Happy Sunday, Everyone!
It’s difficult to believe, but June is here. We’re officially 41.7% of the way through 2025. This week’s issue is one that was inspired by the current state of marketing and technology, along with several conversations with colleagues about what marketers should be doing going forward. Eventually, I came around to a theme for the issue:
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Marketing today is both more difficult and more exciting than at any prior point in my career. To be blunt: we’re living in unprecedented times. The pace of technological progress has never been faster. Our customers are more connected, more demanding and more sophisticated than at any point in history. New platforms are (seemingly) coming online every quarter. “Best practices” have the shelf life of sushi in the Sahara (without any refrigeration). It’s one hell of a time to be alive.
I’ve entered the period of my year where I begin to craft the decks for the Fall ‘25 conference season (yes, I know - don’t start using the “F” word before summer begins and school lets out). As I’ve begun drafting outlines, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking not about what’s changing, but the constants – the things that don’t change - because I believe in a world that’s increasingly dynamic, there’s value in understanding what stays the same.
Before we go any further, I want to be clear: codifying these recurring lessons into ten laws is not intended to elevate any of them to “sacrosanct” status. There are exceptions to every rule. Some of these, for some brands, should be broken on occasion. But, I do think it’s helpful to have mental shortcuts of sorts that can be used to diagnose where things may have gone (or are going) off the rails, before it leads to a failed campaign, a fired agency/CMO or an otherwise unpleasant situation.
Some of these rules run against fashionable wisdom. Data scientists love “big” data; I argue for good data. Finance loves line-item efficiencies; I argue for narrative waste that earns margin. And though every platform promises “just trust the algorithm,” these laws remind you that the algorithm is only as powerful as the human who frames the question.
We have 10 Laws & 3,500 words. Hope you brought your coffee.
Law #1: Clear Crushes Clever
For as long as I’ve been in marketing, there’s been a tendency among marketers to be clever. It’s easy to see why: clever is what wins awards (and the praise of other marketers). Clear, on the other hand, often comes with far less hardware and X mentions – but a load more sales. The rare combination of the two tends to result in unicorns (like Purple Mattress’ Goldilocks + Dollar Shave Club’s ‘Our Blades Are F*****g Great’ Ad).
The next time you feel that primal urge to write something overly clever, stop. Your customers already endure severe cognitive overload. When you (innocently) add playful ambiguity, you force them to solve a puzzle before they can even assess the value proposition. No-one wants to solve a riddle, where the “prize” is the opportunity to give a company money.
I recently spoke with an executive at a cybersecurity firm, who was weighing two different messages for an upcoming campaign:
Option #1: “Stop Data Breaches Before They Cost You Millions.”
Option #2: “Guardians of Your Data Galaxy”
Put yourself in the shoes of their primary target audience (SMB owners who know next-to-nothing about cloud/cyber-security, but don’t want to end up as the poster child for what happens when you get hacked). While Option #2 will (very likely) win the acclaim of award judges and support some very flashy commercials, Option #1 immediately jolts your audience to attention, establishes the stakes (“cost you millions”) and provides a call to action.
If that example doesn’t quite convince you, go back to Juicero - the (in)famous $400 Wi-Fi juice press. The launch copy spoke in riddles about “holistic wellness experiences.” Investors threw over $100M at the company. Consumers shrugged. When Bloomberg filmed someone squeezing the juice packs by hand in eight seconds, the only sound you could hear was nine figures burning.
There are other benefits to clarity, too – namely, it compounds algorithmically. Google’s Natural Language processing, Meta’s Advantage+ creative scoring, and Amazon’s listing crawlers reward semantic precision. Short, literal copy lowers cost-per-click, improves conversion rates (yes, really), boosts quality score, and feeds unambiguous data into downstream models.
Adhering to this law requires ruthless editing. It will not be fun. Your creative team will (likely) get upset - but do it anyway. Translate internal jargon into external verbs, swap metaphors for concrete outcomes, and run a standing five-second comprehension test: if a random person who knows nothing about the brand (find a significant other, a trusted friend or your nice neighbor) can’t explain what you’re offering after counting to 5, deep-six it and start over.
Law #2: Stories Sell, Campaigns Spend
While I don’t agree with Scott Galloway on everything, the one thing I can confidently say he and I do agree with is that storytelling is a superpower. If you can craft a compelling narrative, you can sell just about anyone on anything. The reason behind that is simple: people distill complexity via stories. We’re evolutionarily predisposed to not just believe, but to internalize stories - because it was the only way we could communicate lessons for a few thousand years.
