By Michael Semer, Principal, MSMC
By Michael Semer, Principal, MSMC“I’ve worked in four different decades of marketing.”
That either makes me sound like a battle-hardened survivor who changed with the times, or someone who needs help figuring out WhatsApp. Truth is, both are a little bit true.
Also, it makes me feel old, but let’s skip that.
When I first started, we were still using X-Acto knives and wax rollers to mock up layouts. Now I’m collaborating with AI. I’ve watched marketing mutate from the slow churn and charm of mass media to the chaotic sprint of the algorithm age. And through it all, one thing has stayed constant: brands and people that don’t change get left behind.
So here’s a review of that ride, from the pre-digital era to the age of machine learning, with lessons learned (too often the hard way) in each.
The 80s: Playing small ball & learning the ropes
I’m not kidding about doing pasteups: That was the tech of the time (though it feels inflated to refer to it as ‘tech’), and I still get nostalgic flashbacks at the smell of wax. Then I remember what a pain in the ass it was and nostalgia fades.
But I learned a lot, bouncing from small agency to slightly larger agency, from Detroit to Dallas, gradually scaling the ladder from grossly underpaid copywriter to somewhat underpaid copywriter. My book was pretty light, 80% concept work, but the climb taught me a lot about how the industry worked at the B2B and small change level.
Those were lessons that made me thick-skinned enough to succeed in my later career, sitting in the CMO’s office at Coca-Cola and realizing his bullshit was just only a few degrees bettter polished than the bullshit of a marketing manager at a small OEM manufacturer in Flint, Michigan.
My favorite anecdote? My first agency job? As a “copy-contact” guy, half account executive and half copywriter, at a small shop run by three brothers in Farmington Hills, Michigan, that did a lot of work for automotive aftermarket suppliers and mobile and manufactured home companies. Most of the latter, for some reason, being headquartered in and around Elkhart, Indiana.
One day, the brother who was the CFO told me, “Drive down to Elkhart and pick up a check. We need it today. Don’t tell anybody you’re doing this.”
Mind you, this wasn’t a client I’d ever worked on, but I was happy to be an errand boy on what was seemingly such an important run. It was midwinter, and there’d been an ice storm. Driving across lower Michigan on icy roads in a 1984 Mustang GT was an experience I wouldn’t care to press on anybody else. But the sun came out, so the trees all glittered like spun glass.
I fetched the check from the client. The finance guy who brought it down also told me, “Don’t mention this to anyone.” But the envelope wasn’t sealed and I peeked. $237,000, as I recall. “What’s a ‘cashier’s check,’ anyway?” I asked my young self.
A few years later, I heard the brothers had all been nailed for tax evasion. Welcome to advertising!
What I found out? The grind pays off if you keep listening and learning.
The 90s: Broadcast was boss and brands talked at you
Back then, “content strategy” meant making sure your tagline could fit on a billboard.
I cut my teeth on CPG giants and mega-campaigns that stretched across TV, print, and maybe—if you were really edgy—a sweepstakes website. Let me regale you with the number of FSIs and promotions I came up with for everything from mac and cheese to Microsoft. You made your name by writing killer headlines and “big idea” decks.
Measurement? That was mostly anecdotal or sales spikes, or completely the province of the client. Account teams prayed for Nielsen blessings and hoped the brand manager liked your concept.
But change was looming. I was in the room when we concepted the world’s first online continuity redemption program for Frito-Lay (it actually worked), and did a global tie-in with digital overlays for Lays chips around “The Phantom Menace” that was, IMHO, better conceived than the actual movie.
I worked on McDonald’s, coming up with programs for thousands of stores on behalf of Disney and other partners. And venturing (in a small way) into interactive merchandising and store systems. I worked on early online programs and promotions for Kraft, Microsoft, Unilever and others.
We were breaking a lot of new ground, which made it exciting. We were cobbling up brand platforms that needed to live across web, retail, advertising and experiential.
It was exhilarating. It was chaotic. That adage about still building the plane in mid-flight? Exactly.
My favorite anecdote? At the shopper/integrated agency that would eventually become Arc Worldwide, né Frankel, we had McDonald’s as a client. I was CD on the team that did store merchandising kits for the live-action 101 Dalmations flick tie-in, and we were told to send a set of that POS to McD’s ad agency, our bitter rival Leo Burnett.
That very frigid winter evening, I’m driving home via Lower Wacker in Chicago past the Burnett loading dock and see a group of homeless sleeping on the dock, wrapped in what they’d scrounged from the trash: Our giant store banner for 101 Dalmatians.
“Marketing can do good in the world,” I observed.
My other favorite anecdote: It’s about a brand manager at Oldsmobile, who worked in a great beige cubicle farm, to whom we presented a killer promotion concept. His reply? “That’s a great idea, but I know I can put ‘cash on the hood’ on the car and get my monthly 5% lift…if you stick your head up around here (gesturing above his cubicle) with anything new or different, you’ll get it chopped off.”
