Welcome to Marketing Chronicles. A monthly dose of strategy and creativity for brands, agencies, and businesses — delivered on the second Wednesday of every month. If you like what you see and you’re not already a subscriber, join us for free.

Hello Marketing Chroniclers. Last month I had the privilege to deliver a talk at The Gathering alongside Charlie Grinnell about the attention economy. I’ve included a summary of what I chatted about below, as well as a series of thoughts around AI, media and memeology.

Drop me a line on LinkedIn if anything stands out to you!

Enjoy 🧠

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DEPT. OF CULTURE/

Storytelling vs Personalization: You Can’t Have Both

There are two contradictory narratives that consistently get pushed in the advertising industry: storytelling is imperative for comms to stick, and personalization is the future of ad delivery.

Why are these competing narratives? In short: there's no storytelling if you're personalizing everything.

So much of what makes the stories we tell in culture matter is the fact that they're the connective tissue between our experiences.

• The Genesis in the Bible

• The Odyssey

• Romeo and Juliet

• David and Goliath

• or even more fleeting things such as March Madness' Cinderella stories

These aren't customized to fit our individual interests - what makes them interesting is not only the fact that they are rich in depth and meaning, but also because we know that they MATTER.

Being relevant requires some sort of shared connection. When everyone reads a news article, that story matters. When we all see a new movie, that movie matters. When we all listen to a new album, that album matters.

The tech platforms have sold us this idea that having algorithms that serve only what matters to us would make entertainment more enjoyable. But this fragmented media landscape has eroded shared meaning.

Therefore, if you're a brand trying to achieve RELEVANCE in the market, WASTE is good. You want people to have heard of you, even if they are not part of your ICP.

These connective tissues in our culture are what elevate stories above the mundane. But you can't have that AND personalization at the same time.

Personalization is what ruptures shared stories in exchange for echo chambers.

MENTAL CARTOGRAPHY/

Thoughts On GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

We’re entering a GEO era where marketers must map minds as carefully as they map media. Meaning, if you’re not building mental availability at the right usage occasions, your brand is going to be invisible.

LLMs are quickly redrawing consumers' mental maps of every category. The emerging field of GEO (generative engine optimization) is becoming increasingly more important as a tactical component of every brand plan.

Last week OpenAI launched its Instant Checkout feature which allows consumers to buy stuff straight off the ChatGPT chats.

But the way consumers are searching for products in these chats is not brand-led. It's usage occasion-led.

For the past 15 years brands could get away with paid to do the heavy lifting of discoverability on search engines, but moving forward owned and earned will play a much bigger role.

Brands' owned channels will need to build out catalogue-style content that addresses the various category entry points (CEPs) across the customer journey, meanwhile earned will play a role beyond awareness and become a key input for LLMs' results (think third party mentions and reviews on Reddit and Tripadvisor).

Contrary to what some might think, LLMs are actually putting a magnifying glass on the importance of brand. It won't cut it anymore to just run highly optimized performance marketing campaigns - LLMs under-value such things.

Brands that have strategically and successfully built a network of CEPs will stand a better chance of being seen as authentic and credible sources of information in the eyes of LLMs.

Marketers will need to start behaving much more as cognitive cartographers moving forward - and as per usual, those who have been taking brand building seriously over the past 10 years already have a leg up.

DEPT. OF MEDIA/

The Medium Is The Message

A couple of weeks ago I re-read McLuhan's book "The Medium is the Massage" (it's worth looking into why he stuck with the typo), and was amazed with how prophetic he was back in 1964.

At the time he was talking about "electric circuitry" profoundly changing how humans interacted with their environment, and his aim was pointed directly at the bullseye.

The paper, radio and television created space between thinking and action. One simply could not "act" upon anything they were consuming right there and then (it often required mailing something in or being physically present as a form of direct response).

But as digital mediums began conveyor belting content into our eyelids (and now eardrums), that space has evaporated. We can click, voice command, and pay in the moment itself.

This has had massive ripple effects across society:

• We went from "making a list" to having a grocery store on-demand right in our living rooms (i.e., Amazon Prime)

• We went from "sleeping on it" to being able to donate to political parties from our beds

• We went from "circulating ideas" to being able to broadcast our opinions to millions simply by putting our credit cards down

This fluidity has effectively replaced the practice of thinking with a culture of reaction.

The medium - not the content - has the power to completely transform how we interact with our surroundings.

MEMEOLOGY/

The Genealogy of Memes

Memes are increasingly becoming a critical element of professional communications (believe it or not). As a Meme Connoisseur myself, I've always been fascinated by how they're created and spread.

For starters, the term "Meme" isn't new. The evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, first coined it in his book "The Selfish Gene" (1976) to describe how ideas spread and replicate in human culture (though Memes could be "found in the wild" for thousands of years).

As the years went on, the mediums through which Memes spread continued to evolve, and so did the Memes.

But one thing remains true: the comedic flair of memes is the connective tissue across their recent iterations from the past 80 or so years.

Memes carry A LOT of information within them. The context, the meta meanings, and banality of imagery used enable viewers to process a lot more than just the words on the page.

To this day, my cousin and I exchange Memes regularly - almost like a reserve of old wines ("here's a batch from last week, chef's kiss"). They are nothing to be scoffed at - add this powerful dimension to your communications toolkit and see how effective you become in this age of passive attention.

DEPT. OF AI/

Implications of an Agentic Future

If consumer tech typically goes obsolete every ~3 years, then brand is truly their most valuable asset. And yet, too many businesses offering a "differentiated tech" bypass the work and investment that goes into brand-building.

We know that Moore's Law has recently started to slow down due to the physical limits of silicon.

