It is four in the morning and my trials of fevers and couch naps have finally faded. For 37 hours I have nodded in and out of this world, interrupted only by dog breath, a persistent prompting to hydrate, and a mess of advertisements. The TV stayed on, tuned (streamed?) to a cable channel showing the kind of movies that are indefinitely relegated to syndication – chopped scenes, non-linear development, clipped profanities and jarring cuts to commercial breaks. The ads pay for the content, the content give the ads somewhere to exist. If you don’t pay close attention it all runs together into more or less of the same thing. All of it exists purely to exhaust an over-inflated budget.

In the hours I spent convalescing on the couch, I couldn’t tell you what I watched. Masticated movies, repeated marathons, endless commercials. Even as I napped and left my subconscious mind open to whatever auditory suggestions might have come through, I woke up feeling totally empty. Over the next 24 hours, around the world, 8 billion people will wake up in phases and go about their day – each subjected to thousands of bits of advertising and branded items across variations of every medium and media. It will be a persistent brain drain, it will be the ever-growing rot at the edges of our attention, it will be a blight on the collective grey matter.

We could solve problems, or we could deal with the loud, lazy, automated, and granularity targeted refuse that is modern marketing.

Of course, I’d rather do something entirely different.

I propose KAOS MARKETING.

At the core, KAOS is taking the time to ignore what you think you know and try something completely different. This is a disruption. This is your opportunity to replace the spreadsheet with the human.

The principles of KAOS are ever-changing, but here’s the start of it:

People. At the end of your campaign is a person who needs to make a choice.

People, for the most part, are a collection of cellular systems working in autonomous capacities that are structured by neural networks that incorporate into the brain – which we cannot even begin to comprehend – layered over with the sheer awe of the idea of consciousness and subconsciousness. But yes, please, follow the rules and guidelines of the marketing executive who thinks themselves an armchair psychologist.

Data can only tell you what happened. It cannot and will not ever tell you what will happen next. This is called “predicting the future” and only happens by pure chance accident. The more certain you are of a specific outcome, the more disastrous the end result tends to be.

Chaos is the natural order of things. Entropy is the gradual decline into chaos – all things are perpetually returning to the most basic, energy latent state. On a long enough timeline, everything collapses and comes to an end. In the beginning, there was nothing but chaos – all particles existing in all forms just as they are. Energy organizes inert objects into something else. A pile of Lego is nothing until your energy makes it all into something, or until more energy unmakes it into its natural, latent state. The world is ruled by entropy, chaos is the natural order of things.

All sandcastles are smoothed by the power of the tide.

Chaos is not disorder or randomness. People – humans – are what determine is or isn’t in “order.” That pile of Lego spilled on the floor seems random to you, but it may be in a perfect functional shape for someone else. Order is a matter of perspective.

The conscious mind seeks patterns and craves predictability, but our subconsciousness exists as chaos. Our desire to put things in order works directly opposite to our subconscious need to see things as they are. We know this as the eternal conflict that drives all motivation.

There is no place for AI here. If you think you need AI to do whatever it is you do, then you need to find something else to do. Retail, generative AI is the equivalent of shredding a Gutenberg bible so you can make a recycled cardboard box so your pet cat has somewhere to take their shits.

Creative dies by committee. “Shareholder value” will always stand in the way between you and anything worthwhile. Advertising has lost all relevancy. Welcome to the post-branding era. This isn’t about “going back to basics” or retrograding into the Mad Men era. Advertising worked by chance – the novelty of early advertising made it profoundly effective. Today, anyone can see anything they want at any time – there is no novelty, there is no surprise. Don Draper was always an asshole.

So how do you sell to a population who is in a cycle of perpetual debt?

There is no “ideal customer.” Don’t bother designing “marketing avatars.” If any of this will work, you need real people who exist in the real world. People are a collection of regrets – be sure to add that to your next investor deck.

How can you work for “engagement” when most of us are too afraid to start a conversation with a stranger on the street? If you can’t sell it on a street corner, you can’t sell it at all – to hell with your “friction-less sales funnel” and “targeted ad campaigns.” The public square has vanished, there are no third spaces, every environment is a sales pitch.

If you have to invent a problem to sell your solution, it’s not a solution worth selling. Solve the problem, not the symptom.

From here in:

Let the audience find you. Algorithms and targeted ads are flooding attentions with shit no one needs. The right people are getting wise to this. They’d rather seek out instead of getting served up.

Quality happens at a human scale. For further evidence, look around. Automation and mass production have given us a wealth of disposable, forgettable crap that will rot for generations. The potential of humankind is sucked into the black hole of content that is social media. In a world that runs to the scale of billions, create for dozens. Work smaller, work slower, make something that might surprise us.

Decentralize. Social media is but one shift away from being a mess of AI bots talking to each other. Advertising budgets will bloat, content will get shittier, and all the wrong people will be rewarded with massive bonus checks. When you stop playing the game, the right people find you.

Fuck the shareholder, embrace the stakeholder.