Jan Swafford:

The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most.

We humans need to see the human doing it

John Haugeland:

the most ordinary conversations are fraught with life and all its meanings

Austin Kleon wrote Show Your Work. Now you must also show your humanity.

The guiding principles for marketing content now are:

Personality + Behind the Scenes + What’s “Boring” to You

If this sounds like influencer style social content to you, you’re right.

via DC

Marketers are privileged indeed to make promises. Why make promises you know you can’t keep?

-Seth Godin

Marketing is a game of promises.

Conversion rates are promise delivery measurements.

Repeat customer rate is a trust barometer.

Puffery is over promising, repeatedly.

These definitions from Robin Sloan are helpful:

An accurate definition of “influencer” is: a virtuoso of a particular internet platform; someone who has learned to use its mechanisms to achieve their own objectives, rather than the other way around.

An accurate definition of an internet “creator” would have to be: someone whose income is determined by a platform’s algorithms.

Aligns with why platforms suddenly started talking about the “creator economy” instead of just influencers.

Give them pleasure—the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.

-Alfred Hitchcock

Isn’t this essentially the premise of painkiller based marketing?

Work can only be universal if it is rooted in a part of its creator which is most privately and particularly himself.

-Tyrone Guthrie

Brands typically try to smooth out the edges—polish everything to a uniform shine. In the post-AI world, it’s the idiosyncrasies that will make for truly winning brands.

Mission, vision, values are pieces of paper that can change with a board meeting.

Personality is actually having something to say and a unique way of saying it. Something that is core to the brand itself and not a committee’s reaction to societal trends.

See: Liquid Death