You're So Vain

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.

Hi there,

I got dared into picking the topic this week, as my chum Simon Daniels called me out on LinkedIn, thinking maybe he was vain for thinking he was the Simon I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in this issue of the newsletter.

He was, so he was not being vain, but he suggested I pick “You’re So Vain,” a classic ’70s hit by Carly Simon.

Not a stretch, to be honest, if you glance around the state of B2B marketing, especially B2B tech websites, you see a lot of vanity.

Homepages dripping with industry-leading features, data-led functions, and AI-powered doohickeys that really don’t consider the buyer or the problem they solve.

Just this week I stumbled across a website that claimed:

“Data integrity, built for Agentic AI. Your AI agents need the confidence to act. Unlock Agentic-Ready Data you can trust.”

Which sounds splendid, a full house on buzzword bingo, but why should the buyer care? And what does it do?

Which is all a bit shocking, when I remember the buzz around the book “Outside In”, by Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning, back in 2012. I have a copy; it was required reading from a time when the big-name Forrester Analysts (which they were) were incredibly influential.

The Gary V’s or Ritson’s of their day? Maybe, and I think their fame, and that of their contemporaries like Josh Bernoff, author of the equally influential Groundswell, gave Forrester an early experience of the problem we see with social media today: what if your employees become influencers? Encourage them, or rein them in?

Maybe I’ve digressed, although I guess personal brand versus representing your employer might be a form of vanity. But to return to the vanity of vendor positioning, I wrote about a different V to judge our content marketing by this week: being vital.

Creating vital content is the antidote to vanity, viral, and the vapidness of B2B content.

Yes, all the V’s!

And, of course, sticking to the vanity theme, once we pump out this vanity content - we measure its success with vanity metrics, which are often just as disconnected from our business outcomes as the message is from the outcomes desired by the buyer.

Unless you are selling ads on your website, you don’t need more traffic; you need the right audience to find your content vital.

So, yes, thank you Simon - B2B marketing - You’re so vain!

Have a splendid week!

Cheers,

Ian

A 70’s classic, and maybe a B2B marketing anthem?