When Magic Becomes Mundane // BRXND Dispatch vol 110
Plus thoughts on why “it’s time to explore” and how writers are oddly fortunate right now
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When Magic Becomes Mundane
I’m recently back from helping to throw our flagship event for Ride AI, our sister publication that covers the intersection of AI and mobility. Autonomous vehicles are a uniquely fascinating greenfield for marketers, as there’s no industry where the chasm between the capabilities of the technology and the normie perception of what it can do is farther apart. Self-driving is no longer primarily a technological problem, it’s a cultural one. It is marketing’s time to shine.
From my meetings with marketing leaders across the industry, one story will stick with me the most as a microcosm for the challenge of marketing revolutionary new technology that is indistinguishable from magic.
It’s about how everyday people experience self-driving for the first time when they visit a city with robotaxi service. The first time East Coast folks come to SF, LA, or Phoenix they insist on taking a Waymo and are awe-struck. The next time they need a ride, there’s a rally cry of “LET’S DO THAT AGAIN.” By the third trip, they’re back to scrolling Instagram instead of basking in the science fiction reality.
After those first few trips, what was once a taste of the future becomes a decision made by price and wait time. Even magic rapidly becomes a commodity. It’s a visceral reminder that no matter how amazing a technology is, the old marketing adage still applies: People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, what they want is a quarter-inch hole.
The vibes around AI are bad right now for many reasons, but largely because the world's most powerful AI companies have failed to craft a coherent narrative about how AI improves the quotidian lives of everyday people. I strongly suspect this will intensify as politicians lean into the rhetoric ahead of the midterms. Here, too, it’s time to market.
A Time to Explore
Serendipitously, I happened upon Derek Thompson’s piece on how hot streaks happen in careers this weekend, the single best career advice framework I’ve read. In it, he advocates for a career strategy of "exploring" in your 20s—trying various roles, locations, and skills—followed by "exploiting" in your 30s, doubling down on the best skills and networks developed earlier to maximize success. I’m about one month into my new role at Alephic, and yesterday was my 34th birthday, so Derek’s article found me both enjoying a Miller High Life and in a contemplative moment. (Editor’s note: We have some past writing on the explore/exploit tradeoff, a concept from computer science that is very worth wrapping your head around, as it has widespread implications for enterprise AI adoption.)
In my 20s, I did damn near Shackleton-level exploration. I was an investigative journalist, ad agency intern (for someone who started on Madison Avenue in 1961), corporate training program stooge, product marketer, startup marketing leader, head of sales, and failed founder. This doesn’t even count a myriad of odd second jobs I had, ranging from ghostwriter for a made man to hauling ten thousand bottles of wine into a cellar over the course of two weeks. I basically learned a new industry or function every two years.
Then, like clockwork, weeks before I turned 30, I took a job leading growth for a large portfolio of brands. For the first time in my life, I could exploit. PayPal later hired me at nearly double the total comp of that gig to GM a nine-figure business for a very particular set of esoteric skills, developed in the course of my meandering in the wilderness five years earlier.
But I began to feel something visceral. AI was rendering many of the skills I learned in the last decade obsolete, inadequate, or pointed at rapidly contracting markets. I can’t be alone. So I’m back to exploring.
Much of the angst that (especially mid-career) professionals are having about careers boils down to one condition. Millions of us who thought we’d spend the next 20 years exploiting are once again forced to become voyagers. This is doubly stressful once you’ve been in the workforce for a few years and you are no longer evaluated primarily on your potential, but on driving immediate leverage.
But personal trajectories and economies alike stagnate when people get comfortable exploiting. Time to pick up the astrolabe.
Writers are the Lucky Ones
As Anthropic builds additional capabilities to voraciously gobble up design, HR admin, and other functions once thought resistant to AI, I’ve been thinking a lot about how writers might prove to be strangely fortunate in the mid and long-term AI vibe shift.
Even before software engineers, anyone who wrestles with language for a living has already had to go through the LLM professional identity crisis and come out the other side. Most have found a way to elegantly work AI into their jobs while retaining their core sense of verve and creative self. Some have built a brand on being almost cartoonishly resistant. But more or less, the worst of the existential limbo that is coming hard for so many other professions is over.
It’s worth remembering how early this is for so many other knowledge workers. The entire professional zeitgeist of AI for millions of Americans is CoPilot. Relatively few people have seen Claude crank out a passable 30-second financial model. And with apologies to Excel virtuosos everywhere, a financial model does not really have to ooze poetic panache. It simply has to be correct. There will always be “last mile” work for talented finance leaders, but I’d rather be a junior creative than a junior analyst in this moment.
Us writers and marketers are the lucky ones.
If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.
— Mike