In our day-to-day lives, marketer’s penchant for storytelling tends to run headlong into finance teams’ desire to simplify everything into rows, columns and expense categories. Trouble begins when marketers let the spreadsheet eclipse the story arc. A classic example is Apple’s “Think Different” manifesto: there was no explicit discount, no day-part flight plan, nothing - just a story that resonated with rebels, tinkerers, and misfits. That narrative lifted brand preference for a company 90 days from bankruptcy, and (eventually) resulted in Apple becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world.
There’s a framework you can use to make this work for you: exposition/challenge, conflict, resolution. At each stage, make your customer (not your brand/product/service) the hero of the story, and tell the story in a format that works for you/your brand/your audience (video, images, carousels, emails, whatever). Keep it short, clear and concise. The ultimate test is to tell the story out loud – no slides, no stats, no fancy visuals. Gauge the reaction of those in the room - if they’re not leaning in (evolutionary biology to the rescue), then your narrative needs work.
And yes, narrative wastes money upfront. You invest in “untrackable” creativity before hard metrics appear. My contrarian take: that waste buys emotional equity, which later discounts every click, lead, call and sale. If you scrimp on story today, you’ll overpay for performance media forever.
Law #3: If Your Marketing Is Risk-Free, It Is Reward-Free
One of my more controversial ideas (well, less so now) is that tanking in sports is good, actually – not because I like losing (I hate losing), but because the middle is death. There is no worse place to be in professional sports than stuck in mediocrity: not good enough to compete for a championship, not bad enough to draft the generational talent that goes in the top 1-2 picks. The middle is a no-man’s land.
The same thing is true in marketing: platforms punish “safe” creative concepts with median outcomes – not good enough to really help you gain share, not bad enough to become meme-able. The last (legal) source of alpha is creativity - but it comes with risk. Take the Old Spice “Smell Like a Man, Man” gamble. P&G approved a pitch that opened on a shirtless former NFL player riding a horse backward. Focus-group safe? Absolutely not. The campaign resurrected a legacy deodorant and spawned thousands of parody responses, driving sales up 125% the quarter after it aired.
Risk does not require recklessness. Carve off 10-15% of working spend for experiments with asymmetric upside. Plan out the worst-case scenario (it’s likely some version of becoming a meme or incinerating your test budget), and if you can live with it, go for it.
When Dollar Shave Club greenlit its infamous $4,500 launch video, Michael Dubin’s board agreed the worst case was 50,000 people laughing at them on YouTube. Instead the clip drove 12,000 orders in 48 hours and paved the way for a $1B exit.
It’s OK to take big swings. It’s OK to try (slightly) crazy things, provided they’re on-brand. In fact, it’s often the only way to break through in an increasingly saturated, attention-starved market. It’s not OK to not understand the risk you’re taking, or to take risks that have asymmetric downside. If you’re playing it safe, you’re likely living in the middle - and the middle is no-where you want to be.
Law #4: Attention Is The Only Currency That Matters
One thing I’ve noticed is that marketers are more and more willing to pay for impressions, but less and less willing to earn attention. The one thing Donald Trump should have taught all of us is that attention is the most valuable commodity in the world: if you can earn it, you can transmute it into anything you’d like - sales, leads, clicks, conversations, subscriptions, whatever - pretty much at will.
One of my favorite trivia tidbits is this: Netflix assesses the success of a title in “hours watched” and “episodes finished”, not simply plays or starts. They know a half-watched film shows negative ROI because viewers bail at the exact moment that should have hooked them - which means everything leading up to that moment was also a waste. Marketers should adopt the same accounting. Divide revenue by voluntary impressions - content consumed by choice - and you’ll see wildly different returns.
That may sound a little abstract, but here’s a concrete example of it in action: a tool storage company we’ve worked with had several lengthy (10+ minute) explainer videos, each showcasing the founder reviewing the features of a product in incredible detail. These videos received a miniscule amount of spend on YouTube - 5%-8% of the budget - but drove a disproportionate share of revenue. The revenue per view on these long-form explainers was approximately 8x higher than the fancy, 0:30 “sizzle” reels that received the lion’s share of the spend. The long-form video earned attention (users didn’t have to watch the full thing, but stuck around anyway because the content was interesting, relevant and helpful to them), and that attention was monetized into sales. The real win was that we started using those longer-form videos in prospecting + TOF initiatives - and sales have continued to climb since.
The easiest way to determine if what you’re sharing is likely to earn attention? Ask yourself: would you post this if you weren’t on payroll (or otherwise expected to)? If the answer is “no,” keep iterating. Remember: goodwill compounds. Each delightful opt-in interaction - a long video view, a read of thought leadership content, genuine participation in a webinar, actually viewing an infographic - lowers the skepticism barrier for the next ask, resulting in a flywheel that outpaces competitors desperately trying to buy visibility instead of earning attention.
