One crazy trick
Recently, a creator I follow (who I like and want brands to continue to support, so I won’t name) launched a new page. In parallel to their main comedy channel, they now have an account dedicated to offering life and entrepreneurship advice. The videos have that familiar faux-podcast setup, talking to camera, broadcaster-style mic in front, as though they’re just been asking a question that penetrated their soul.
Strategists have seen this persona represented through a collection of MRI statements: I see my job as a sport. And it’s often not a stretch, with professional athletes starting business-adjacent podcasts as the sun starts to set on their playing careers.
This creator isn’t a one-off, they’re indicative of a trend in doling out advice — on anything — to the scrolling masses.
The issue isn’t the content or the style, necessarily. I’ve gotten tons of inspiration from people like Ryan Holiday, Andrew Huberman, and Brene Brown, all of whom create content in this style. I also follow experts (professional and others, admittedly) in wellness, fitness, and business in hopes of gaining some scraps to use in my real life.
The problem is what this does to our expectations of where deep thinking and insight come from. That there’s one crazy trick to solve our problems.
We can be forgiven for wanting an easier answer. Agency people are feeling the crunch of high standards meeting fewer people and tighter timelines.
With clients giving less time and doing less consumer research, generative AI is a natural stop (for the record, I use and love GenAI. Please don’t eat me.). But as a recent Fast Company piece puts it, “The fun quickly wore off, and a new killer function has taken over: using generative AI to compress existing stuff and restate it in simplified form. We don’t live in a new creative age. We live in the age of summarization.” Summarization leads to sameness, not differentiation.
And then there’s LinkedIn. In the same way that Instagram made us all photographers, LinkedIn has made us all B2B writers.
The feed is full of newsletters*, decks formatted to meet what the algorithm wants for lunch, fawning reviews famous brands’ work, or most flagrant of all, takedowns of other people’s work, with the suggestion that the poster could have saved them with their genius (“link in comments!”).
This is a format that’s also popular in literature circles, with writers writing about others’ writing.
What is most depressing about the literary takedown as a form is its overall nihilism. It rarely has any generative power or real creative vision for what the future of literature, and by extension, the world, should look like. It defaults to cynicism because that is a way out of earnestness and a way out of solutions. Even where the critic is basically proven right by the fickle tide of public opinion (for instance, Lauren Oyler in her LRB takedown of Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino), she is almost proven right by chance
Generative AI will make that much worse. Just let Gemini read the book and write the takedown for maximum feed points.
To Ad folks the bolded section will sound familiar, and will be frustrating because we are here to shape an exciting creative future, if it’s primarily a capitalistic rather that artistic one.
Last month, Lea Walker wrote an excellent piece for LBB on the advertising industry suffering from long covid, experiencing prolonged symptoms of the significant shakeup of 2020–2021. As she puts it:
Stuff feels hard. The Seniors really feel more like Mids. The Directors are having to really come down into the work. The Exec are spending a huge amount of their time in everyone’s feelings. The clients are demanding more ‘grown ups’ in the room.
Agency people moving down the stack is a budget and time problem, made worse by feeds that tell us that everyone else is doing smart, effective work by using the right AI prompts and proven frameworks.
A solution is messier and more old school. We need to use all ingredients available but we shouldn’t eat them raw.
The smartest brand and agency teams are using this moment as an opportunity to learn more about what regular people do in their regular lives. They might us AI to generate questions, but they’re using IRL, gut, and gusto to generate hypotheses about how to win.
There is no killer framework to extract the category-juking strategy. No chart that will finally make a CMO invest in brand. No case study that will ensure future success. The answer isn’t on this feed; it’s in the productive conflict of doing the work.
*I note the irony of writing this in what could be considered a newsletter.
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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben
