Why "dumb"?

A while back I pitched a marketing idea at work. It was cheap, a bit odd, and nobody in our space was doing it. Leadership thought it was a dumb idea. Not long after that, I was let go.

At my next job I pitched the same idea, and my new boss told me to try it. It worked.

The idea was the same at both companies. What changed was whether someone let me try it.

Since then I've noticed the same pattern all over marketing. The tactics everyone uses now started out as ideas someone had to fight for. Then they worked, everyone copied them, and they got boring. Then someone came up with a new dumb idea and the loop started again.

What you'll find here

Blog posts and videos about marketing ideas that sound wrong at first. Some of them are early. Some are old ideas that have gone stale and need retiring. A few will be bad, and I'll say so when that happens.

Who's writing this

I've worked in growth and lifecycle marketing for most of my career. For now I'm keeping my name off the site. Judge the ideas, not the byline.

Say hi

Got a dumb idea your team shot down? Send it over.