environment Day if for the rest of the year, you’ve done nothing to live up to your words.

Good example: IKEA creating toys out of recycled plastic and launching a cute social media campaign about it.

Bad example: Dubai Electricity and Water Authority changing the color of its logo to green without any real shift towards sustainability.

When it comes to sustainability in marketing, actions speak louder than words.

As a marketer, it is part of your job to be critical of the brand messages you put out there. 

Question the slogans and campaign ideas suggested by agencies and people ranking above you. Keep your ethics and morals high, and demand that others do the same.

Actionable takeaways:

1. If you’re still doing tree-planting and other low-commitment greenwashing campaigns (like carbon offsetting) in marketing, stop it.
2. Look for meaningful ways to make your company or products more sustainable. Then do it. And only after it’s done, talk about it.
3. If your company is not willing to contribute to social responsibility, accept it and find another marketing angle.

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Et voilà! These were my predictions on 2024 marketing trends. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback. 

If you’d like to be notified about new blog articles and get actionable marketing tips, subscribe to my weekly (Friday) newsletter.

The post 2024 Marketing Trends & Predictions appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Questions by Siim, answers and translation by Karola.

Read the Estonian version in TULI’s blog.

Years ago, while interning at a PR agency, Karola spotted a book on content marketing on one of the office bookshelves. This instantly sparked her interest in digital marketing. Little did she know where this road might take her. 

Presently, Karola has become one of the best-known marketers in Estonia. She’s got over 10,000 followers on LinkedIn and a popular marketing blog (the one you’re reading right now). Behind are the long working days as the Head of Marketing at Bolt, Scoro, and MeetFrank. For the past few years, Karola has been freelancing for companies across the EU and the US.

When moving to Paris, France three years ago, Karola re-found her literary calling. It had always existed, since early childhood. In 2022, she published two short stories in the Estonian literary magazine Looming and was awarded the annual Debuting Writer Award by the magazine. Karola has also written book reviews for the cultural weekly Sirp and for Looming. Currently, she is working on her debut novel and beginning her MA studies at the Royal Holloway University of London. The MA course is not in Marketing – she’ll be studying Creative Writing.

P.S. If you’d like to sign up for a monthly newsletter on Karola’s London life and reading recommendations, go here (and wait for 2sec for the popup).

How does it work? The more you write, the less you want to work on marketing projects?

That’s how it tends to be but marketing continues to interest me as a subject. I don’t live with the illusion that writing could be a sufficient source of income, not in Estonia and especially not in Western Europe. While I dislike the word ‘hobby’, that’s the relationship I want to maintain with literature and writing – to keep it pure in a sense. I’m not forced to write or publish anything unless I want to. If writing were to become my day job, it would soon become repulsive.

I once calculated the hourly pay of writing for an Estonian publication. Sometimes it is 50x lower than the marketing salary, sometimes 10x lower. It is a sad reality as for many talented people writing actually is the main source of income. Some newspapers and weeklies pay their collaborators incredibly low fees and, on a few occasions, I have declined their invitation to contribute a piece. That would mean feeding a system that doesn’t treat people fairly.

What is it about marketing that attracts you?

I like the psychological side to it. It’s a bit like a game. You build a world and then stand back and see whether it works. As I launched my personal marketing blog, I was thrilled to write on a variety of subjects, SEO-optimize the articles, and watch my blog grow to 100,000 monthly organic readers. It’s like playing a computer game where you can steer the outcome.

Were you at the right place at the right time? Back then, there were much fewer marketing blogs.

The blogs were there but as in many other industries, the problem arises when blog articles are written by content marketers without any actual industry experience. These copywriters aren’t practitioners but look for information in other blogs; they collect and compile the existing information but do not add anything new or of practical value.

A practitioner myself, I wrote about the tips and guidelines that were actually relevant. I happened to make it in a more logical and detailed manner than other blogs. My articles got published by many big-name marketing blogs in the US (Entrepreneur, AdEspresso, CMI, Social Media Examiner) as they were more insightful than those written by some random copywriter.

To speak of LinkedIn in for a second, I am often put off by – and this is done by a lot of Estonian marketers – people who rewrite some viral posts and fail to add anything new to the topic. I always try to share observations and ideas of my own. I won’t go commenting on the Barbie movie when it’s already been done a million times. There is a symptomatic lack of originality in Estonian (but not only) marketers’ personal brands.

I still hold the opinion that even in 2023 – especially now when so much content is created by AI – it isn’t all that difficult to succeed with a blog or on LinkedIn. But the quality has to be exceptionally high, there also has to be originality. You’ve got to have a personal opinion, an angle, and you have to do proper marketing for your content. It all takes a lot of time. It’s not the case of spending a few hours every week, rather you’ll be working on it 20h/week.

You have always been interested in literature. How did you arrive at writing?

When I left my job at Bolt, I fell into a deep identity crisis. I realized I didn’t want to dedicate my whole life to working 10-12h per day; getting old, dying without making anything meaningful with my one and only life. This raised the question: so what should I do? We’re living on a planet that wilts with every minute as climate change progresses. Should I go and work for Greenpeace? Should I so to say sacrifice myself and make something truly good?

I know there is not that level of altruism in me. Literature seemed like the right path forward: I’ve always been attracted to it, it’s occupied with the soul rather than the material; it doesn’t create new waste into the world but explores that which is human about us. I am interested in climate change as a topic, especially the question: how to live in this world as a human being while knowing that every day that you live and consume and breathe, you are destroying the very planet you’re living on. 

