Why I'm Fed Up Working in Marketing

Is this the point of no return? Who can say. Well, I can.

Licensed from Adobe Stock // Love the wind

For over two decades, I was a believer. I fashioned a marketing career using a toolkit metaphor, where instead of working in one role and climbing the ranks I gathered a suite of skills that gave context and color to the one thing I excel at—telling stories.

Every time I’m interviewed for a role, I’m deemed interesting. Recruiters often scrunch their face, hiring managers squint and prospective bosses try to connect the dots while I sit there and think, my god, we live in a world where everyone wants simple, easy. Nuance is not on the menu.

One has to take a risk when hiring me because I can’t be boxed in. I’m not perfect on paper—recruiters to this day are desperate to rewrite my narrative, to which I respond with the word “no,” because I believe no is a complete sentence. And I thrived on this toolkit metaphor—taking jobs that were built around the nucleus of telling stories so I would ultimately get good at telling because I understood marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Until the past year where I’ve had zero desire to tell a brand’s story. I stopped hustling. I stopped networking. I built a house of no because I was slowly becoming a non-believer.

Unbeknownst to me, I was fed up and content to toss my toolkit in the trash. And after reading yet another garbage article about toddlers becoming CMOs, I yelled at the screen: FUCK YOU AND THE PONY YOU RODE IN ON because come on. Why am I over marketing? Let me count four ways.

Because Toddlers Can Become CMOs

From companies desperate to be relevant in the eyes of the kids to finance and operations seeing the glory in cheap labor, I’ve grown increasingly disgusted with people who consistently reduce and debase the role of a CMO. They reduce it to a tactic, a TikTok channel plan. The reasoning goes—if you’re good at creating a viral video, clearly you can set the strategy and lead an organization for the long haul.

Forget the fact that a tactic does not an integrated, measurable strategy make. Let’s set aside that a CMO has to understand the complete mix (i.e., performance and brand marketing, creative and customer service), what components make sense for success, they also have to lead teams, manage laterally and up (I’ve managed CEOs and COOs/CFOs and it is an art and a science), deal with peers who only want to cut costs and increase revenue, and if the return isn’t there perhaps you can lock yourself in a cold dark room until you show us the money? CMOs have to manage budgets, vendors, agencies, partner agencies, and everyone in an actual company, blah, blah, blah.

TL;DR: A CMO’s role is not to fucking create TikTok videos although apparently that’s the running line these days.

Am I qualified to be a CMO? Absolutely. Do I want to be one? Absolutely not. For one, I don’t want to spend my life in a conference room, stressed out, and I can’t cope with the politicking, which is a separate full-time job. For another, the ageism is deep, real, and true, and apparently everyone’s drinking from the well of stupid.

People Are Incapable of Understanding the Long Haul

The impatience I often see reeks of desperation. Nothing matters more than the current quarter, and your brand is only as relevant as your last social media post (which has become pay to play like influencer marketing, but I digress). There is zero consideration of the long term. It’s as if everyone secretly knows the planet will burn up, we’ll all die, and that will be left are a handful of trees, Starbucks cups, and horses galloping through the flames. So, who cares about silly concepts like sustainability, stability, et all because no one can think beyond the next few months.

For marketing to work, you have to consider BOTH the short- and long-term strategy. Short term players want to make a fast buck while short/long-game players focus on getting the customer, keeping the customer, and getting that customer to hand over their first born and several vials of blood to the brand.

I’m legit sick of clients and brands who can’t handle the complexity of building a brand and a business for the short and long term.

No One Gives a Shit About Customers, But They Say They Do

If I had a c-note for every time I’ve presented brands with objective, concrete data—basically telling them: YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT THIS—and they’ll clamp their hands over their ears and proceed to do the opposite of what their customers want.

Why? Because they’re arrogant, egotistical, and frightened of failure.

I’ll often hear, “I know our customers.” To which I respond, “Interesting. So why is your business diving head-first into hell without a parachute or a prayer? So, you’re not interested in making money? So, you’re not seeing why your competitors are stealing share? So, you’re ignoring all the messages on social media, via email, and through call centers that your brand is trash?”

If you knew your customers, you wouldn’t be failing. If you knew your customers, you wouldn’t be hiring me to tell you what’s wrong with your business.

And I’ll work hard, deliver a clear path to success, which is routinely ignored because it’s hard, takes too much time and money, and I have to remind them that winning over someone and retaining doesn’t happen overnight. And then there comes a point where my work feels meaningless because it shines a light on what they’re doing wrong instead of smoothing their hair and telling them they’re DOING SUCH A GREAT JOB!

For the love. Here’s some free advice: talk to your customers. Often. Course-correct. Admit you are not omnipotent. Realize that while you may be smart, you’re not always right. Finally, fix your house because your customers have already left the party and are heading to another house down the street.

Because Too Few Companies Do Good for Profit

I used to joke that a marketer’s role is to hurl glitter on shit. Build the story, sell the life, fool the customer, and forget about the product that doesn’t work, or nobody needs, or wasn’t created ethically or sustainably. As I get older and become more aware of the greed around me, the people who never seem to think they have enough, and the ways in which my role has been about capitalism, it wears on me. And it’s not like I can escape the system because it’s what we have, and I don’t see it changing in my lifetime.

It occurs to me that while marketing can serve a greater good, many people don’t want to be decent. The success of capitalism is predicated on a few people winning and many striving and suffering. Marketing went from solving the pain to manufacturing new and phantom pain and delivering pain medication.

I’m tired of marketing products that aren’t ethical or sustainable. I’m tired of marketing products for companies whose leaders are predominately white, but they’ll make that token diversity hire. I’m tired of creating pain where none should actually exist.

I used to work in beauty marketing. Christ, we don’t need any of that cancer-causing garbage, but society and media will tell you differently.

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I wish I had a solution. I wish I could be the me of a few years ago who took well-paying gigs. But I’ve changed. I care about the planet we live in and the people I share it with. And I’ve become too aware of the ubiquitous greed and garbage that show no signs of abating.

But once you see something, you can’t unsee it. There’s no going back. There’s only me wondering what’s next. How will I exist in this capitalist system? Do I abandon marketing to sell clothes or do something else? Do I move to the middle of nowhere because nowhere costs less than Los Angeles?

I don’t know.