8 things I learned from writing inside a marketing organisation
Red Bull BMXer, Kris Kyle, in Copenhagen for a VisitDenmark campaign. Credit: Me.
Eight years ago, I stepped into a Danish marketing organisation as green as a little English apple. That’s not fully ripe. A few months ago, I stepped out of it a completely different person. A ripe person. I learned so much about the world, about people, and about writing during my time at VisitDenmark (Denmark’s national tourism agency), that I thought I’d share eight of those things here. Like a one-for-every-year kind of thing. I’ll get on with it, shall I?
1. Help! I’m in a box!
We’re all in boxes. Not like the unfortunate woman in that film where she was kept under the bed (I haven’t seen Boxing Helena but that doesn’t mean it can’t be imprinted on my memory forever) but in marketing ones, with our limbs still attached.
If you feel like you don’t conform to society’s expectations of you based on your age and organs, then it can be extremely dispiriting to work in marketing. My internal bits are not the boss of me! My brain is! (Wait, that’s… never mind.) I like to think that we’re not all predictable. That we like to be surprised. Content can throw up some surprising reactions.
On top of that, the way we’re defined online by the data collected from us is equally as suffocating. Have you been into Facebook’s ad preferences and checked what’s been assigned to you as interests? Mine were shockingly far off. I really do hate dogs. And I don’t particularly like Thursdays, you nits.
2. Strong opinions are amplified online
I learned early on, and the hard way, that you need to be able to stand by what you write when you make it public via official channels. Something I wrote in the first six months on the job was ripped apart ON THE NATIONAL EVENING NEWS. They even had my text on screen behind the news presenter with certain sentences highlighted. But honestly. It was all useful learning, a ha ha ha. (Fine, I pooed myself.)
The problem with what I’d written was that it was on a sensitive political subject in my adopted country. And being that little green English apple, I did not yet understand the complexities of this. It only took the removal of a couple of words and a disclaimer on the piece to sort it out, but it was an extremely invaluable experience. I knew then that what I wrote would be seen and people would have an opinion on it. I tightened up my process.
There are, of course, negatives to knowing you’re going to be scrutinised. It can dampen creativity and risk-taking. It did with me at first. But I got over that. I realised that you can push the envelope with what you’re writing, as long as no one in particular is going to be outside the… envelope. And if you’ve done your research and your own little internal risk assessment, then… memorable in a bad way is better than boring!
3. Being an outsider is good
When I started, I was one of only three foreigners inside a big Danish organisation, working in Danish, marketing Denmark. I was extremely conscious of my otherness and at pains to hide it. To adapt. I threw myself into the Danish and NEVER spoke English. I soaked up all I could about Danish culture and eventually I integrated.
But wow, do I realise now how brilliant it was to be different. To be able to help Danes see their country from an outside perspective. No, the world is not gagging to know that Denmark came 3rd in the Handball Something-or-other. Handball is not… well it’s not a big deal, okay? And no, that person is NOT FAMOUS outside Denmark. Can we get Nikolai Coster-Waldau to do it? (Note: I was always asking this.)
In the end, I let my Englishness slowly unfold in my professional life and it felt like a massive relief. It is mentally taxing to conduct business every day in a language that you learned late as an adult. I started letting myself say the odd English thing. I forced some colleagues to try Marmite. And they loved it. (Not the Marmite. The other stuff).
4. It’s always someone else’s content
No matter how much you love a project, it‘s hard to shake the feeling that it’s someone else’s content. Someone else’s money. Someone else’s idea. Someone else’s passion. And I know I felt that because I think of myself as a writer. I have MY writing, and I have THEIR writing. So I could really enjoy what I was making. But I never really owned it.
And writing stuff for someone else all day, definitely makes it hard to want to sit and write your own poetry or fiction at night. It can sometimes feel like an extension of work. I know, I know… excuses excuses. But it would be like working in a chocolate factory and going off chocolate. I just couldn’t bring myself to write for myself. Pretty much during the whole time I had this job. And that’s a long time. Not a good place for a writer.
