Poetry

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hello!

This week’s subject line comes from “Poetry” by Erykah Badu, a lyricist you could reasonably call a poet. But it wasn’t Badu who inspired this week’s issue. It was poetry in a place I didn’t expect to find it: from the CMO of e.l.f. Beauty, Kory Marchisotto, speaking on the Uncensored CMO podcast.

Marchisotto shared her Marketing Hall of Fame induction speech, though she described it as a “not-so-speech speech” as it was a poem. I listened rather than watched, as I do with podcasts, and it’s quite a thing. Here was a senior marketing leader reflecting on the experience of carrying the CMO title, the doubt, the stretch, the scrutiny, and all of that through verse.

It struck me as a bold move.

To stand in front of your peers at an awards ceremony and offer poetry instead of what Seth Godin describes as “the regular kind” - a speech. Similarly, it’s not what you expect to hear on a podcast known for its edge.

Would you have the cajones to read out a poem on stage or on a podcast?

A poem carries something difficult to codify. Yes, there are rules to poetry, but rules are not what give it that special something that makes it right.

That rightness is the experience of the writer, the vulnerability that Marchisotto shows, through the writing and performing of the poem, and, of course, the lived experience that is uniquely hers.

A poem cannot be attributed to the team, or the agency, or the algorithm. It is yours. If it fails, it fails with you attached. It’s authentic. And I make no apologies for using that word, that yeah, sure has been flogged to death recently.

The human creative experience was then supported by a back story about the ephemeral nature of inspiration, as she says, “it hit me like a ton of bricks at the AC/DC concert in Las Vegas”, and goes on to describe pulling out her phone and diving into the flow of poetry writing while the world literally rocked around her and how inspiration had found its time to strike when she had let her guard down.

We’re told we are entering an era of infinite, frictionless content - what some have already labelled “AI slop.” And yet here is a CMO choosing something crafted, personal, distinct, and owned. And it lands.

I’ll leave the last words to my favorite robot assistant ChatGPT. Who said, when I asked about writing poetry:

… yes, of course I can write a poem if you ask me. The interesting part is whether it would matter.

So true.

Have a great week!

Cheers!

Ian

The episode with the poem, on YouTube:

Poetry by The RH Factor, featuring Q-Tip and Erykah Badu, for those that like a gentler approach to getting your marketing mojo working…