Which explains a lot about why the world ended up saying adios, Oldsmobile!
The big lesson? Big ideas are hard to push up some corporate slopes, but you’ll find some clients who crave big ideas. Hold out for them.
The 2000s: Digital arrives and all bets are off
The good old days: Uncertainties and surprises abounded, from the dot.com bubble to Y2K. In other words, when it came to the digital universe, nobody really knew anything.
Still, suddenly every brand needed a website. And an email campaign. And some newfangled “interactive” activation that usually broke halfway through the event. But some of them didn’t. Ideas were generated that didn’t work then but anticipated more successful descendants:
For instance, we came up with an animated character for the Kraft Interactive Kitchen named “Anita Helper” who paraded across the bottom of the site, offering recipe tips and whatnot. A neolithic chatbot, if you would.
From there, I did a long spell in experiential and event work. This was fascinating because it was the best of all possible worlds for an integrated marketer who could see envision how a lot of previously disparate pieces could fit together.
From mall tours for megabrand to on-premise tasting events, what mattered was bringing a compelling theme together with coherent elements. Then, of course, the Great Recession hit and you suddenly had to find other options as event budgets dried up.
Underground fun: For an event concept pitch to a major shoe brand headquartered in Portland (yes, them!), we set up a scavenger hunt through the city’s legendary Shanghai tunnels to give them a taste of the concept, which involved scavenger hunts aimed at sneakerheads.
They loved the entire experience and the concept; the only hiccup was when they realized one of them had wandered off and was still down in the underground. So the pitch meeting involved sending out a search party.
Big lesson: Agility isn’t optional. Disruption is opportunity. Clients love it when you bring the fun.
The 2010s: Content becomes the kingdom
This was the decade that made every brand a publisher…and every marketer a nervous wreck.
Suddenly, everyone was talking “funnels,” “personas,” and “thought leadership.” I migrated out of experiential and promotions work into helping tech firms evolve their messaging and build content ecosystems that, if properly designed, truly moved metrics. Though you had to explain to stakeholders that immediacy is not a core virtue of content marketing.
I ghostwrote posts for CEOs, created B2B campaigns that didn’t (at least back then) sound like they were written by a sentient spreadsheet, and helped health orgs shape deeply human messaging because, well, that’s how you manage to arouse engagement with fellow human beings.
What sticks out: The fact that so many companies had flung themselves headlong into content marketing but had no idea what ground they’d already covered or what legacy content was still online or archived in their digital dungeons.
One client brought us on to conduct a content audit and were gobsmacked: They had 7,000 content assets in their inventory, no performance metrics, and even less rationale for how they’d produced and published any of it.
Big lesson: People don’t buy content. They buy clarity, consistency, and relevance. If you’ve still got content out there that dates back a decade, its “relevance” is probably moot.
The 2020s: Brand voice is your POD, not the bots!
Which brings us to the here and now. Where AI grinds out drafts, an analytics dashboard makes your decisions, and customers expect a flawless omnichannel journey that also feels…personal?
No pressure!
Fact is, voice and value are make-or-break. You don’t win trust through volume anymore. You win it through precision, resonance and value. SEO is passing the torch to GEO, and the value of human creativity is even gaining ground in B2B channels.
By showing up with something authentic and original, even in the age of automation, marketers are poised to move forward by, ironically, taking a retro stance.
SEO blues: A tech client explained to me how they’d spent a lot of time and money mounting a broad SEO content campaign that had massively improved site traffic, but with no net gain in MQLs from content.
The problem? The content they pubbed was primarily keyword-saturated Industry 101 stuff that impressed none of the decision-makers they meant to target who were searching for actual problem-solution content. Once in the funnel, these folks had nowhere to go. So they bounced.
Takeaway? Content needs to be where your humanity, thought leadership and ability to connect become your true marketing superpowers.
The biggest lesson
The biggest lesson I’ve picked up? It’s that human beings have a degree of adaptability that helps them scale nearly any obstacle. I’ve had a career that’s been disrupted, set back on its heels or taken a gut-punch multiple times, but even I can roll with all of that because I’ve still got a stubborn love of the business burning somewhere. It’s been immune to disappointment and antacids alike for a very long time.
Relevance is a muscle, not a situation, not a dictate. You can choose to stay relevant by advancing your skills and opening yourself up to new opportunities, or you can shrug and fade away. Or open a Jamba Juice. I know a designer who was great at his job and did that, and every time I saw him later in life, he couldn’t shut up about his time as a creative. “I kinda miss that.”
Mind you, owning a franchise or a food truck might look like an attractive option at a time like this. There’s no avoiding how the creative business is changing, and not altogether for the better.
But believe in your own ability to evolve, and you’ll do fine. You’ll keep on keepin’ on. When you begin to doubt that about yourself? That’s when frustration and that enemy of every creative person, boredom, begin to set in.
It’s a lesson that may sound cheesy and prosaic and none too earth-shattering, but that’s why I know it’s true.