So ultimately that feeling of not controlling what I was writing led to me stopping, and carving some space to write other things. And look at me! I’M WRITING OTHER THINGS! I would like to finish this point off by saying that I loved my job. And I loved the product. Imagine getting to write about a whole country! It just became my chocolate factory I guess.
5. Words don’t matter
Seriously. They are the least important bit. They are the doily on the table of internet content. Under the cup and saucer that are photos and videos. There’s all types of content out there, content where words still matter. But in marketing, it’s all about those pretty cups and saucers. The words are just frilly dressing on top.
I mean even emojis will grab people before the words do. 🗿And then there are places you need to produce words for that you know people won’t even see. Take a Facebook click ad. We know that people will look at the picture first. Then they’ll read the heading under. Then they might read the button and the heading’s description. But that description text you poured over at the top? Didn’t see it.
Still, the world is a nice place because people take the time to put doilies on tables. To bring things to life and make them beautiful in every way they can. Sometimes the words are special enough to get people to notice them all on their own. Congratulations to all the talented marketing peeps that nailed those campaigns. Most of the time though, you’ve got to put the time and effort into the visuals first. Then you can add the doilies.
6. People don’t know you exist, OK?
It is eye-opening to have a job telling the world how fabulous a particular country is to visit, when the vast majority of people do not know it exists. A lot of them don’t even know what a country is. Hell, there’s still over 700 million people that can’t read. (See Tiger King, Netflix 2019, for multiple examples.)
So expounding on the delights of the organic food scene, or diving into the history behind some building is ultimately just something you do for a small number of people. People who’ve unlocked bonus-level content. The ones that want to take themselves on that journey of discovery.
Everyone is after a big viral hit, or content that can speak to as many people as possible. But the most useful content is often the content that reaches very few people. But they’re the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
7. Who needs school?
The reason I was so green when I went into marketing was because I had done just about everything else before this job, except study marketing. I’d been through Officer Selection with the Royal Air Force and got my private pilot’s licence. I’d studied medical NGOs in Africa. I’d trained as a teacher and led youth expeditions to South America. I’d even had a collection of poetry published.
But at some point I took the leap to follow my passion for writing and to see if I could get anyone to pay me to do it. And it worked! Luckily for me, I took that leap just as social platforms were becoming the way the world stayed stuck together. So I learned them in situ.
12 years later and I’m still learning every day, but I promise you I have learned a lot. And things change so quickly, you have to be open and curious and ready to learn for the rest of your life. I try to imagine what I would’ve brought with me into my last 12 years in marketing, from a lecture hall bench. Probably some of the diagrams and vocabulary that have been buzzing around me all this time. But I’ve learned all those too now, from seeing them put into practice.
8. Done is better than perfect
When I heard that this was one of Facebook’s company mantras I originally thought ‘Oh what’s that now? Something rubbish you’ve finished and pumped out to meet a deadline is never going to be good, is it.’ But then I realised that of course, in marketing as in many other aspects of life, done trumps everything else. You’ve got to be out there, sticking your bits into people’s feeds! You gotta be in it to win it, hustlers.
I spent the first few years in marketing painstakingly labouring over the most minute of details. Tweaking the tiniest of texts and fretting over the things that nobody ever sees. And this seriously held me back from devoting more time to getting the big, showy things done.
Now I am totally here for the quest for perfection. But with content that has a lifespan shorter than a butterfly with a death wish, something done really well that you didn’t manage to edit the bejesus out of is better than the thing you never even managed to get live. There is time for excellent. If you make time saying ‘go’ to the things with lower stakes.
The takeaway then. In marketing it’s good if you’re an uneducated outsider who hates being put in a box (literally and metaphorically) and who understands that words don’t matter and many people can’t read anyway. And with that, this imperfect piece is officially done. Because I’ve got some other people’s content to write.