Fiction, and literature in general, holds the potential to analyze things more broadly, to see a problem from multiple angles. It doesn’t tell you what’s the one right answer but helps, in an abstract way, to look for those answers; it invites you to think along. Half a year ago or so, I began to dabble with my very first novel and it’s a hundred – ok, perhaps a million or billion or trillion – times harder than any marketing project I’ve ever worked on.

When I moved to Paris, I began reading more fiction and made my first attempts at writing. I read voraciously, learned and learned and learned. Only after two years did I feel daring enough to write one tiny short story. I am still haunted by the question of whether I’m ready. One could keep studying literature and writing forever. In marketing, there comes a point where you feel that you’ve hit the ceiling, that now it’s become boring. But literature is endless like the ocean: you swim, and you swim some more, and there might be some small island along the way but you’ll never reach the continent. 

There is also a beauty to writing on an everyday human level. Instead of messaging or sending pictures via social media to my grandparents, I write them letters. This means of communication feels a lot more meaningful and caring. Sometimes, I think that perhaps my grandparents have forgiven me for living abroad because I’m being cute and sending them all those letters. 

Is the environment a subject that marketing actually deals with?

I am highly cynical about this one. Just recently I heard an advertisement that told people to bring their old teflon pans to the store so they can get the new one cheaper and this is the greenest deal in the world. It is often sickening to realize how ignorant such messages are and how mindless it is to believe that buying a new frying pan can in any way be good for the planet.

Recently, someone shared on Instagram how they bought a new kitchen device for filtering water. The new machine has an iron filter instead of a plastic one so now they will never have to use plastic again. Had they thought about the ecological footprint of producing and transporting this new machine, they might as well have used the old plastic device forever.

In a similar way, it isn’t green to buy a new electric vehicle when the old car still drives. The electric car has to be produced and transported, the ecological footprint of electric batteries is very high. It’s hypocritical to tell people to buy ‘green’ as buying a new item is never green. What’s green is not buying.

Sometimes, I have told my clients not to launch another campaign where they plant a tree for each purchase. Because it’s plain greenwashing. This kind of tree planting isn’t green. These trees are not going to grow old and sequester carbon and even, if by some miracle they will, a single tree isn’t going to save the world. I have pushed back on quite a few greenwashing campaigns, shared some scientific articles with my clients, and explained the bigger picture.

Speaking of clients, I am offered a lot of potential projects but it’s not always easy to find the few I am willing to accept. I refuse all gibberish products and fast fashion, also food industry projects. Gambling and crypto are also a no-go. What I find acceptable are projects related to tech products, culture and education, as well as some medical and financial products. I also resist marketing any lifestyle products as I think most of these shouldn’t even exist in this world (laughs – ed.).

Last year, I was offered to join as a marketer in a project where they built an e-commerce algorithm that turns the search function more efficient and makes people buy more. The end goal was to sell the product to Amazon. I would have been given some shares in the company and, possibly, made a lot of money, but I found it deeply immoral to spend time on making people buy more things that they do not actually need. Add to this the fact that someone is building a product with the sole goal of selling it to Amazon and getting rich. 

On the other hand, I do realize that not all marketers have the luxury to choose which projects to accept, which ones to decline. I do not hold it against anyone if they do marketing for brands that are unethical in my book. Life requires compromise, sometimes we need to find a middle ground.

Aren’t you running out of products to market? Tech and digital projects also have a big ecological footprint.

Indeed, but there are many interesting recycling and re-using platforms, projects related to education and culture. Whenever possible, I try to buy things second-hand. And digital products still have a much smaller carbon footprint, however, it’s not non-existent. 

When was the last time you bought something new?

Very recently! I bought some film for my camera. Of course, I do slip sometimes and buy clothing and other stuff that I don’t really need. It is hard to resist at all times, especially when it comes to aesthetic preferences. I always feel guilty but nonetheless buy the thing. As a marketer, however, I prefer not to pour any more oil into the fire of increasing consumption; I am already part of the system as a consumer.

I suppose many readers would like to know how you manage to work for one half of the year and then take the other half off?

I’ve been incredibly lucky to have found the projects that allow me to work and live this way. For five years, marketing and blogging was all I lived for. Back then, it was super interesting for me and it still pays off, although my blog has fallen victim to neglect (laughs – ed.).

This year, I’ll end up having ca eight months of marketing work, not six. At one point, I was working on four projects at once, spending 60h/week behind the laptop screen. It’s just a highly concentrated effort. In a way, I still work full-time but it is simply more condensed and allows me to take a few months off.

You were living in Paris as a freelancer. This sounds like a dream for many people. Was this life how you imagined it?

It was a strange life. I was living on my own and during COVID, the lack of human contact was psychologically straining. On the other hand, I enjoyed working from home – I’m more efficient this way and can move in my own rhythm.

Was this how I imagined it? It was idyllic for sure. After a day of work, I went on a walk in the parks and by the riverside, eventually found friends, learnt to speak more fluent French. I had bars and cafes and boulangeries where people already recognized me and sent a Salut! my way from behind the counter. It was all very agreeable but, well, it was nonetheless a life where you’d have to work all day long. You can’t just go and walk around Paris all day eating croissants.

You’ve been working with both Estonian and foreign companies. Is it in any way different?

I was recently working for a client operating in Luxembourg, London, and Spain while expanding to New York. I admired the level of professionalism in the team’s communication, it was both polite and considerate. Even on Slack, people wrote in an organized way and only when they had a good reason for writing. The quality of meetings and presentations was top-notch. And this kind of environment makes you put in more effort, too.