Law #5: Velocity Outperforms Raw Volume
I believe creative volume is one of the most under-appreciated levers available to marketers - put simply, when it comes to creative, quantity drives quality because the cost of assessing those creatives (vis-a-vis the meta algorithm) is effectively free.
There’s a second, and even-more-under-discussed aspect to this, though: velocity out-performs volume. Creative concepts have a half-life – the instant a “winning” concept is found, other brands pick up on it and begin iterating their own versions of it. Users see more and more of the concept, and the efficacy of the concept begins to wane.
Velocity - cycle time - is the secret weapon used by some of the most successful advertisers. Instead of simply rewarding the raw volume of concepts launched, their goal is to minimize the time required to go from idea -> execution -> insight. The faster you can cycle creatives, the higher the probability that you’ll launch creatives as they’re still gaining traction (i.e., before fatigue sets in), the higher the probability that those creatives will be “hits”.
One note: velocity is not an excuse for sloppiness or a lack of standards; a well-intentioned concept that’s poorly executed due to being rushed will likely do more harm than good. Yes, it’s critical to accelerate the idea -> execution -> insight loop, but not if it comes at the expense of the brand, story or customer experience. It’s 2025 - we should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Law #6: Good Data Beats Big Data
This is a hill I’ll die on: most brands have too much data.
Big data promised omniscience – but delivered dashboards nobody reads. Quantity without clarity paralyzes. We routinely talk to clients with data lakes overflowing that no-one even uses. Millions of data points are collected on every customer, but never turned into anything (aside from a higher AWS invoice each month). For every one of these customers, the solution isn’t more data - it’s the right data. Having trillions of data points matters exactly zero if you’re unsure which ones are actually relevant to the task at hand.
Most of us remember iOS14.5. Overnight, most of our clients lost a ton of visibility into their ad account performance, funnels and businesses. The response to that from two different clients illustrates my point here:
Brand #1 tried to rebuild full-path models with a wildly complex mar-tech stack, incorporating 3PA, fingerprinting and investing upwards of $100k on CDP integrations. I sincerely have no desire to know exactly how much they spent trying to get back what they lost, but it was a LOT.
Brand #2 downgraded to a blended CAC model plus post-purchase surveys. Total cost? Something like $2,000/yr.
The real irony? Brand #2 was the one that has repeatedly spotted trends early and pivoted – moving to TikTok shops early, moving more spend onto YouTube vs. Meta, and even spotting the potential of AppLovin well before it went mainstream. They absolutely have less data than Brand #1, but they have a much clearer, stronger signal. And at the end of the day, signal is what wins.
A second, and related point (that happens to reference one of my all-time favorite Jeff Bezos quotes): “When data and anecdotes disagree, trust the anecdotes.” I wish more “data-driven” organizations would trust qualitative data. 5 quick-and-dirty Zoom interviews with churned users revealed to a SaaS client that its opt-out window + auto-renew felt shady. No CRM data or fancy dashboard showed that pain point, yet fixing it reduced churn by 18% year-over-year. A handful of conversations with sales reps told a client that the #1 pain point among potential residents was apprehensions about the economy, even though everything in the dashboards/focus groups suggested it was price.
Good data is data that changes a decision. Everything else is noise, however numerically impressive.
Law #7: Brands Are A Promise
One of my more unpopular opinions is that, as the marketing landscape becomes increasingly AI-centric, brand becomes the last true bastion of differentiation.
Kevin Plank - the CEO of Under Armour - has a saying, “Trust is built in drops, and lost in buckets.” The same thing is true of brands. Each seamless delivery, intuitive interface, product that exceeds expectation or thoughtful interaction adds a single drop to the trust reservoir; one careless fee, tone-deaf tweet, or mis-shipped order tips the bucket and drains gallons. Seen through that lens, a brand is not marketing’s costume but an operating promise that every team must keep, shift after shift, pixel after pixel, day after day.
Your brand isn’t your logo; it’s every one of these miniscule interactions. If you want to protect it, start by listing every one of them: checkout flow, onboarding email, hold music, return label, invoice line item, packaging, product - then color-code by trust intensity. Moments carrying high emotional charge (a warranty claim, a price increase notice) demand bulletproof fulfillment because a crack there becomes a bucket-sized leak. Patagonia’s lifetime guarantee, for instance, works because incentives at every level of the company - supply-chain, procurement, warehousing and retail - all assume merchandise may come back years later. The policy is expensive, but the drop-by-drop trust it earns allows Patagonia to price at a premium and spend pennies on paid media.
