pick a silly hill


fist in the air...

Here’s your next evergreen campaign idea:

  1. Pick a regular time.
  2. Fabricate a playful reason for marketing.
  3. Run it into the ground.

Think about it.

There’s already Mothers Day, Black Friday, Valentines Day, Movember…

These are all marketing gimmicks.

In Japan, on Christmas Day, it’s tradition to purchase a bucket of KFC.

I wish I was lying 😂

So rather than “fight the system” go ahead and break the system.

In the digital wilderness we’re all bucking against generative AI.

There’s a LOT of crap out there and it’s only getting worse.

The tides are shifting (see the landscape for senior marketers right now).

But rather than stop writing a newsletter about AI (oh no he didn’t) do things that OBVIOUSLY aren’t AI.

Here’s some examples:

  • I threw out a shit post on LinkedIn every Friday leading with Happy Friday fuckers - my engagement went nuts and I only stopped because I got a language warning on a comment later
  • Simone @ Kitchen Language created the “Potty Mouth of the Month” and awarded it to foul-mouthed podcasters
  • “I’m coming in hot” is a nice preamble to dropping truth bombs why don’t you look to do this with your business/customers/social posts the 2nd Tuesday of every month

It’s not so much the what or even the how.

By just being deliberately real - you are winning.

Calling out the world how you see it - however imperfectly - is how you win.

In a computed and carefully curated world of algorithmic optimisation - picking a silly hill and just owning it is a big fuck you to all of that.

-Marshy

p.s. sorry not sorry for the swearing - I’m promising my future self not to check the unsubscribes next week

PO Box 378, Kangaroo Ground, Victoria 3097
Unsubscribe · Preferences

Early Growth School

Continuous tips, lessons, advice, and direction on growth for your early-stage startup by a growth marketing pro.

Read more from Early Growth School

doing the work. “So you’ve done the work…” I met Mel Greblo through my work in the impact space. She does a number of amazing things, including founding Banksia Academy. A destination for helping women create their own employment pathways to help remove themselves and recover from domestic violence. She now leads Humans of Purpose. “Oh yes, I have.” If you read into the question literally - you can ask things like: what work? in what context? is it this or that? what kind of work? But if...

the human element. A popular online writing teacher stopped his course 4 months ago. His name is David Perell. He is young, taught a course called “Write of Passage” for 6 years, and the AI boom has “set off an existential crisis” in him. There’s a certain irony in an influencer who has benefited from AI (Twitter algorithms) becoming challenged by AI (LLMs). If you’re a non-fiction writer - it’s going to become near impossible to perform better than AI. This means we’re going to have to work...

cutting edge. I share principles in this newsletter for a reason. The tech changes. A shiny thing will fade. Fast tactics are trumped by sound strategy. I work with tech startups and have done this for a long time. So it’s only natural people want to know what is happening on the edge. Today I’m going to indulge that curiosity - and let you know that the principles are more important. Things like the below only work if you understand the principles. So here’s what I’m seeing: AI-trained video...