International brands have a higher willingness to invest in marketing and develop large-scale campaigns. They’re not afraid of launching an outdoor campaign that costs half a million euros, or a million. Because they know that it will actually work. On the other hand, Estonian brands believe they can expand to New York by running Facebook ads for €10,000 and seeing how the market reacts. It will not react. Even a campaign that costs €500,000 and covers every 10th subway car in New York might not launch the market.

Estonian entrepreneurs are under the impression that as it was easy to launch in the Estonian market and make some profit there, it is just as easy to launch in any other market. Just run a bit of Facebook ads and done. A long time ago when Facebook ads were actually cheap, this could actually work, but it’s become a lot harder these days.

I’ve seen an Estonian brand expanding to a nearby country and for six months, they spend a low budget on Meta and Google ads. And it’s not going to work. If they spent the same budget in a single month, on one strategic multichannel marketing campaign, they’d achieve a much higher brand recognition. In the end, this one-month campaign would be a much more efficient way to spend the budget.

Another issue I see in Estonia and elsewhere is that the company’s management fails to give relevant input to all teams and employees. There are good and bad CEOs. A good leader knows where their company is headed, they’ve got a clear vision. A good leader knows that X budget or X runway allows the company to grow to Y and makes their team work towards that goal. And then there’s the opposite type of leader that tells “let’s try something and see where it takes us.” In the second type of companies, it is highly stressful to achieve any marketing results. You simply don’t know what to do. Each week, there’s some new idea and everything needs to be reworked, rebuilt from scratch. And none of the ideas and hypotheses are ever properly tested.

Prior to accepting to work with a company, I want to hear from the CEO their expectations to the marketing team. How else should I know where to focus and which goals to set for my team? Numbers are a critically important motivation for any team. Occasionally, when the product is truly good, I still accept the project and will create the company’s growth goals on my own.

However, this “let’s just try” attitude is not going to take you far. Results have to be thought through and strategy should stem from those high-level goals. Building a strong brand message takes months, sometimes years. You just can’t try a new one every few weeks.

I’s like to encourage other marketing leads and practitioners to keep pushing the company’s leadership to spell out what numbers they want to see. If a leader doesn’t know what they want, perhaps then they’re not a very good leader. The CEO might be a great product lead but if they’re incapable of thinking about growth and numbers, it can be disorientating and stressful for the rest of the team.

Let’s speak about literature marketing as well. How to get more young people to read, how to popularize literature? With literary magazines, the problem seems to be that although they’re state-funded, there isn’t any budget for marketing.

Certainly, all the literary magazines lack money. Seen from the state’s perspective, I don’t know… just organize one less sports competition and give that money to some magazine so that they can afford proper marketing (smirks – ed.).

Tiit Hennoste recently wrote in Sirp how in the 1960s, the budget for a single issue of Looming magazine equaled 35 average salaries. Right now, the magazine’s monthly budget is 3.5x the average salary. There is a lot of talk about valuing and preserving the Estonian language but, ironically, the Estonian language was in fact more valued during the Soviet times.  

Surely there should be a marketer working for each cultural magazine but there isn’t any budget for this. Värske Rõhk (a monthly Estonian literary magazine publishing younger authors) is fairly active on social media but I assume that it’s one of their editors doing the marketing on top of their actual job. The same with Müürileht (another monthly magazine) – for them, strong social media marketing has been one of the keys to building a large readership.

Naturally, you also need good content. Marketing isn’t just about posting, posting, posting. You need people to talk about your magazine, you need to get people excited about the articles. The quality needs to be extremely high.

In large countries, every author has an agent who finds interview and speaking gig opportunities, and maintains the writer’s website. On top, there’s the publisher that does all the marketing for authors and their books.

Do any Estonian writers have websites? Not that I know of. I do but I designed it myself, hired a developer, and had it set up. I myself design all of my blog’s visuals, write and post the articles, and do the marketing and analysis part. The actual writing of texts takes maybe half of the time required to maintain a blog. No wonder writers don’t have time or skills for all this.

In the Anglophone literary industry, all authors have a personal website, they’re on Twitter and on Instagram. I have looked for some well-known Estonian authors on Instagram. Nada. No profiles. I’m not saying that it’s the writer’s job to have a social media presence but it could be something that their publisher does. Of course, the publishers don’t have any money, either. The Estonian literary scene is very small, including print runs and sales. 

Yup. The timidity is interesting in the sense that the world is headed toward everyone’s life and profile being public, everyone has to build a personal brand.

I began to think about the term ‘personal brand’ and its meaning. What is it? In a way, the term signifies the productization of a human being. A living person is turned into a product that others can consume. What a sick concept, huh? Bring to mind how people speak about ecosystem services. A chanterelle grows in a forest and it’s nature’s service. A terrible discourse.

Recently, I have grown more sensitive to the language used in advertisements. I am constantly bothered by slogans that, were you to think about it for even a second, you realize are utterly idiotic. Ülemiste Keskus, a big shopping mall, advertised with the slogan “Everything you’ve ever dreamed of.”

I should like to hope that nobody’s dreams are on sale in a shopping mall. This is borderline insulting to the readers of the slogan and the store’s visitors. To say that all you can dream of is laid out in a random Estonian shopping center.

So you walk the street and think what the hell?

I think that it’s sad that nothing more meaningful is done. It’s basically insulting – above all, insulting to the brand that signed off on the campaign. Instead of shouting silly marketing slogans, people could think about the meaning of their words. Advertising language has become awfully sloppy and blatant. Marketers should give each word and sentence a little more thought.

