I miss Twitter, and more specifically, I miss writing tweets.
Since Musk took over it’s changed a lot, all of the fun many of us used to have there has evaporated, and so I use it less and less.
Twitter used to have a great community of marketing and advertising people, mostly strategists, creatives and some clients. We’d trade opinions, new work and the odd cutting remark. It was a place of high emotional intensity, with lots of ups and downs. Though a less positive and forgiving place than LinkedIn, it had an edge that made it more entertaining and compelling for some of us.
Part of the game there was to try and write the ‘perfect tweet’; to express an opinion as succinctly and as satisfyingly as you could in 140 characters or fewer; to write with “maximum meaning, minimum means”1.
When Musk took over, things changed, some people left for political reasons, the feed started to fill up with more hateful stuff, the algorithm evolved, and the niche little community we’d built ebbed away.
Despite attempts by people to promote alternatives like Threads, Bluesky or Mastodon, LinkedIn ended up being the main beneficiary.
Then the other day, I was reflecting on the fact that it’s nearly five years since I moved from the creative agency world to a different one – to Jellyfish, a marketing company uniting media, creative and data with AI.
I wrote up some observations on my first five years, and when looking at my notes for the post, I realised much of what I’d written was essentially just tweets – individual summaries of the ideas, opinions and beliefs I now hold as a result of my experiences over the last five years. Things I probably wouldn’t believe had I not made the move to Jellyfish.
Previously I’d have tweeted them individually, but not now. So here they are all together in a blog post. Some may turn into a full article here or in Marketing Week at some point – in fact if any strike you as being articles you’d want to read in longer form, let me know.
30 beliefs in 30 tweets
1. Marketing works in 10,000 ways, not in a single, marketing guru-approved way.
2. Build and own your brand freehold, not leasehold2. It’s better to create and own, not rent, your brand assets.
3. People telling you X is dead, are just snake oil salespeople selling you Y.
4. Practices change, principles remain. So be rigid in your principles, flexible in your practices.
5. What’s not going to change is at least as important as what is3.
6. To grow, brands need to act a couple of sizes bigger than they are.
7. People have always built brands ‘as birds build nests, from scraps and straws we chance upon’4. It’s just today’s scraps and straws are smaller yet massively larger in number than before.
8. The best performance marketing people are also big believers in brand and creativity – because they’ve seen its impact on the performance of their work.
9. You can’t escape the formative experiences that shaped your marketing worldview, but don’t ever be a prisoner to them.
10. Media and creative belong together, will eventually reconverge, and AI is driving their reconvergence.
11. Run at the future5. But walk only slowly away from the past.
12. A brand isn’t a luxury, it’s your future cashflow6.
13. You won’t get off the performance plateau7 armed with spreadsheets alone.
14. Don’t dismiss performance marketing, it can buy you time, credibility and revenue for brand building.
15. It takes lots of littles today to help you build big8.
16. AI isn’t just giving us a new toolkit to create brand content with, it’s building us a whole new audience to create brand content for9.
17. You can’t push people through a ‘funnel’ – people enter markets in unpredictable ways and progress at their own pace.
18. The funnel’s not collapsing, it’s a metaphor. Metaphors can’t collapse.
19. Marketers need to know their audiences – and today that means humans, algorithms and AI.
20. Adtech needs to be built by people who understand how humans, brands, communications and creativity works – not just tech.
21. Many of the people who will be the future of commercial creativity are currently serving apprenticeships in the creator economy.
22. Ads don’t convert people, they’re just tiny particles of cultural DNA floating past their field of vision and occasionally getting a fleeting moment of attention.
23. Advertising isn’t a great word for what we do today, as it’s too strongly associated with a narrow type of paid communication. The meaning of the word needs broadening or we need a new one.
24. Marketing communication is a 1000 piece jigsaw. Strategists help paint the picture on the box.
25. There’s never been a golden age of advertising. Nostalgia doesn’t build brands. (And it won’t rebuild the industry).
26. Adtech democratised ad media, GenAI democratises ad creative10.
27. AI puts the means of production into the hands of the people with the ideas – the creatives11.
28. New principles for brand building in a world of creative fragmentation – high consistency, high volume, high fit for platform12.
29. Search isn’t dying, it’s having babies13.
30. Nostalgia for what advertising used to be stops people re-imagining what advertising could be.
- The design philosophy of mid-twentieth century graphic designer Abram Games. ↩︎
- One of BBH founder Sir Nigel Bogle’s mantras and beliefs
↩︎ - Building on something Jeff Bezos said and expanded on here: https://www.marketingweek.com/principles-effective-marketing-communication/ ↩︎
- Jeremy Bullmore ↩︎
- A BBH mantra, to which I’ve added the last part ↩︎
- Tim Ambler defined a brand as ‘A reservoir of future cashflow’ ↩︎
- Grace Kite and I coined this term together
https://www.marketingweek.com/tom-roach-brand-stuck-performance-plateau/
↩︎ - Grace Kite coined ‘lots of littles’, I borrowed ‘big as a collection of smalls’ from Sir Nigel Bogle, and together we’ve been talking about the overall theme of ‘Building big from lots of littles’ ↩︎
- This is a summary of the ideas here https://www.marketingweek.com/brand-building-ai-world/ ↩︎
- From this: https://www.marketingweek.com/tom-roach-creative-marketing-ai/ ↩︎
- From this: https://www.marketingweek.com/tom-roach-creative-marketing-ai/ ↩︎
- From this: https://www.marketingweek.com/brand-building-adapt-creative-fragmentation/ ↩︎
- A conscious build on Tess Alps of Thinkbox on TV from this: https://www.marketingweek.com/brand-building-ai-world/ ↩︎
Tom Roach 