There's No Fucking CO Here: Why Marketing Is Facing Apocalypse Now
AI Without Marketing Strategy Is a Dangerous Weapon
Remember those Ghibli scenes and action figures that inundated the marketing world a few weeks back?
Like a lot of you, I found their emergence in the wake of the latest GPT-4o updates eye-opening.
Seeing marketing-quality visuals become ridiculously easy to crank out caused two things to spring to my mind (with a thread connecting them).
The vast majority of what marketing churns out now is utterly remedial (bad news if you make a living creating such assets).
We need strategy now more than ever.
Much ink has been spilled about the need to prove the value or ROI of content or content marketing.
But if business leaders and other stakeholders don't already grasp the value, why are they always asking for more?
Why is Gen AI being used for content creation more than any other marketing task, despite it being more useful as a scaling and polishing tool than a generation tool?
I think it relates to how marketing is being done now.
Good marketing is about making your brand attractive and making sure potential dealbreakers are avoided or addressed during courtship, with individual content pieces functioning as encounters, touchpoints, dates.
And if every date goes well, with any fatal landmines avoided, eventually you marry.
Sometimes this happens after years of going steady (i.e., reading your blogs and newsletters). Sometimes the process is swifter.
But most B2B marketing isn't like this. It isn't attraction or courtship.
B2B marketing is war, but not the glorified strategic war embodied by someone like Napoleon.
It's more like war as envisioned in Apocalypse Now, a film set during the Vietnam War that follows Willard, an American soldier tasked with finding and killing a colonel from his own side who's gone rogue.
Killing your own side is generally not what you're supposed to do in war.
And Willard grows increasingly disillusioned over the course of his mission as he realizes his target seems to be the only US soldier present actually interested in winning the war.
Willard encounters three types of US servicemen on his journey.
Those who only seem interested in goofing off and getting high.
Those who only follow orders and regulations, even when doing so might be detrimental or contradictory to the mission.
Those who only seem interested in blowing things up.
And the state of the marketing profession seems best summarized by what Willard encounters at Do Lung bridge.
It's nighttime. No stars.
Willard is traveling upriver on a small boat with a few other servicemen and they happen upon a battle being fought over the bridge.
The American forces posted there, tasked with defending the bridge and keeping it open, are firing in all directions.
The opposition is in the jungle surrounding them, firing from unseen positions and moving, taunting all the while.
The Americans shoot at where they think the voices are coming from, a strategy that hasn't worked for the weeks, months, or perhaps years this battle has been going on.
And yet they keep doing it.
This is not strategy, because there is no strategy (a strategic move would be to clear the forest near the bridge so the opposition can't enter firing range without being seen).
And Willard confirms firsthand by being unable to find a commanding officer (CO) onsite.
In fact, no one he talks to seems to know who the CO is or where.
But despite the chaos and futility, somehow the US forces carry on.
They receive supplies and communicate with HQ (Willard even receives mail while he's there).
And HQ somehow tolerates what should be an intolerable situation.
Why?
Because every day they're told the bridge is open, even though this is hugely misleading.
Every night the bridge is destroyed, and every day it is repaired, with it therefore usable only for a very short time each day and using it for travel insane since the opposition can just wait for them in the jungle nearby.
Yet the madness goes on, because HQ's KPIs clearly include a daily report stating that the bridge is open, despite the bridge, and the Americans' battle for it, being strategically useless.
The marketing profession has been heading towards Do Lung bridge for a while.
I think this started with the phrase "always on" entering the lexicon.
Because marketing promotions no longer needed to be done in discrete campaigns for the achievement of strategic objectives.
Now, promotions could exist merely to fill channels.
Indefinitely, endlessly, with no success metrics connected to the winning of a battle or the war.
The bridge only needs to be reported open each day.
With smoke and noise no longer incidental to the winning of battles.
Smoke and noise have become the battle.
And marketing metrics? The only metrics we can count accurately are largely internal.
Blog articles written. LinkedIn posts posted. Money spent.
It's mostly about efficiency now, though not combat efficiency.
Since we never see what we're shooting at, nor do we have any reliable way of knowing whether we're hitting what we're aiming at, we're left with resource consumption efficiency.
Except for one metric.
Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)—that's our body count.
Though this doesn't distinguish between combatants and civilians (neither do other metrics like reach).
And now we have AI.
Possibly the final nail in strategy's coffin.
In the past, marketing battles couldn't degrade into the sort of infinite jest of Do Lung bridge for one simple reason—resources were limited.
Blogs and ads and social media posts took time and money to create, so you couldn't just do whatever whenever.
Even without a strategy in place, you still had to have priorities.
But with AI, we don't anymore.
Smoke and noise can now be generated endlessly at no cost, making it easy to create the illusion that something meaningful is happening.
And any dumb fucking idea that comes into any marketer's mind, down to the lowliest, most unqualified intern, can now be manifested and posted instantly, essentially for free.
And since most orgs have no marketing strategy in place, there's nothing to stop marketers from doing it.
And since the sheer volume of approvals will overwhelm any human approval chain, soon there will be no human approvers approving it.
And since AI can do all this faster than humans, soon there will be no humans doing it.
In Willard's words, "There's no fucking CO here."
Marketing shouldn't be war.
Like I said earlier, it should be attraction and seduction.
"Make love, not war."
But we won't avoid the Do Lung bridge unless strategy is reintroduced to marketing.
I'm referring to the actual making of choices. The willingness to say no to things that don't serve the strategy.
Most B2B marketing leaders don't bother with this since they think their job is simply to fill the pipeline.
This is their job, but a marketing pipeline isn't a physical thing.
Prospects don't enter through immutable forces of nature; they enter by choice.
And a good CMO gives prospects good reasons to choose your pipeline and not someone else's (and makes sure they hear them).
Are you?
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I'm Jason Patterson—Teller of Truths As I See Them
I'm a B2B content marketer, but I don't let that limit me. I'm also a proud papa, innocent abroad, semicolon user, and unrepentant smartass; one who spends entirely too much time trying to point out to the marketing world how it's fucking up. I'm also the founder of Jewel Content Marketing Agency, where we give prospects like yours a better trail of branded content to follow than some lame AF breadcrumbs.
Follow me on LinkedIn at
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