But, Kurzweil’s Law (the rate of technological progress itself is accelerating, with each new innovation building upon previous ones faster than before) seems to be accelerating with AI.

This means that an agentic future poses a pretty big risk for brands: when consumers interact with your brand through an AI bot, that bot embodies the properties of the user, not of the brands themselves. All remnants of distinction evaporate.

Click-through rates to websites will nosedive as people use LLMs more and more to search and discover (we're already seeing that with Google's newest feature "AI Mode").

But brands that understand how to conduct mental cartography are effectively positioning themselves ahead of large language models - they're building availability in people's minds.

I suspect CPG brands will have less of an issue in this new reality as they can still be found physically in stores, but products that rely on intangible presence (such as software, insurance, professional services, telecom, etc.) will need to heavily tip the scales of their marketing budgets towards brand-building - and in turn, rewire how they measure marketing success internally from quarterly cycles to multi-year cycles.

Paying for search visibility is still nascent on LLMs (though I hope it never becomes a thing), hyper-targeted campaigns on social continue to be served to heavy users/clickers, meanwhile light buyers who amount to the majority of category sales are becoming harder and harder to reach.

Which is why live sports remains a massive expressway into the minds of consumers. I find it difficult to see how AI will disrupt sports viewing, though I'd love to hear if anyone has other thoughts on it.

The most valuable brands to date not only have exceptional products that continue to cannibalize their previous offerings as a defensive strategy, but they are also some of the biggest marketing spenders in the world.

PUBLIC SPEAKING/

Attention Is The New Shelf Space

This past month I had the opportunity to take the stage alongside my good friend Charlie Grinnell at The Gathering to talk about how to harness attention.

I’ve always found this to be a fascinating topic, but one that often gets pushed aside by brand planners leaving all the fun to media strategists. But I am a true believer that every brand strategist should understand and be well-versed in media studies.

In a nutshell, this is what I talked about:

We’re entering an Attention Economy where quality impressions is the name of the game. Meaning, if you’re not earning attention long enough for memory to form, your brand is essentially invisible.

Our culture used to happen in public: cafés, theatres, community spaces. Then it moved home with the radio. The TV rearranged our furniture from facing each other to facing the television set — culture was now seen from our living rooms. Eventually, the smartphone came along and put the world in our pockets. Every technological leap has reshaped how attention flows: from shared to solitary, from passive to personalized.

This new digital world effectively fused thought and action into the same moment. You now have a grocery store in your living room — simply open Instacart and order what you need. You can debate politics from your bed simply by logging into X/Twitter, all the while immediately donating funds to your party of choice. The space that previously separated reflection from action has been flattened.

Which means we need to stop treating media as neutral pipes feeding us information and start seeing them as environments with biases of their own — while the car became an extension of our legs, the coat an extension of our skins, and the gun an extension of our firsts, digital media has effectively become an extension of our minds.

And the way we engage with this digital world is through trading attention. Meaning, attention is now the principal currency of engagement: the shelf space of the digital age.

But here’s the problem: most brands only earn about 2.5 seconds of active attention on average across all mediums — with large variations depending on how distracting the medium is (i.e., can you easily scroll past it, are there other things on the screen pulling your attention, is the screen coverage 100%, etc.). But according to research, it takes around 3 seconds for memory to even begin encoding. Below that threshold, recall is near zero.

One way to compress this encoding time is through Distinctive Brand Assets (a brand’s colours, sounds, characters, shapes). DBAs are shortcuts that facilitate recognition, moving that 3-second barrier closer to 1.5. They help brands get recognized before their audience even realizes they’re paying attention.

In other words: DBAs are your brand’s fast lane into memory.

But here’s the catch — creativity is still being massively underused as a driver of branded attention. Most brands are wallpaper. They blend into the environments they’re funding.

Cult brands, on the other hand, understand that attention is not won through volume but through quality. They build for their audience, they know their customer’s journey inside out, and they make the customer the hero of the story, with the brand as the supporting cast.

If we want to stand out in the digital bazaar, our brands must be truly remarkable; not just visible. Because in a world where everything is shoppable, the brands that make recognition effortless are the ones that turn attention into commerce.

INSPIRATION/

The Guide To Restaurant Bathrooms

Back in 1900, founders of the Michelin Tire Company, Édouard and André Michelin, published a free guide to help drivers find restaurants, hotels, and repair shops, encouraging more travel (and tire sales).

As cars and travel became more common, the guide evolved. By 1926, it began awarding stars to recognize excellent restaurants, turning it from a travel aid into a respected culinary authority. By 1931, the three-star system was introduced, and Michelin inspectors became anonymous professionals whose reviews shaped global fine dining.

Over the years, brands debated whether or not they could create and own something similar, but the realities of doing so were always so daunting.

Until Kruger came along last year and put some money behind their very own “UltraLuxe Bathroom Guide”.

They developed the “Fleur” system, created the restaurant bathroom inspection guide, and cemented their Cashmere UltraLuxe toilet paper brand as the gold standard for bathroom tissue.

Oh, and they also ended up winning a Gold Effie for it. Bravo!

BRAIN FOOD/

Strategist’s Delight (What’s On)

• Book: The Attention Economy and How Media Works: Simple Truths for Marketers (Karen Nelson-Field)

• Podcast Episode: Rory, Elfried and Max on marketing's next wave (The Bottleneck Podcast)

• TV Series: House of Guinness (Netflix)

• Article: The Innovation That’s Killing Restaurant Culture (The Atlantic)

QUOTE/

The “Expert” Is The Man Who Stays Put

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram

• 🗣 For speaking engagements, you can reach me at [email protected]

• 💌 In case you missed it: Unlocking The Ordinary’s Next Growth Wave

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing strategist with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across North America. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.