Is there anything else that marketers could do better? Are there any trends to watch out for? 

It depends on the marketer’s role. When it comes to brand messaging, marketers should avoid overused slogans and use their own heads to think. There could be fewer social media posts, fewer campaigns, less noise. Try to really think about the brand and what you want to say, focus on organic marketing, on word of mouth. There’s no point in creating marketing campaigns that speak to no one, just for the sake of creating something.

For instance, let’s take the company blogs. Marketers and agencies create a ton of content for those but if you start to think why anyone should want to read it, well, you don’t really know why.  On social media, there is also an overload of meaningless posts, without any meaning or soul. You might as well leave that stuff unpublished or perhaps hire someone else (laughs – ed.).

I have this feeling that marketing is headed towards further brand-building. You can’t anymore rely on just Google and Meta ads, it’s become very expensive. I see many companies switching from paid advertising to organic social media. However, the latter is also often paid as you need to pay the content creators. 

Marketers should learn how to work with TikTok and how to hire influencers to create content that can later be used as ads. And it’s about time to master the art of Instagram Reels. Both of these trends can be difficult to stay on top of. You’ve got to break your comfort zone and learn new skills all the time.

Above all, collaborating with content creators and cross-posting on Instagram and TikTok are the two things worth testing right now. There’s also a lot of talk about AI but I’m not a fan.

Why? I didn’t ask about AI as I figured that there isn’t much new to say about it, anyhow. But perhaps you do?

AI tools can be helpful when creating visuals and that’s worth looking into it. When it comes to writing marketing copy, I wouldn’t ever use it myself. Texts written by AI bots, without any original add-ons, won’t even get you ranking in Google search.

Indeed, AI can be used to compile drafts or to collect talking points. But I wouldn’t go any further than that. You’ll lose originality as another hundred marketers have used the same AI for the same kind of text. And anyhow… If we, as humans, delegate the last of our capacity to think to AI, will there be anything human left in us?

Coming back to marketing trends, it is also worth mentioning that there’s been rapid economic growth for the past 10+ years. It was possible to successfully launch lifestyle products like sustainable toothpaste, there are a million small fashion brands now. Competition has reached an unprecedented height and as the economy begins to cool down, so will those small brands fail.

What might help is focusing on a specific niche and building a strong brand, a loyal audience. Instead of focusing on growth right now, companies should look into loyalty programs and community-building. Not so far in the future, there simply won’t be enough room in the market for everyone to stay.

So the relationship has to be more meaningful than just brand and consumer?

That’s it. And more than the simple fact that you sell your product cheaper than a competitor. You’ve got to have a high-quality product and a clear product-market fit. But even that won’t be enough: you also need a strong brand that attracts and engages people.

What I’m hearing is that often the problem isn’t bad marketing but there are many average products that are hard to sell?

Yes. One of the reasons why I reject new projects is that there isn’t yet a proven product-market fit. I decline a project because I know I wouldn’t be able to market and sell the product.

Marketing won’t save a bad product but it can certainly help to bankrupt you faster (laughs –ed.).

Autor: Siim Kera, TULI

The post Interview: Karola Karlson x TULI appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

But it wasn’t just due to the Godardesque SMS* sent by the planet that turned literature into a handy medium of escapism. Writing this article has been obstructed by the fact that all the books & magazines I read from January to August are packed away in cardboard boxes, 2573km away from where I dwell now – Paris. 

Moving to the new city (that was soon quarantined) redefined the weekends. Instead of routine social gatherings that set a stamp of tiredness on the two following days, I would spend most of my free time on reading – novels, essays, literary magazines (The New York Review of Books now arrived to my mailbox routinely, contrary to its (non)delivery in Estonia). The geeky confined lifestyle turned out to be more enjoyable that I’d expected, it also explains why bookstores are reporting a record year.

Against the popular belief, I think the world would be a better place if people would read & think more, Netflix & business less. And no opportunity to try and lure more people to read should go wasted. So here they are, my reading recommendations from 2020.

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*The reference to Godard’s SMS originates from a recorded interview of his, befitting of year 2020.

“Do you know what SMS means? You send them all day long and you don’t know what it means. “Short Message” and what then? No no… I know what it means. It means “Save My Soul.” People they send the SMS like we used to send the SOS because they are all alone, they want to be with someone. That’s what in means, “Save My Soul.””

2020 reading list

The below list features most of the books I read in 2020, with a few missing casualties caused by lacking memory. There were many that I could indefinitely go on raving about, and others that didn’t speak to me as profoundly – either because of the subject matter or due to the cadence and articulation that the author used for self-expression.

In some cases, my reaction to a book was shaded either by the high expectations from reading the same author’s other works or just not being in the mood for a particular style or form. The lists’ order is random, a mishmash of fiction and non-fiction; essays, novels, and poetry. A note to self for 2021: limit reading the 20th century canon of American authors, and look up more European and Eastern literature.

