Have you seen the deliciously postmodern promo for Timothée Chalamet’s new film Marty Supreme? It’s ricocheting around the internet right now, and for good reason. The spot offers a bone-dry portrayal of a virtual marketing meeting between the film’s agency team and Chalamet himself, who joins the call to share his “thinking.”
He wants to be on a Wheaties box. He has a Pantone: “hardcore orange”. He demands the Statue of Liberty. The Eiffel Tower. The session culminates in a sixty-second team meditation on the values of “culmination, integration and fruitionizing”.
It’s worth the full eighteen minutes, because it offers a frighteningly accurate portrayal of modern marketing planning and its superficial cocktail of optics, bullshit, and tactification.
Yes, tactification. I made that word up. But if Chalamet gets “fruitionizing,” I’m having one too.
Tactification means the almost total obsession with execution that afflicts most marketers and comes at the expense of a broader, deeper grasp of the discipline.
Roughly 70% of American marketers have no formal marketing training. They stumble backwards into marketing from the consumer side and assume the entire discipline is just an array of tactical activities: Social posts, billboards, blimps. The Eiffel fucking Tower.
In reality — and this will shock precisely no one with proper training — tactics and communications are merely the tip of the marketing spear.
Proper marketers start in exactly the opposite place: diagnosis. First comes research. A total understanding of the market you’re about to enter before you enter.
Roughly 70% of American marketers have no formal marketing training.
After comes strategy.
The sequence has been clear for millennia: diagnosis informs strategy, strategy directs tactics. When you start with tactics, all you ultimately achieve is what Sun Tzu called “the noise before defeat.”
Too many marketing teams operate a noisy approach that starts and ends with tactics. In fact, that’s too generous.
When the late Jerry McCarthy gave us the Four Ps. Promotion was just one lever alongside pricing, product, and place.
But like the Chalamet meeting, marketers now usually restrict themselves not just to tactics, but only a quarter of the potential by focusing exclusively on advertising.
Most marketing teams are just glorified communications units, with all the other tactical challenges now outsourced to more able, better-trained alternates. Marketers are left with blimps and pantones. An echo of their former selves.
