Good Morning and welcome back!
This week we have Harryâs return and boy is it brutal and honest!
Next week we have something a little special planned with someone who is famously unfilteredâŚ
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Harry Lang - Connect On LinkedIn - Teaching Business Leaders AI Through The Oxford AI School
Last Monday, I was invited to speak to a class of final year marketing students at Oxford Brookes University by the Senior Professor of Marketing, professor Robin Lee. It was an honour and a privilege, of course, and I tried my best to amuse them with tales of my biggest career mistakes (the highlights - we only had an hourâŚ) before sharing some of my thoughts on what their future marketing careers could look like in the Age of AI.
Their questions at the end of the session were quite telling:-
âWhy do I keep getting rejected by automated systems when I apply for graduate jobsâ
âHow do I stand out with my applications?â
âWill AI make it harder to work in marketing?â
I smelt a theme brewing...
Now, regular readers will find this admittance no shock. Iâm not one to sugarcoat things.
The presentation I gave to the Brookes students was titled:-
âIs Marketing A Shit Career?â
âŚwhich felt a little harsh to the hopeful, thin skinned, aspirational undergraduates looking back at me across the lecture theatre, but I wasnât about to lieâŚ
A big part of older, cynical, battle hardened me thinks that yes, itâs not a career I could or would advocate for any young person without some serious health warnings:-
Itâs hard to get into
It pays badly at the start
Youâre rarely in any job for more than three years, so youâre emotionally and actually disposable.
Your output is constantly judged subjectively. Just imagine if Finance teams had to suffer derisory comments on their work the way marketers do?
âYeah, to hell with your cursed spreadsheets. Your reporting is outdated and your forecasts are amateurish guesswork that a child could do better - Bloody numbering-in department. And I HATE that F&%$ing + sign! (and yet CFOs still outlast CMOs by an average of four years)
The goalposts shift every minute
You can never achieve perfection, and even if you could, the perfection is fleeting and rarely repeatable.
THEN - AI comes in and persuades CEOs that Agents can replace marketers and media spend to massage their ill conceived short term financial forecast and paste layers of Duck Tape over their strategic failings.
Yeah, itâs a crummy career yet⌠yet⌠Itâs STILL more fun, interesting, different, creative, challenging, collaborative, and fulfilling than most other jobs I can think of, and thatâs what I told the students I met at Brookes.
Even with AI breathing down your neck like a Mensa-grade Microwave, you still need to be able to understand people, craft a brief, fix a broken jigsaw of strategy, tactics, measurement and channels, manage thick clients and headstrong agencies, then fail to sell ugly concepts that YOU KNOW will turn into Swans of campaigns if theyâre ever given the chance to fly.
(TL;DR - They wonât be).
âEmbrace the chaosâ hit share to help othersâŚ
And all for what? For one fleeting moment when the stars align and you publish genuinely brilliant work and it lives to see the light of day. Work that not only gets talked about but that smashes your absurdly challenging brand and sales targets. Work that your parents mention BEFORE they knew you had a hand in it. Work that⌠(trust me, I hate myself for writing this, but needs must) âŚis so massively influential that it shits on Zeitgeist and genuinely influences popular culture.
Itâs a rare beast, for sure, and it seems like a skinny premise to sell to young people as the lynchpin of their entire careers, but the kinetic potential and aspiration to reach such a goal is where the fun lies.
So yes, marketing is a shit career, but only for the likes of me, the chopped up, fourteen jobbed, thrice redundant former CMO who now has the privilege of working for himself in something I enjoy and control. For the students I met on Monday, the world is literally their oyster, and I admit I was envious of the adventures that lie before them.
And what advice did I ultimately give them? For the question around getting through the ATS-barricaded door of the graduate program interviews, it was the same advice I was given when applying to ad agencies 27 years ago:-
âBe Outstandingâ
âŚby which I mean, just frickin stand out from the herd.
Thousands of limp minded undergraduates are hurling their AI enhanced CVs and likely degree scores in the general direction of London right about now. Itâs a crap shoot - a lottery - and one in which Oxbridge savants and Nepo Babies covet the bulk of the tickets. For everyone else, your chances are slim and none, so youâre gonna lose.