Fave & deeply moving:
Coventry (2019) by Rachel Cusk [link], Decreation (2005) by Anne Carson [link], The Art of the Novel (2003) by Milan Kundera [link], Democracy (1984) [link], Salvador (1982) [link], The White Album (1979) [link] by Joan Didion, Intimations: Six Essays (2020) [link] & Feel Free: Essays (2019) [link] by  Zadie Smith, Essayism (2017) by Brian Dillon [link], The Years (2018) by Annie Ernaux [link], Walks with Men (2010) by Ann Beattie [link], The Sea, The Sea (1978) by Iris Murdoch [link], The Whole Story and Other Stories (2004) by Ali Smith [link], Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 (2019) by Peter Schjeldahl [link], Chairs (1952) by Eugene Ionesco [link], Sculptor’s Daughter (1968) [link] & Fair Play (1989) [link] by Tove Jansson, The Paris Review Interviews, I (2006) by The Paris Review [link]

4 out of 5 points:
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (2020)  [link] & The Lonely City (2016) [link] by Olivia Laing, The Poetics of Space (1958) by Gaston Bachelard [link], The Joke (1994) by Milan Kundera [link], Miami [link] (1987) by Joan Didion, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord [link], The Rings of Saturn (1995) by W. G. Sebald [link], Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2020) by Jia Tolentino [link], The Pond (2015) by Claire-Louise Bennett [link], The New Yorker Stories (2011) by Ann Beattie [link], Confabulations (2016) by John Berger [link], The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously (2017) by Slavoj Žižek [link], This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2015) by Naomi Klein [link], An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1974) by [link] & Things: A Story of the Sixties and a Man Asleep (1965) [link] by Georges Perec

No chemistry:
Dept. of Speculation (2014) by Jenny Offill [link], In the Dark Room (2019) by Brian Dillon [link], Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951) Theodor Adorno [link], Late Writings (2007) by Clement Greenberg [link], Mythologies (1957)  [link] & A Lover’s Discourse : Fragments (1977) [link] by Roland Barthes, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1975) by William H. Gass [link], Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013) by Deborah Levy [link]

Reading through 2020

The one author whose works’ overarching mood feel most suitable to the year 2020 is Joan Didion. Didion with her calculated and artful reportage on the politics and zeitgeist of the Americas in the 70s through to 90s. 

But to start from the very beginning of 2020, my January days passed with Kundera’s brilliant non-fiction, The Art of the Novel (1986), and Peter Schjeldahl’s art criticism, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 (2019), which itself turned out to be an artwork molded into literary cast. A few weeks before Covid hit, while on vacation in Paris, I stumbled upon Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), and it occupied a spot on my side table for the next 4 months from where it was occasionally lifted up and read. It was followed by Zadie Smith and Jia Tolentino essay collections, both acute reflections of our modern society and its spectacles, if only a bit skewed towards posing questions relevant to well-off Western metropolitans.

Late spring, to complement the quarantine depression, I read a book on climate crisis by Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2015). As much as I admire Klein’s knack for anticapitalist subjects and her work as a researcher – she reads up on her subject for years before writing a book – the proposed solution to climate crisis (native people demanding historic rights to their land, thereby stopping the oil industry’s expansion) felt all but naive and sugar-coated for a comfortably well-off Western reader. If Klein had pondered on the issue for longer, she may have concluded that the demand for the dirty oil starts from consumer choices, and had thereby suggested to her readers to plainly consume less. I also looked up some classics such as Mythologies (1957) and A Lover’s Discourse : Fragments (1977) by Roland Barthes. The prevailing quarantine-age mood may be to blame, but both books read as a pretentious and outdated meditation on subjects that many contemporary, and especially female, writers have illustrated more convincingly.

Early summer, I switched to lighter reading, taking on my solo trip to Helsinki a couple of Tove Jansson’s books: her autobiographical short story collection Sculptor’s Daughter (1968) and the novel Fair Play (1989), also autobiographical, which depicts the relationship between two female artists, living at opposite ends of an apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic. Jansson’s short stories offered a nostalgic lookback into childhood, with our family on boat trips on Finnish lakes and exploring the forest paths, acutely experiencing the animal and plant life around me. The Sea, The Sea (1978) by Iris Murdoch was a shamelessly amusing novel to read, a modern-day Netflix show with all its unforeseeable turns and a pace that refused to slow down right until the end. Murdoch’s book was also entertainingly British with its egomaniacal protagonist, a retired actor and theater director Charles Arrowby, voicing Latin aphorisms and cooking eccentric dishes such as an egg poached in hot scrambled egg. (Iris Murdoch explained the critics of her enlisted meals in the book: “But me and John eat like this all the time.”) As a review in The Guardian put it, Murdoch wrote novels of ideas about love, as well as the occasional love letter to ideas. 

Reading the collection of interviews with 20th century writers and poets The Paris Review Interviews, I (2006) felt like binge eating literary popcorn. Each interview was brimming with references to fellow authors, and I finished the book with a list with 50 additional books to read, each feeling urgently major. This also made me complicit in what the British author Rebecca West may have had in mind when she claimed in her own Paris Review interview: “People have no desire to read anything new…. They don’t even look onto the past. They look onto the certified past.” But, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, there is entirely too much good literature around, and something must be done to stop it. The only possible way to deal with this seemed to find and read all those books.

I read most of my 2020 canon while in Paris, first in the lush fern-laden oasis in the midst of Jardin de Tuileries, then confined in my apartment in Paris 3rd. During this period, I grew more interested in exploring what a friend called “writers’ writers” – authors whose works carry a substantial essence while also being admirable for their form and phrasing. Reviewing my reading notes and Goodreads’ “Read” list, I detect an inclination towards female writers and literary forms more stylized (William H. Gass, Ali Smith, Rachel Cusk, even Annie Ernaux) and at times eccentric (Anne Carson, Brian Dillon, Claire-Louise Bennett) than the traditional novel: essays, short stories, interviews, reportage, poetry.  As most of these books are still effectively in my mind, I expanded on a selection of them below.