Translate values into measurable behaviors. “Customer obsession” should map to a two-ring maximum on support calls and a 24-hour response SLA for social DMs. “Radical transparency” means publishing ingredient sourcing or outage root-cause analyses before angry threads start trending. Build those behaviors into job descriptions and bonuses so that finance, ops, and HR are aligned with the promise marketing shares. Zappos famously turned this alignment into a moat: agents have no handle-time targets and can overnight replacement shoes without managerial approval. The result is cult-level loyalty that competitors with cheaper products, bigger discounts and 10x more marketing spend can’t crack.
Find the flaws, or your customers will. Run secret-shopper journeys, stress-test refund processes, test your sales people, review your ads/landers, monitor your social comments, lurk in random forums. Actively seek to find any evidence of small cracks - an uptick in negative sentiment, more return requests than usual, lower conversion rates, whatever - and fix it before it turns into something more.
The contrarian takeaway: flashy campaigns matter less than boring consistency. Great brands win not because they dazzle more, but because they spill fewer buckets. Guard every drop.
Law #8: It Is Better Not to Spend Than to Spend Poorly
This is the single-most-difficult lesson to teach new marketers - but it’s the one that’s been the most valuable to me in my career. The math behind this rule is simple: for every dollar spent poorly, every subsequent dollar must be spent ever-more-efficiently just to get back to where you wanted to be (your target) in the first place. Put another way: poor spend comes with compounding interest.
In practice, this isn’t so simple. There’s always the temptation to spend more; the hope that a campaign will turn around and “click” if you just give it a little more time. That’s rarely the right answer. Platforms seldom reward desperation, and algorithms interpret “more budget” as proof you’ve already accepted current economics. The smarter move is to pause, triage, and redeploy only after the issue (targeting, experience, creative, offer) is addressed.
Don’t let one loss snowball into a series of compounding catastrophes.
Law #9: Do Your Research Before, or Pay for It After
A one-off competitor + audience research sprint is table stakes; sustained insight is where the edge compounds. I’ve watched brands incinerate $100k+ in ad spend because they declared “audience research complete” the moment a campaign launched. A few weeks later, the TikTok Zeitgeist evolved, a competitor tweaked pricing, and the in-market creative was completely dominated by a competitor’s offer.
Improving this starts with understanding that competitive + audience intelligence isn’t a once-and-done thing; it’s a breathing system you tend day after day. We all know that the operating environment changes quickly: competitors pivot offers pivot, copy angles shift, products sunset, and a week later you’re competing against a landscape that no longer exists. Treat your A+CI efforts like an always-open radar screen.
Law #10: Your Offer Is Either Compelling Or Crap
The harsh truth of marketing is this: no amount of creative genius will rescue a garbage offer. Consumers spot derivative discounts instantly. A truly compelling offer stands out. It resonates deeply with your target audience because it simultaneously makes them the hero (see storytelling above) AND helps them overcome the challenge no-one else fully understands (see audience + competitive research).
The fundamental law of commerce is as true today as it ever was: as Value > Cost increases, the probability of purchase increases. The problem is too many marketers have adopted the Groupon approach (just reduce cost 80%), instead of building value.
One fantastic (and famous) example of the latter approach is Casper’s 100-day trial. Where every other mattress provider tried discounting, Casper attacked consumer’s #1 barrier - fear of buying a mattress sight unseen - without resorting to margin hits. The offer was all about risk removal and trust building (after all, who would put a 100-night guarantee on a mattress they didn’t believe in?)
Internal pocket-book test applies: would staff pay personal money for the offer? If they hesitate, try again. Your target audience’s sniff test is harsher than anything you can imagine.
Discipline Fuels Creative Breakthroughs
Friction drains rockets and P&Ls alike: confusion, drift, and busywork burn fuel you could spend on breakthrough ideas. The 10 Laws strip away that drag, freeing you (and your team) to focus on customer delight instead of firefighting. Remember Basquiat and Pollock: both artists mastered classical draftsmanship before flooding canvases with chaos. Their command of fundamentals gave them the privilege to break every visible rule.
Marketing works the same way. Master clarity, narrative, risk calculus, attention stewardship, velocity loops, selective data, operational covenant, fiscal discipline, research rigor, and compelling offers. Then shatter any surface-level rule you like. The foundation will hold.
Tactics will evolve. Voice search (maybe it’s a thing again), mixed reality shopping, AI-authored creative, new platforms, you name it. These laws endure because they describe human behavior, not platform quirks. Follow them and watch creativity, efficiency, and growth align. Ignore them and the market will teach a lesson that no discount, no gimmick, no offer and no lander can soften. Choose wisely, invest patiently, and remember: true innovation looks flashy on the outside, but underneath it always rests on disciplined fundamentals.
Until next week,
Sam
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