Doctor in Brooklyn: Why are you depressed, Alvy? …
Alvy (age 9): The universe is expanding.
Doctor: The universe is expanding?
Alvy: Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!
Alvy’s Mom: What is that your business? … What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!
Doctor: It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we’ve gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we’re here.
-Excerpted from Annie Hall
I’d love to call in sick for a week to try to soak in the new images of the universe from the James Webb Space Telescope, but I’m not sure that’d go over well at the omnichannel ad platform I call my work home.
There’s a meme that best captured how I’ve been feeling since the images came out. I have no clue what the source, so I’ll do the kind-of-lousy-but-maybe-
We’re at a moment in time filled with verse, and not just the verses found in memes.
There are three verses to consider here:
The universe,
the metaverse,
and
the multiverse.
Let’s briefly look at each in turn.
The universe is where we are.
We are here.
The universe as we know it feels much vaster than it did when I was a kid.
When I grew up, we were still used to calling extraterrestrials Martians. Even our neighboring planet felt so distant — not the kind of place that Matt Damon could turn into a man cave.
Now we see light originating from close to when the universe originated more than 13 billion years ago.
Even recent events in the universe change our concept of history.
We can see a dying star 2,500 light-years away in the Southern Ring Nebula.
The light we are seeing predates the birth of Jesus and Cleopatra. Emperor Ashoka, known as Ashoka the Great who ruled the vast Mauryan Emperor now in India and is credited with spreading Buddhism across Asia, might have been born the moment we are witnessing in these images.
To quote a favorite book title, soon it will feel like everything is illuminated.
The metaverse is where anything is possible, but it isn’t real.
It’s a realm where someone can actively indulge in their fantasies, even if that fantasy is as tame as seeing an avatar of their coworker, or watching an NBA game virtually with some friends.
It may or may not even exist. Forrester says it doesn’t, largely because metaverses are not interoperable.
But individual metaverses are real, and maybe one day they’ll be spectacular.
The multiverse connotes the infinite possibilities that arise when different universes exist.
The multiverse may or may not exist.
If it doesn’t, it exists as an idea.
See Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
See also, in an unforgettable manner, Everything Everywhere All at Once.
It also manifests culturally in forms that we may not have previously associated with the multiverse.
Role-playing games could be the source of fantasy that lends itself well to the metaverse where anything is possible.
But there’s also an internal level. What if, in another universe, I was a wood elf ranger, or a dragonborn sorcerer, or a human barbarian?
There’s also an element of that in another popular art form – pornography. What if…
If Lost were made today, everyone would just assume it’s a multiverse story, and they’d love it even more. The ending wouldn’t disappoint everyone because it was always going to end when Jack discovered he was living in multiple universes.
Okay, so what does this mean for marketers?
I hate asking that question here. But I have to.
It means everything. And nothing. Not everywhere all at once though. Take it easy.
Here’s a very real question for you:
What’s your goal for how you engage with your customers?
Are you expanding their horizons, introducing them to an increasingly vast universe?
Are you giving them a fantasy where they can do what’s impossible in this world?
Or are you giving people a sense of who they would be if they lived different lives and made different choices?
Maybe the answer is none of the above.
Maybe you’re offering something that is just a little faster, better, or cheaper than what one tends to use in their very ordinary lives.
That is beautiful too. With how messy and unpredictable the world feels right now, simple pleasures and utilities are appreciated more than ever.
Just know what you’re selling, and how you’re selling it.
Don’t sell yourself or your products short though. Because what you’re selling was once a star.
As Lawrence Krauss writes in A Universe from Nothing, “One of the most poetic facts I know about the universe is that essentially every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded. Moreover, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than did those in your right. We are all, literally, star children, and our bodies made of stardust.”
David
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WHAT TO READ:
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Recent content shared by Serial Marketers and friends:
- Ad of the Day: NFTs created with real cancer cells to fund cutting-edge cancer treatment by Kendra Clark of The Drum
- Back-to-School Season Offers a Challenging Course for Marketers by Anne Field of ANA
Asher Rapkin: Storytelling in the Metaverse Asher Rapkin recent talk at OMR
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HOW TO SHARE
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EVENTS
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Please submit any events you’re hosting to our calendar at https://serialmarketers.net/
UPCOMING SERIAL MARKETERS EVENTS
- 8/3: First Wednesdays in-person NYC, Mason Jar on E 30th. RSVP on Meetup! 5-7pm
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BRAND INSIDER SUMMIT PHARMA & HEALTH
July 17 – 20, Park City, UT
“Using MediaPost’s signature Brand Insider format, we invite an intimate group of marketers to share their best practices around the key touchpoints of the new patient journey: re-mapping media plans, driving more personalized CRM, learning from the new generation of DTC players, innovating around brand building, building better health martech stacks. Through case studies, Q&As and roundtables, we spend three days of genuine conversation among the brands that are thinking hard about the shape of healthcare marketing for the 2020s.”
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GROW NY
July 19 – 20, New York
“The best retail event in the world returns home to Knockdown Center this Summer. Hundreds of trendsetting founders, marketers and growth experts share their experiences in creating and scaling multi-million dollar brands. Through interviews, panels, workshops and much more, we’re cutting through the noise to ask the most important eCommerce questions – what is working and not working across your online sales channels, and what tactics are you deploying to drastically improve marketing campaign ROI?”
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HOW DATA CAN LEAD TO BETTER ROI AND MEASUREMENT IN AN UNCERTAIN ECONOMY
July 20, Online
“As customer behavior becomes digital-first, marketers have embraced equally critical dual mandates: customer satisfaction and growth. Data is the foundation of both of these objectives, whether it’s to personalize customer experiences and build trusted relationships or to optimize the return on investment of campaigns and programs. But gathering that data, preparing it, analyzing it and ultimately turning it into insights is not without its challenges, especially as issues such as privacy continue to disrupt the old norms of data collection. As the quantity and variety of data continue to increase—particularly the increasing demand for first-party data—and new rules and norms are developed to meet privacy and other challenges, the effective use of data is becoming even more core to marketing success.”