One contemporary author I like to return to is Zadie Smith. I’m a longtime reader of Smith, her White Teeth (2000) being a landmark novel of my early 20s. This year, I read her short essay collection on Covid19-induced changes Intimations: Six Essays (2020) and Feel Free: Essays (2019) which I’d recommend to anyone looking for intellectual yet humorous reportage on our modern society. Pondering on similar subjects was also The New Yorker reporter Jia Tolentino’s book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2020), yet the essays fell short due to their lack of cultural and socio historical context, making the book’s subjects ephemeral, something that I suspect will not happen to Zadie Smith’s or Susan Sontag’s writing. Tolentino’s was nonetheless a blissful and entertaining book, you can check out the opening essay here.

Another essayist I read, this one writing mostly art criticism (for Frieze), was Olivia Laing. Her 2020 collection Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency was an intelligent excursion into the lives of artists and literary figures such as David Wojnarowicz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Agnes Martin, Joseph Cornell, Derek Jarman and Hilary Mantel. Laing’s other book, The Lonely City, written four years earlier, also relied on art as a medium for exploring the loneliness of metropolises (enter the works of Edward Hopper).

Strolling in the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, I spotted The Rings of Saturn (1995) by W. G. Sebald, an author revered by many of my friends, in a bookstore and gave it a read. I can’t say that I disliked its quasi-philosophical meandering from one 19th century curiosity to another (consider the history of silkworm farming, or herring fishing, or Rembrandt’s paintings), but the style was not what I was currently interested in. 

In November, the anti-capitalist stars aligned and I happened to watch Godard’s Masculin Feminin (1966) while reading Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951) and Perec’s Things (1965), each a meditation on and a disapproval of consumerist society. Together with Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Ernaux’s The Years (2018), these works made me wonder how intellectuals were criticizing capitalism already 60 years ago and regardless, it has steadily advanced, both for better and worse. Ignorance is bliss, and one probably shouldn’t read these books unless willing to feel discomfort for daily lifestyle choices.

During my last weeks in Paris, I rediscovered the short story collection The Whole Story and Other Stories (2004) by Ali Smith, the writer that seems to have a whole lot of fun writing her books that are a treasure trove of puns and playful use of form. I recently heard someone asking why Smith is so “unfriendly towards her readers,” the question implying that her books are unnecessarily literary and difficult to follow along. I’d object and ask “what kind of reader?” as it is exactly for this unapologetically whimsical style that I appreciate Smith’s writing the most. Here’s Ali Smith in her The Paris Review interview: 

“Puns were originally sacred. If you look back at the beginning of the writing down of language, in sacred rites, puns are everywhere. Ritualists in religions used puns to mark the important, the holy, or the sacred places in the ceremony. A pun heralds or marks the point at which transformation takes place, where a magic thing happens.”

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“We carry with us all the people who have made us and the people we make and the lives we make, and the world we make continues on from what we make of it.“

2020 Fave short fiction & longform essays

An even more random list of short stories, interviews, and essays that caught my attention, skewed towards works published in the past three months + what’s available online.

Short stories: 

Color and Light by Sally Rooney, link
A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Winged Thing by Patricia Lockwood, link
1 = 1 by Anne Carson, link 

Essays & reportage:

What Have We Done to the Whale? by Amia Srinivasan (New Yorker), link
Between Light and Storm by Esther Woolfson (Granta), link
The World Brain by Mark Alizart (Purple Magazine), link
The World Brain by Mark Alizart (Purple Magazine), link
Plants Know by Emannuele Coccia (Purple Magazine), link
The Secret Lives of Fungi by Hua Hsu (New Yorker), link
The Oldest Forest by Lucy Jakub (The New York Review of Books), link
My Three Fathers by Ann Patchett (New Yorker), link
Cooking with Iris Murdoch by Valerie Stivers (The Paris Review), link
How Leonora Carrington Feminized Surrealism (New Yorker), link
Eileen Gray’s Infinite Possibilities by Martin Filler (The New York Review of Books), link

Thoughts on + clippings from 2020 favourite books

While every single book in the “Fave” list above left its undeniable mark, some were especially consequential. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t recommend the below-listed books to everyone, especially to readers who are into literature with a consistent narrative and little patience for literary flâneurs. Of these authors, Rachel Cusk Annie Ernaux, and Tove Jannson are the least eccentric yet no less moving authors.

Coventry (2019) by Rachel Cusk

“Every so ofter, for offenced actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Conventry. I don’t know what the origins of the expression are, though I suppose I could easily find out.“ 

Playful self-aware irony is the trademark of Rachel Cusk’ writing, one that can divide readers into two groups: acolytes and critics. While her writing style is radically pragmatic, the borderline cynicism is recurrently asking for remittal via an occasional display of vulnerability. The statements of Cusk’s essays sprout from a delicate exploration of human nature and relationships, topics varying from driving a car, making a home to contemplating a divorce.

As a collection, Coventry can affect one as the ultimate empathy-builder, all the while distancing the reader from the author. Going through the essays, it is difficult not to start questioning Cusk’s arguably selfish ways of life and the effects her choices have had on others, especially the close family. Contemplating about Coventry reminded me of Joan Didion’s essay on self-respect. Didion wrote that “character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.” It is Cusk’s acceptance of her choices that makes her writing agreeable and enchantingly reflective.

Naturally, the best person to propose the most apt explanation of her subjective writing style would be Cusk herself. Here’s a passage from her interview with The Paris Review:

“But yes, it’s an ethical situation. I think I could hew that close to the line in a sustained way because I had studied and questioned the ethics of human interaction so intensely in my own life. My lack of ego, of subjective self-regard, has been very useful in that way, even if it’s made experience more painful than it perhaps ought to have been. But it meant I could use myself dispassionately as an example. It gave me a chance to find what was universal in the particular circumstances I had in front of me.”

