Marketing needs to find its Ferris Bueller moment

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

The words of Ferris Bueller in 1986, when he decided that enough was enough, have kept coming back to me since Marketing Week published this year’s Career & Salary Survey.

The stats are pretty gutting; the eye-catchers being that 58% of the 3,500 marketers surveyed have experienced feeling overwhelmed, 56% undervalued, 51% emotionally exhausted and 48% a lack of enjoyment in work that used to engage them.

I mean, eugh.

Sadly, I don’t find the results all that surprising. I spend my time with a variety of different brands each week and there’s no story more common than the one about overwhelming to-do lists and the frustrations of great intentions that can’t get the attention they deserve.

The report has raised a lot of eyebrows and understandably caused a lot of concern about the way we’re doing things.

At the risk of sounding tone-deaf, and while I share the concerns, I think we should embrace this moment.

From a purely cold-hearted and commercially minded perspective, while the stats are pretty gruesome, the sheer size of the issue means that businesses who manage to break the mould in this area have probably got a massive competitive advantage compared to everyone else.

But more important than that, if we heed Ferris Bueller’s advice, we’ll find a bunch of really exciting, fun and powerful solutions which are within marketing’s gift to make happen, are well known and understood, and make brilliant business sense.

‘Overwhelmed and undervalued’: Half of marketers grappling with ‘emotional exhaustion’

Remember the bigger picture

Before that, some thoughts on where the challenge has come from. Let’s start with the relentless pursuit of optimisation, without total clarity on what is actually being optimised for.

We should all embrace the fact that we’ve moved into an era of marketing which is based more on evidence and knowledge than on assumption and myth. However, along with the scientific approach and the availability of data has come the practice of metric-myopia, where marketers are looking so intently down the microscope that they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.

Teams are chasing stats down funnels, fixating on whether A is better than B, and trying desperately to connect dots between the TikTok shared by the CEO’s 11-year-old and the diminishing returns the brand is seeing on its social channels.

It’s what Grace Kite has called “whack-a-mole marketing”, and while whack-a-mole might feel like fun for a bit, it’s an exhausting way of actually doing business.

AI is giving people permission to throw new curve balls that nobody knows how to hit.

Alongside the relentless optimisation and data-chases come all these competing frameworks, templates and models. I love a good framework as much as the next strategist, but no matter how well-crafted the template or how provocative the thinking model, if they’re used incorrectly they can cause more harm than good.

Part of the problem is that when a model is ‘completed’ – when the PDF is print-ready – it can feel like the work is finished.

But a PDF of a completed template or model is not a real deliverable; the real deliverables are things like clarity, and confidence. Mindset shifts, which, while aided by a good model, actually exist in the mind of the audience. It’s mental change that drives behaviour, not a template that’s been filled out.

And then we throw AI into the mix.

I’m a big advocate of AI tools; they’re astonishing and already in such widespread use that if they were taken away, I expect we’d all panic a little. But alongside the macro concerns about AI taking people’s jobs and killing creativity, I’ve also got a more prosaic concern, which is how AI is giving people permission to throw new curveballs that nobody knows how to hit.

People are asking ‘clever’ questions like: What if we did this with AI instead? Have we challenged this with ChatGPT? Are we legally allowed to use synthetic data?

These AI questions have become the equivalent of ‘shall we research it?’ and ‘are we confident in the methodology?’. Good questions, but often asked instead of making a decision, and with the effect of slowing everything down and moving work further away from execution.

Throw in a good dose of increasing commercial pressure and 18 hours of back-to-back Zoom calls, which need to be juggled with competing (and often more important) pressures of life outside of work, and it creates the sort of toxic mix which leads to exhaustion.

Spend time with your people

So where to next?

Firstly, a healthy dose of empathy. Please. The world is not a kind place, and it feels even less kind at the moment.

That’s not just a passing thought, but a genuine plea. It is especially aimed at the people with LinkedIn ‘road rage’ who seem to think that because the windows are up, they can say anything they like.

We work in an industry where collaboration and human understanding are vital ingredients for success, and yet there are people out there with significant experience and expertise who have made The Snarky LinkedIn Comment their modus operandi.

It doesn’t set a great example, encourages others to think acting like that is ok, and as well as being mean-spirited, it surely can’t be good for business.

