Most marketers are LLMs
... and need to improve their training set
During a recent analytics project with a medtech company, I had the opportunity to work a little with their marketing team, who were gearing up for a product launch. Despite the differences in their industry from mine, it was intriguing to see how their approach to product positioning and message crafting mirrored that of any technology company.
The language of their messaging and content struck me immediately. They were trying to say that the device to be launched was unique and exciting. However, even with my low exposure, their marketing materials read very much like every other vendor in the field. Sure, they made different specific claims, but most of what they had to say could have been cut-and-paste from competitors. On its own, the writing was not terrible, but it was bland and very …. predictable.
And there’s the word. Predictable. The marketers were behaving like LLMs, generating the statistically most suitable text for every occasion. Where their inputs were the same as every other vendor - about reliability, accuracy, and performance - their outputs were indistinguishable. Occasionally, they had some specific claim to make that was different - a resolution, for example, 25% better than the competitors. That represents a real advantage, but again, the language was simply repetitive.
In my field of data and analytics, I see the same struggle. Marketers want to create exceptional content, but they often find themselves constrained by the lowest common denominator of their language, different only in the details of specific claims. Few companies have a distinctive voice.
It’s not just that LLMs can replace marketers like this. Marketers are already behaving like LLMs!
To be fair, my many friends in marketing are irreplaceable, but for other reasons. They are hard-working and imaginative in putting together strategies around campaigns, events, and collateral. To do so, they must be attentive to long-term trends and short-term patterns in local, global, and vertical markets. They must work sensitively with egotistical product teams, demanding sales teams and needy partners. They must find headlines, straplines and taglines every executive can support and speak to. Doing all this is a human skill. It’s negotiation more than content creation.
So, what can we do about the content? Over time it becomes a burden to write and to read. We could just give in. Who reads it anyway? Who cares about tone? Perhaps all the target audience needs is the usual industry pablum and a pointer to specific differentiators. Let’s hand it over to the LLMs and get on with the rest.
We can do better.
One of the best marketers I have worked with - in terms of content - was Jennifer Barone. Jenn is a jazz poet and author of a heartbreakingly lovely book of poems about love and Italian food called Saporoso. It’s a favorite book of mine to gift to others. Other marketers I know and admire are great at pulling together all those other complexities I mentioned, but Jenn brought the gift of words, even to very bland corporate messaging.
Over lunch with the medtech marketers, I asked them, What are you reading just now? The answer was not nothing. Instead, a pretty good range of books was mentioned: I came away with a reading list. But it did not all go to plan. My next question, however, did draw a blank … What did you learn from what you read - about description, expression, tone of voice and register - that you can use in your work?
There was nothing. Even those who were reading the books I now want to read thought of them as quite disconnected from their work, although their work is greatly involved with words. They struggle every day to find the right description, expression, tone and register … but they learn little about that from their reading.
So, my third question was not asked: What do you read in order to learn about these things?
This, then, is why these smart, diligent people are turning out the same old stuff. Their only inputs are the same old stuff.
Here’s what I do, however imperfectly. I read and read and read: literature, philosophy, history, nature writing, poetry and so much else. I keep a notebook while I read, and in it I write down words, phrases and literary techniques that I find particularly effective or striking. Here’s a page of my notes …
I’m sure you can’t read my writing, but I’ll transcribe a few snippets for you …
from the mess and joy
it is this precious thing we are making out of life’s mess and muddle
moving from embellishment to invention
there is nothing in it that is not the result of a partnership
turf-lifting has its own particular injury
Who writes like this? Very few people in the tech world. This is from The Jewel Garden - beautiful title! It’s by Monty Don, an English gardener and TV presenter, and his wife Sarah. It’s about how they turned their life around from despair and bankruptcy and became successful, even famous, gardeners. It’s a joy to read and they both write with distinctive, insightful voices.
I don’t use these phrases, or words, or longer passages, just as they are. But they inspire me to think about how I can say things. There is nothing in it that is not the result of a partnership. That’s a lovely way to talk about how we work together. Our marketing LLM would likely say: The content is solely the outcome of a collaborative effort.
So, try this. Read for pleasure: history, fiction, philosophy, whatever. But read with a notebook by your side. When you come across a phrase, a word, or even a whole passage that serves well some function in the text, follow Captain Cuttle’s dictum: When found, make a note of. In your next email or your next proposal or content, think about what you can learn from those skillful words. Don’t use them directly, but learn from them.
You will enjoy your writing much more, and that pleasure, that savor of words, will flow from you to your readers.