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SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES SUMMIT
October 26–27
“Join Your Peers at the #1 Social Media Event for Senior-Level Marketing Professionals. Learn the nuts and bolts of a successful social media strategy to position your brand for success. Assess and audit your current social media initiatives through real-life feedback, discussions and peer-to-peer learning. Revitalize your strategy framework as brand practitioners walk you step-by-step through successful case studies…etc”
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JOBS
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Keep checking out the #jobs channel in Serial Marketers for more. Better yet, subscribe to get updates from our job listing board. Here are some great opportunities shared in these places or sent to me directly.
HARPER WILDE
Director of Growth
Los Angeles, CA
“The Director of Growth will manage our customer acquisition strategy and roadmap across several channels. You’ll track metrics on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to make sure we are hitting targets, while also learning what works for our brand along the way. This is an opportunity to continue to build and scale a much-loved brand and company. With an established brand and high organic growth, we’re looking for a growth marketer who wants to both drive strategy and get in the weeds in managing some channels directly. The role will have significant autonomy, budget, and support.”
Apply
HARPER WILDE
Director of Product (Digital)
“The Director of Product will own the strategy and roadmap for our DTC website. This role will be highly collaborative, managing all the technical, creative, design, testing, and data work that goes along with owning a successful eCommerce store. The ideal candidate can synthetically blend between analytical data-driven decision making and the insights from a qualitative user interview, thinking holistically about solving customer needs and prioritizing efforts where it matters most to the user and the business. You are as comfortable conceptualizing a new product or feature, as you are weighing the customer, business, and engineering needs. You are highly detail-oriented and know that can make or break a product experience, but can always hold the broader brand and business story alive and in mind as you execute on the finer details.”
Apply
ONDER
Operations Lead
Seattle, WA
“Working directly with the founding CEO and CTO, you’ll be the first operations hire ready to help build a top-notch consumer and supplier experience. This is a critical early hire to help establish the right rhythm and operations to deliver amazing services to our homeowner members as well as build out our exclusive network of service providers from onboarding through their lifetime with Onder. About You: You thrive in early-stage ambiguity and turn the chaos into order. No job is too small or too large. You like to have fun and don’t take yourself too seriously. You care deeply about creating consumer-centric experiences and figuring out how technology can improve peoples lives.”
Apply
ACADIA
Senior Project Manager
Atlanta, GA
Via David in the community
“Acadia’s Project Manager (PM) acts as a central point of contact for select clients, facilitating day-to-day interactions between clients and the Acadia team. They are responsible for managing the entire process and providing a hub of project details for the entire team, from the start of a project to its close. The PM should command a high level of efficiency as well as client happiness to ensure both profitability and repeat business and/or referrals. The PM clearly defines and manages project scopes, assuring that delivery is within scope, on time, and within budget. The PM creates detailed project schedules in our end-to-end agency management tool, works closely with Account Managers and Business Unit Leads to assure appropriate staffing, and is accountable to the Head of Ecommerce.”
Apply
Also, check out the Serial Marketers job board.
Other job resources (see a full list here):
- Beeler.Tech: Job listings for ad operations, programmatic account management, sales operations, and more.
- Braintrust: A freelance platform where you are the owner and where freelance talent keeps 100% of the bill rate.
- Built in NYC: Jobs at a range of levels and functions, as long as you’re okay working in this quaint, backwater hamlet.
- Candidate: Featured marketing and sales jobs
- Creative Women of Color: List yourself in the database and find talent, via Women Who Create
- ExecThread: Senior roles spanning a range of verticals and cities; membership is free but fully vetted (this uses my referral ID to get you in faster)
- Gently Ventures: Helps scale businesses by finding the right talent
- Growth Collective: Apply to join this network of notable freelance marketers
- Hearty: Get recommended by peers and be discovered
- Hue: Amplifying voices of people in color working in marketing
- Lunch Club: Match 1:1 around predetermined goals with accomplished professionals (free)
- NYC Ad Jobs & Networking: A popular Facebook group
- #OpenToWork: There’s a channel in Serial Marketers where you can share what you’re looking for
- Pocit: A platform connecting people of color with jobs in the tech industry
- Questions to Ask for a Marketing Role: What questions should you ask when starting a new marketing role or job?
- Serial Marketers Job Board: Post regular and featured listings and subscribe for updates.
- VC Job Boards: Aleph, Eniac Ventures, Pear, Sequoia, Union Square Ventures
- Venwise: Submit your job interests here and get in front of their roster of hiring leads; select “Serial Marketers” under “How did you find us”
Do you run or enjoy other job listing sites? Let me know, and I’ll share them.
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OFFERS
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GPO: Generate at least 20% more organic traffic. Doing a strong job in SEO but wonder if more traffic can be had? GPO will custom-build an AWS instance that will become a subdomain of your site, and generate at least 20% more traffic the first year. Contact Cory Cox in the community to redeem.
ContactSmarter: ContactSmarter is an AI tool that generates over 40% call booking rates without requiring human intervention. More details.
Markman Speaker Management: Get 15% off the half-day customized virtual training session “Get Speaking Engagements” for individuals or corporate staff through Dec. 31, 2022. Contact Steve Markman to redeem.
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Get 10% discounts on campaigns. ReverseAds reverses the search ad process, outperforming Google at a fraction of the cost. To redeem, contact Thom Feltz by email.
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