Hi! Welcome! Let’s talk about the state of modern marketing for a minute. It’ll be fun. 

For the last twenty years or so, nearly all marketing has run on one central premise. Ready?

If you get enough people to pay attention to you, some of them will eventually buy your stuff. 

That’s it. That’s the whole premise. 

Everything we’ve been doing – all the platform building and content creation and social media templates – it has all been in service of this premise. 

For a while, this premise held. Not for everybody, no. The people who got the most out of the system were the ones able and willing to draw attention to themselves. But as a premise, at least in theory, it held for a good while. 

Things have changed, however. You see it in the emails you receive, the videos you watch, the feed updates that flow by. The tone has changed. The frequency has changed. Marketing has started its shift towards the extreme. 

People sound more desperate. People sound more arrogant. People sound more self-effacing. People sound more repetitive.

And of course they do. They’re playing a game that was once kinda fair, and now is completely unwinnable. The idea that we need to hold and sustain the attention and interest of thousands of people in the hope to get sales from a few is unworkable and unsustainable.

Everyone is competing to get and keep attention and engagement from thousands of strangers in the hope that a bunch of complete strangers will “convert” – it’s becoming deafening, and it’s only getting worse. 

That era of attention for attention’s sake is coming to an end. It will be a messy end for many, as the transition from an attention economy to a trade economy is one a lot of people aren’t trained for. For those who were strongly invested in the attention economy, this will be bad news, and there will be a lot of denial and bargaining and anger and depression before anything like acceptance. 

But I’m going to guess that if you’re reading this, you weren’t that invested in the attention economy. I’m going to guess you actually didn’t like it very much at all. The pretense, the “look at me!” dance, the turning yourself into something you weren’t – if you’re like many of us, the end of the endless attention circus actually comes with a whole lot of relief. 

It’s nice to think we might not have to play that game anymore. Say what we will about the algorithms, the robots, and the tech overlords, they did do an excellent job of hastening the demise of a trend that had long since outstayed its welcome. 

So there is a relief, one much overdue. But also, a new crossroads. Most of us don’t even remember what marketing was like before the entire plan was “make a spectacle and hope for the best”. 

Several years ago, I did a coaching consultation with someone who had been referred to me – they didn’t know me or my work. At the end of the call, I asked if she had any questions. She did. She was earnest and real and honest. And she said:

“I want to know how in the hell you built a business without Facebook.”

We come from different worlds, of course. In my world, that’s a mystifying question. In her world, it’s the only question. So I tried to bridge the gap as best I could, and I said, “I built it the way people built businesses before Facebook.”

And her face was completely blank. I may as well have spoken Dutch. She said, “But… I don’t know how people built businesses before!”

No. No, most of us don’t anymore, actually. It’s become a bit of a lost art. 

So even if there is relief in knowing we don’t have to play the game anymore (and truly, we don’t, because it really doesn’t work for most people) there’s also a chasm of the unknown. There’s a blank where “what I should be doing now” used to go. There is a collective, understandable panic of “what on earth do I do now?”

The fall class is about what to do now. It’s a new way to see, approach, and structure marketing for the next era and beyond.