Your marketing confessions 🌶️🌶️

The Women in Marketing meetup at UNBOUND last month was loud in the best way — everywhere I looked, people were deep in conversation. Thank you to everyone who came, and double thanks to everyone who shared a marketing confession with us. Scroll down to read some of your confessions (including a few 🌶️spicy🌶️ ones). 

I also interviewed nearly 20 marketing experts at UNBOUND. Those features are coming soon, but here’s a teaser: 

AI reality check: Notes from UNBOUND

AI content is eroding trust.

I heard this over and over again, even from AI superusers. Some people use AI as a thought partner to help create content, taking a heavy hand with edits and rewrites. And for some, AI-generated content was a bright line never to be crossed. People from all corners of marketing — direct mail, SEO consultants, content strategists, event marketers — told me, unprompted, that AI content is damaging relationships with customers. 

The real failure of AI is adoption without a plan.

The strongest throughline from my interviews: story after story of what happens when a company gives its marketers access to AI without a defined metric, a shared knowledge base, or any kind of governance. The result is redundant busywork, with people constantly reinventing the wheel instead of using tools they already have access to.

Claude was the most-mentioned AI tool.

Marketers are using Claude in every conceivable way (and then some):

• Querying a data warehouse without SQL

• Auto-updating CRM fields with meeting notes

• Multi-agent SEO orchestration

Everybody’s using it, but nobody’s using it the same way.

Confessions of a Marketer 

The marketing rule everyone follows that I think is completely wrong.

Not all social channels need to be used. If your audience isn’t there, why are you?” —Anonymous Senior Marketing Manager

🌶️ “Negging your way to a sale; e.g., Tired of always being broke? We can fix you.” —Anonymous

“[That] CTA buttons are the end all, be all. People are coming around to seeing the truth that they won’t be clicked [as much]. I always thought raw links or linked text felt more trustworthy, and it seems to finally be leaning that way.” —D, Marketing Strategist

The marketing move I was embarrassed to try that actually worked.

“Being unpolished and just throwing fun words and gifs into our emails. Showed how we can be authentic.” —Kirsty, Marketing Coordinator

🌶️ “Coming up with something on the fly and saying I researched the hell out of it.” —Rachel, Manager, Marketing and Comms

“Despite my objections, public speaking DOES work for networking and demand gen.” —The Reluctant Introvert, VP of Marketing

Got a marketing confession? Hit reply and tell me (and tell me if I can use your name).

This week's email was brought to you by Laura M. Browning.  

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR OTHER NEWSLETTERS

Business news, but not boring: The Hustle | Stay current on AI: Mindstream | Grow your business: Starter Story | Sell better: The Science of Scaling

Follow Marketing Against the Grain on LinkedIn and Instagram

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.