UnlessâŚ
âŚ.unless you press the fuckit button, ignore the rules, identify everyone at the company you aspire to work at, from the car park attendant to the CEO, and send them a personalised, interesting message, thought, idea or nonsense in a creative way, leaving an indelible tattoo on their soul that spells out your name with the whiff of joy surrounding it.
In my day, when applying to a big (now defunct) agency called TBWA, I was asked to mail in a bunch of written interview answers plus a tape recording of my favourite animal sound. I tried to write impactful, creative and brave answers, but they were fairly trite nonsense if Iâm honest, so the animal noise was my last Hail Mary resort.
Late one night, a few drinks in from a Biggmarket session and inspired by my dear friend Tazzy, I hit play on the tape deck and recorded my interviewâs winning gem:-
âEeee Eeee Eeee AaaaaaahâŚ.â
Yes, a dolphin having an organism was enough to get me past several thousand intellectually superior humans and through the door to my interview at what was then the worldâs greatest Ad agency. And THATâs the lesson: -
Be funny, be outlandish, be different, be odd, be brave, be stupid - be anything except the same as everyone else in the generic, beige, AI attuned applicant pool of non-starters who will never ever ever get the nod and then at least you have some small semblance of a chance.
1% beats 0% 100% of the time.
Now youâre in an interview - great! Only three rounds to go. So my advice to the Brookes students was to have a simple weapon in your pocket - evidence that you actually cared to understand how marketing turns into money, meaning you can demonstrate:-
A/ how marketing works and
B/ what customers go through before they start spending money on a brand.
This bit is really easy. Just pick a funky new product on Amazon, join the affiliate program, build a website in Claude and Netlify, create some social content and videos linking back to the site or direct to your Amazon link then sell JUST ONE PRODUCT.
If youâve done that by the time I interview you (so you can demonstrate youâve proactively built an entire funnel from brand awareness through to sale) I donât care if youâve sold zero products. Hell, I donât care if your videoâs shit and your understanding of Search Console is woeful - youâre through to the next round.
You thought. You created. You built. You tried.
Sounds easy? It is - but 99% of people Iâve interviewed over the past ten years havenât bothered to step outside their comfort zones by having a go at building something real off their own backs.
If you;re a student today with marketing aspirations, youâre extremely lucky. You have the thin skin of inexperience, not the toughened, cynical leather of people like me. Youâll be more open to new technology, learning, experience, channels, tactics and methodology. Like osmosis, youâll allow the unknown to flow into you and excite you, not demean you and scare you.
Thatâs it - thatâs the article - marketing is shit, but itâs not. AI will make your career easy and at the same time, very much harder, getting your first job is impossible until itâs not. The worldâs going to hell on a star spangled rainbow while some version of a gleaming, golden future awaits you on the other side.
So go - go out there and embrace the chaos - because the unpredictability is what keeps life interesting, and youâre about to dive head first into a career made up of a maze of opportunities.
Have fun finding your way.
- Harry Lang
Harry Lang runs The Oxford AI School which teaches teams the basics of AI in an intuitive, practical and fun way. The School has modules to cater for numerous industries and experience levels.. Harry is also the author of âBrands, Bandwagons & Bullsh*t,â a 5 Star rated marketing guidebook available on Amazon. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, check out the Schoolâs socials or email him to book an AI training course at Harry@TheOxfordAISchool.com
Did you apply the practical advice from last weekâs MU?
Notice the âbreathâ: Pay attention to the moment you switch into your work persona.
Be honest: Stop answering âbusyâ on autopilot and tell one person the truth about how you are doing each week.
Evaluate your âyesesâ: Ask if your commitments are for the business or for your own need to prove something.
Thanks for reading again this week, we have an extra special MU next week, it might be the most unfiltered yet đ
Danny Denhard & Harry Lang
Funny thing about the âmessage everyone from the car park attendant to the CEOâ advice. Thatâs account-based outreach. Any graduate who gets a job that way has already proved they can do the thing most companies are desperate to hire for.