As well as that plea for kindness, it’s clear that life for marketers today is moving pretty fast, and that if we don’t stop and look around once in a while, we’re going to miss opportunities.

Marketing needs its Ferris Bueller moment, and that can start by simply spending a bit more of our time with the people, the brands and the creativity which make this such a fun industry to work in, as well as being the bedrock of long-term performance.

It’s a double-whammy. If we spend more time working with people, brands and creativity, then we’ll be working on the stuff that makes the biggest difference to our businesses.

A small step to start with would be to simply carve out a moment to grab a coffee with someone and check in on how it’s all going. Amid all the technology, it’s easy to overlook the fact that authentic, human, social contact has always been part of how we solve things. Connection, discussion, interaction; they’re the things which make the brain tick.

It needn’t be anything deep and meaningful; just a moment to deliberately disconnect from the chaos and reconnect with something or someone else. Whatever it is, whoever it is with, let’s start having the conversations around the edges of the models and the funnels and the data and the optimisation. It is in the more real, less measurable, more human, less artificial exchange of ideas and information that real change becomes possible.

Understand your brands

Along with finding time for good old-fashioned human intelligence, it’s always worth spending some time thinking about the brand(s) you work with, or on.

You can do this on your own or go wild and double up, bringing a bit of brand into that discussion you’re going to have with someone over a coffee or on a walk.

Brands – and the building of them – are one of the reasons many of us got into this industry in the first place, and they’re the things that are out there in the ‘real’ world, which people and businesses pay money for.

Connecting the brand across functions into the fabric of the business is often a cost-effective route to greater consistency and efficiency.

Now, I’m not saying that everybody needs to start being a brand builder – although the stats say we’re still over-investing in the short-term performance stuff – but brand-led questions are a great way to spend time and uncover opportunities. If getting your head around the numbers can help you understand finance, then getting your head around the brand can help you understand marketing.

For example, can you say in simple, no-BS terms what your brand’s positioning is? Do you know all the non-marketing teams in the business that help build the brand? Could people in those teams tell you what the brand positioning is?

If you’ve answered ‘no’, ‘maybe’, or ‘what do you mean by ‘brand’?’ to any of those questions, then you’ve got some really exciting stuff to explore.

With so many aspects of the brand experience nowadays delivered outside of the marketing team, connecting the brand across functions into the fabric of the business is often a cost-effective route to greater consistency and efficiency.

Think differently about creativity

And the final place to stop and have a look around is how you’re using creativity in your job.

This might be Creativity with a big C – advertising and all that – but that tends to be quite a limiting definition. Much more common is the ‘little-c’ creativity which every marketer has the opportunity to explore: how can we think differently about the challenges and opportunities we’re faced with?

How are other people doing it? What would your hero do? What’s the worst way to approach this? What’s the opposite of that? If you had a magic wand, what would be different tomorrow? What would Ferris Bueller say?

Thinking differently – creatively – is a way of giving our brains something different to work on and a change of perspective. Again, the questions above don’t have to be a solo effort and can be great ways to spend time with colleagues and connections.

People. Brands. Creativity.

They are a business’s greatest assets, and if we’re going to tackle the challenge of exhaustion and overwhelm, they’re great places to start looking. A change, instead of a rest.

I’m fully aware that this perspective risks coming across as a little tone-deaf; that “stop and take a look around at people, brands and creativity” might feel like a rose-tinted response to the deep challenges we face in how we are conducting the business of marketing.

But we’ve got to do something, because life does move pretty fast, and if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

The World Happiness Report, which was released this week, agrees, highlighting again the importance of social connectivity and benevolence on how we feel about life and the opportunities available to us.

As much as anything else we should ask, like Dr Pepper, what’s the worst that could happen?

The biggest risk I can see is that marketers manage to actually heed this advice; and as a result spend a bit less time chasing statistics and a bit more time working together, thinking about and working on the people, brands and creativity that drive this industry.

That would be good for all of us.

Johnny Corbett is an independent marketing specialist who has worked in leadership roles for large corporate businesses, startups and agencies, in sectors including food and drink, technology, financial and professional services, politics and the public sector. He is the chief strategy officer at brand and culture consultancy, Glow.