Passage from Cusk’s essay Coventry via Granta:

“Stories only work – or so we’re always being told – through the suspension of our disbelief. It’s never been altogether clear to me whether our disbelief is something that ought to be suspended for us, or whether we’re expected deliberately to suspend it ourselves. There’s an idea that a successful narrative is one that gives you no choice in the matter; but mostly I imagine it’s a question of both sides conspiring to keep the suspension aloft.”

Passage from Making House via The New York Times:

“The house a woman creates is a Utopia,” wrote Marguerite Duras. “She can’t help it — can’t help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.” The domestic, in other words, is ultimately more concerned with seeming than with being: It is a place where personal ideals are externalized or personal failures made visible. These ideals, as well as the forms of failure they create, are ever-changing: The “search for happiness” is a kinetic state, and it follows that the most seductive of all the illusions of homemaking would be the illusion of permanence”

Democracy (1984) and Salvador (1982) by Joan Didion

Recently, everyone I discuss books with seems to have looked up Joan Didion, a writer already venerated in her contemporary literary and journalistic circles. And she’s in vogue still – The New Yorker recently published an essay-long ode by Brian Dillon on a single image caption that Didion wrote for Vogue when working there in the 1960s. The latest New York Review of Books featured its own tribute, written by Hilton Als who had found adept words to describe Didion’s writing: “… there’s an energy to her writing—what she might call its “shimmer”—that goes beyond a given piece’s surface story, and that sheds an awful and beautiful light on a world we half see but don’t want to see, one in which potential harm is a given and hope is a flimsy defense against dread. Didion’s ethos is a way of seeing what’s particular to the world that made her, and that ultimately reveals the writer to herself.”

Didion was a prolific writer in a multiplicity of forms, from magazine articles to movie scripts, personal essays to political reporting, a novel now and then. The Didion I enjoy reading most is her magazine writing from the 1980s. The “prolonged amnesiac fugue” that she writes about in her calculated reportage of contemporary American politics is hauntingly fitting to 2020.

I revisited Didion’s Democracy (1984), one of my favorite works of fiction for its distantly objective writing that’s yet acutely emotional, both for its nation and characters. I also discovered that Didion’s reportage slash literary essays Miami (1987) and Salvador (1982) were both initially published as 3-article series for The New York Review of Books and read both together with her other essays, many of which were published in the collection named The White Album (1979).

This passage from Miami seemed like a good example of Didion’s writing: 

“…words from a language in which deniability was built into the grammar, and as such may or may not have had a different meaning, or any meaning, in 1963 in Miami, where deniability had become in many ways the very opposite of the point.”

If you’re interested in reading something by Didion, start with her books Democracy (1995) or The White Album (1979). Or look up the essays Hollywood: Having Fun about 1970s film industry, and New York: Sentimental Journeys on the Central Park jogger case.

Here’s the beginning of Didion’s reportage on the LA scene:

““You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”

—Cecelia Brady in The Last Tycoon

To the extent that The Last Tycoon is “about” Hollywood it is about not Monroe Stahr but Cecelia Brady, as anyone who understands the equation of pictures even dimly or in flashes would apprehend immediately: the Monroe Stahrs come and go, but the Cecelia Bradys are the second generation, the survivors, the inheritors of a community as intricate, rigid, and deceptive in its mores as any devised on this continent. At midwinter in the survivors’ big houses off Benedict Canyon the fireplaces blaze all day with scrub oak and eucalyptus, the French windows are opened wide to the subtropical sun, the rooms filled with white phalaenopsis and cymbidium orchids and needlepoint rugs and the requisite scent of Rigaud candles. Dinner guests pick with vermeil forks at broiled fish and limestone lettuce vinaigrette, decline dessert, adjourn to the screening room, and settle down to The Heartbreak Kid with a little seltzer in a Baccarat glass.”

Essayism (2017) by Brian Dillon

If one is able to surpass the notion that Brian Dillon’s writing mimics the very authors he is writing about, Essayism can offer a rich literary feast. The book’s impracticality is also its charm. Regardless of its few shortcomings, at least in my opinion, such as melancholy divergences into the storyline of Dillon’s personal depression, the book is a constellation of essayistic and highly articulate writers and their works. 

Dillon introduces the reader to the etymology of the word essay: essayer dates from the 12th century, derived from the Latin base exagium, meaning a scale. An essay is an act of weighing something outside of itself, a weighed consideration, control. Essayism amounts to nothing less than a considerate and controlled attempt to write a tribute to Dillon’s most revered authors. It was also the book I left with the most underlined, scribbled and jotted down pages.

The authors mentioned include Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Theodor W. Adorno, William H. Gass, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, Jacques Derrida, Elisabeth Hardwick, Cyril Connolly, Emil Cioran, Susan Sontag, W. G. Sebald. The list is incomplete.

