The history of the Apple brand is far more meandering and complex than many people care to admit. It’s so meandering that it’s quite challenging to tell it chronologically, so, let’s look at overlapping and shifting themes instead.
When people talk about Apple as a brand, they often envision a minimalistic premium lifestyle brand, but that’s a relatively recent incarnation.
Sadly, my brain absorbs marketing communications like a sponge and then loses sleep over incongruent thinking, so here are some “Apples” that may surprise you.
This simple process, taking as little as 15–30 minutes with the majority of the work done by the AI, creates a bespoke tool that enhances all your future AI-assisted writing.
The approach
Prof Scott Galloway mentioned in a recent podcast how, while feeling unhappy with the ending of a column he wrote one night, he asked a chatbot to write an alternative ending paragraph in his style and was pleasantly surprised by the result.
Writers often have mixed feelings about the fact that AI models have been trained on their writing. The silver lining for them is that when well-known writers work with AI, they can ask it to write in their style and get better results. But what about the rest of us?
As someone who values both creativity and strategic thinking, I’ve always been meticulous about my writing. To be honest, it’s probably the reason why I’m not as prolific as many others. 🤷 When I started using AI tools like ChatGPT, I quickly encountered a different limitation — how generic both style and advice can get. Of course, I could prompt: “Rewrite this post in a style combining the best of Mark Ritson and Malcolm Gladwell”, but what would be the point? I want my writing to be in my voice and to reflect my specific views and needs.
My objective was to ensure the chatbots helped me maintain my unique voice and thought process. I wanted them to assist me not only as copyeditors and proofreaders but also to be more useful as sparring partners while not wasting my time with views I fundamentally reject. I also wanted a tool that would allow me to “prime” the AI and start writing immediately without wasting time on repetitive tasks each time I start a new project.
To do this, I used the AI to create a personalised writing guide for the AI.
The process I used is straightforward and could be useful for anyone looking to collaborate effectively with AI. Today, I’m sharing how you can do the same, with the AI doing most of the heavy lifting.
In-housing, the practice of merging creative services with marketing teams within the same organisation, promises streamlined operations and enhanced collaboration. However, it often brings to light a universal and age-old tension between marketing and creative mindsets.
Sooner or later, in-housing encounters the same challenges that are familiar in client-agency relationships and sometimes even within agencies themselves (especially bigger ones). Those two cultures have always had to work together for creative marketing to work.
Effectively combining marketing and creative teams requires a specific set of skills. It comes with differing worldviews, cultural tensions and often knowledge gaps that have to be tackled.
Recently, I have helped multiple organisations with in-house creative teams improve their briefing process and the understanding of creative strategy across their marketing and creative teams. This tension transcends sectors, affecting B2B and B2C alike, from media to FMCG, Tech to professional services.
At some point every team has to find a shared language and values that help them bridge marketing and creative communications. You can’t have a high-performing team, effective briefs and briefing sessions or successful creative development without it. A designer who understands marketing objectives and a marketing manager who understands the creative process will always outperform those limited to their discipline and eyeing the other team with suspicion or snobbery.
In-housing just brings the pain home. You still have to solve it and bring people together. Training for shared knowledge across disciplines can be the first step. Reengineering processes and shaping tools and templates are of great importance. But it all can only work if it considers the business model and larger work culture, and makes everyone feel seen.
Whether you work in-house or with agencies, have you found effective ways to bridge the gap between marketing and creativity in your organisation?
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Prompt: the tower of babel made of neon marketing ephemera against a stormy sky (MJ5)
It’s often said that the very things that initially attract you to someone are the things that eventually begin to grate on your nerves. This old saying perfectly captures my relationship with the marketing industry.
Early days, I fell in love with Marketing’s creative, “whatever works” approach. A magpie-like mentality to pick and choose the best concepts and strategies for success from our own as well as other disciplines. Yet, over time, I have become increasingly frustrated with the neverending onslaught of synonymous, mutated, and spliced frameworks, models, labels, jargon, and “stuff”. It’s bloody exhausting.
The tragedy of this situation is that the genuine ideas, original concepts, research and science that underpin our profession are buried beneath this barely held-together tower of shiny marketing trinkets. This dearth of context and historical understanding has led me to call my blog “Marketing Babylon”. Way back in 2006, when I was still a fresh-faced agency-side rookie.
The paradox of marketing is that the creative freedom we love is both our saviour and our tormentor. It’s what makes our industry innovative and adaptable, but it also spawns a convoluted mess that leaves most marketers befuddled and, frankly, less effective. And in a classic “it’s always the children who suffer”, it also stunts the growth of our junior team members, even those with some formal training.
Marketing Babylon 