My new column is out in The Drum:
If you post about marketing and have writer’s block, you can always ponder whether some recent negative news over some marketing tactic will lead to the ‘death’ of that practice. It’s unoriginal and cliched, but people will read it – even though the answer is always no.
While I was on holiday and giving a talk in Dublin last month on the biggest lies in digital marketing as part of my work as a marketing keynote speaker, Vanessa Friedman used the recent debacle of the Fyre Festival in the Bahamas and its promotional partnerships with Hailey Baldwin, Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner and Emily Ratajkowski to discuss ‘The Rise and (Maybe) Fall of Influencers’ in the New York Times.
Nothing will change. The Fyre Festival was terrible, but there is little that can be done to prevent anything similar from happening again.
If you read too many clickbait marketing articles from people who are desperate for pageviews, you will fall under the illusion that marketing communications is constantly changing and that one thing or another is always ‘dying’ or ‘broken’. But marcom never really changes – and when it does, it changes very, very slowly.