Here’s the 1st sentence (also the 1st paragraph, the 1st page, and a good part of the 1st chapter) of the book:

“On essays and essayists. On the death of a moth, humiliation, the Hoover dam and how to write; an inventory of objects on the author’s desk, and an account on wearing spectacles, which he does not; what another learned about himself the day he fell unconscious from his horse; of noses, of cannibals, of method; diverse meanings of the word ‘lumber’; many vignettes, published over decades, in which the writer, or her elegant stand-in, described her condition of dislocation in the city, and did it so blithely that no one guessed it was all true; a dissertation on roast pig; a heap of language; a tour of the monuments; a magazine article that in tone and structure so nearly resembles its object, or conceals it, that flummoxed readers depart in droves; a sentence you could whisper in the ear of a dying man; an essay upon essays; on the author’s brief and oblique friendship with the great jazz singer; a treatise on melancholy, also on everything else; a species of drift and dissolve, at the levels of logic and language, that time and again required the reader to page back in wonder – how did we get from there to here? – before the writer’s skill (or perhaps his inattention); a sermon on …”

As a Joan Didion fan, I also logged Dillon’s musings on her reportage.

“… Let’s join Joan Didion in 1967 at the Hoover Dam, in a scene of ominous calm that I have read and reread and whose consoling power I cannot explain. Or rather here is Didion three years later, in her Essay ‘At the Dam’ in which she tells us that since her visit there the dam has never been entirely absent from her imagination, though she cannot quite tell why. In the middle of a conversation in New York or Los Angeles, the dam will come to her mind, ‘its pristine conclave face gleaming white against the harsh rusts and taupes and mauves that rock canyon hundreds or thousands miles from where I am.’ Aspects of the dam loom to mind: roaring generators, ominous intakes and outlets for the water that powers them, bronze sculptures that recall the optimism of 1930s, power cables snaking away into the landscape, the seeming emptiness of the place, cranes moving above her ‘as if under their own volition.’ Neither the dam’s history nor the power (with transparent sexual overtones’) embodied there will explain why the structure lives in her mind almost daily. “There was something beyond all that, something beyond energy, beyond history, something I could not fix in my mind.” Then she recalls the star map incised in marble which, her guide told her, was carved to inform future visitors, long past human habitation, about the date of he dam’s construction.

“Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.”

Decreation (2005) by Anne Carson

Picked up at random at a bookstore’s poetry section, Anne Carson’s unfathomably creative collection of poems, essays, opera librettos, screenplays and other forms was a mind-altering read. All the wildly imaginative literary plots, moving the reader from Aphrodite to Antonioni to Demosthenes, mélange as a meditation on decreation – an activity described by Simone Weil as “undoing the creature in us.”

Decreation is a mixture of poems and essays, one on solar eclipse, another on sleep (“There is so much sleep to be read, there are so many ways to read it.” … In Aristotle’s view, sleep requires a “daimonic but not a divine” kind of reading. Kant refers to sleep as “involuntary poetry in a healthy state.”); one on Antonioni, interpreting his visit to a madmen’s asylum. Carson is as excellent as a scholar as she is inventive as a poet. Decreation was certainly the strangest and the most beautiful book I read this year.

The poem Guns and Desire I by Anne Carson:

Guns and Desire I 
What does it matter to me that there were other people to love

Guillermo’s Sigh Symphony by Anne Carson:

Guillermo’s Sigh Symphony
Do you hear sighing.
     Do you wake amid a sigh.
           Radio sighs AM,
FM.
               Shortwave sighs crackle in from the Atlantic.
           Hot sighs steam in the dawn.
    People kissing stop to sigh then kiss again.
Doctors sigh into wounds and the bloodstream is changed for ever.
        Flowers sigh and two noon bees float backwards.
               Is it doubt.
                  Is it disappointment.
                     The world didn’t owe me anything.
                         Leaves come sighing in the door.
                  Bits of girl sigh like men.
           Forgeries sigh twice.
Balthus sighs and lies about it, claiming it was Byron’s sigh.
        A sigh may come too late.
               Is it better than screaming.
                  Give me all your sighs for four or five dollars.
                                A sigh is weightless,
                     yet it may interrupt the broadcast.
                  Can you abstain.
          What is that hush that carries itself up each sigh.
        We hunt together the sigh and I,
sport of kings.
          To want to stop is beyond us.
The more sighs shine the more I’m in trouble – some kind of silvery stuff –
                        you thought it was the sea?

The Years (2018) by Annie Ernaux

The Years by Annie Ernaux, one of the most acclaimed contemporary French writers, is an autobiographical memoir that blends personal and public life from the author’s birth in 1940 through to 2006. The chronologically moving storyline is narrated as a collective and impersonal “we” or “one,” eluding the use of “I.” Ernaux’ telling of the her generation’s story nonetheless has an ever-present author, reminding herself to the reader via mnemonic photographs inserted at the beginning of each chapter.

Having recently moved to France, this book was a welcome window into the French sentiment towards the second half of the 20th century. The detail-oriented and anthropologically curious Ernaux has also managed to intertwine into her book the story of 20th century rise of capitalism together with the side effects of a sinuous appearance of radio, TV, MP3, and PCs into our lives. In her own words, “All was derision and gleeful, festive fatalism.” And later in the book, “With all the intermingling of concepts, it was increasingly difficult to find a phrase of one’s own, the kind that, when silently repeated, helped one live.”

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“And we who were undeceived, who seriously examined the dangers of advertising with our students; we who assigned the topic “Does the possession of material goods lead to happiness?”, bought a stereo at Fnac, a Grundig radio-cassette player, and a Bell & Howell Super-8 camera, with a sense of using modernity to intelligent ends. For us and by us, consumption was purified. The ideals of May ‘68 were being transformed into objects and entertainment.”

With delightful observations that at times required that she invent her own terms to describe something barely explicable (such as palimpsest sensation – a sensation of re-experiencing past moments while adding a new layer of current thoughts. A manuscript on which the original writing has been scratched out to make room for new writing).

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Fin.

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