Mark Ritson really likes marketing. He likes talking about it and writing about it. This is most useful, because I had an hour to talk to him about marketing and about writing about marketing, since, very fortunately for us, he’s joining The Drum as a weekly columnist from September 1.
Our Zoom conversation wasn’t initially conceived as one for The Big Interview; the idea was to plan the new-look Mark Ritson column. But then I thought it would be worth doing our planning in the open and record it as a vodcast. (Ritson is someone you record your planning discussions with.) He speaks with such certainty and substance, we then felt compelled to make him The Big Interview.
As it turns out, my planned discussion was painfully abrupt. He’s not exactly demanding. He wants to be excruciatingly topical. (OK, so no forward planning. Got it.)
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What about process, then? (This is paraphrased for brevity. I am sure he won’t mind.) ‘Send a few ideas on Friday, I might pick one. I’ll think about it and write it in an hour or two. And on Monday, you can do what you want with it.’
With that all sorted and 45 minutes to spare, we thought we’d spend the time getting to know a bit more about the man bringing his inimitable brand of academic thought and scientific rigor to The Drum, Professor Mark Bloody Ritson. But wait, what does he mean he’s not a professor?
“I’m not really a professor any more. You’ve got to point that out. I was a professor for 25 years but packed it all in. Most people don’t stop being a professor, but I’ve definitely stopped. I have no interest in doing it ever again. I’ve served my time.”
But he is the founder of the MiniMBA. His face is all over it. Surely that makes him a professor?
“I became a marketing professor because I like marketing,” he says. (He got his PhD in marketing from Lancaster University in 1996 and the university maintains a landing page to boast about it to this very day.) “Most of the people I worked with became marketing professors because they liked the idea of being a professor.”
He did stints at London Business School, MIT Sloan, the University of Minnesota and Melbourne Business School. Now the MiniMBA has trained around 40,000 individuals worldwide.
That sounds quite professor-like to me, but it appears he is reluctant to be associated with marketing education in general.
“We’re a very unusual profession… there’s no other profession I’ve ever seen have this level of nihilism,” he observes, noting that formal training in marketing is often dismissed or actively derided.
When trying to come up with a strapline for the MiniMBA, he floated ‘Training Makes You Better,’ mainly for the reason that “most of the fuckers in marketing don’t really believe that it does.”
He says three-quarters of its alumni are marched into the MiniMBA by their employers thinking they don’t need it. “The minute you give them the training, they message me saying, ‘I’m way better now.’”
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Ritson acknowledges the complication that marketing education can be rather poor. “Sometimes the quality of marketing training, particularly at universities, is so poor that you could make a strong case for saying maybe they’re better off without it. You can’t have marketing taught by people who don’t do marketing, right? It’s a practical vocation.”
He has some sympathy. “The problem we’ve got is the nature of marketing: everyone wants to rewrite the basics, even when they literally don’t understand them. There isn’t another discipline this stupid.
“The reason marketing is in so much trouble is that we have all these people who have tried to add Ps to the four Ps. None of them understands what the four Ps are and how they’re meant to work.”
Then there’s the language people use to describe themselves, usually on LinkedIn. “Anyone who calls themselves a guru or anything like that… that always turns me off straight away. I can call you a guru. You can’t call yourself a guru.”
I keep him going on his pet peeves, which include not being a fan of demographic research (“I don’t like anything related to demographics… even the Pew Institute in America that invented demographic stuff doesn’t use them any more, so this Gen X, Gen Y stuff is probably the single biggest indicator that a marketer doesn’t know what they’re talking about”), and ask whether he thinks marketers constantly use change as a scapegoat for any negative results, to which he says: “There’s a line of thought that if everything is always changing, then I don’t need any training. And I get myself in a real frothy old mess reading LinkedIn, because everyone there is selling change. Usually with a book, software, or a consulting firm. There’s money in the pornography of change.”
Ritson’s skepticism extends to marketers’ technofetishism. He has called bullshit on a lot of trends that too many marketers latched on to. “I wrote about the metaverse the day Facebook launched it. That was pants. What were those monkey art things called again? NFTs? They were idiot magnets. This is all historical fact.”
When it comes to AI, Ritson balances caution with pragmatism and it doesn’t quite get the same lashing as those failed innovations he mentioned before. “I do recognize AI as a proper revolutionary change, but it’s not happening at the pace a lot of people are stating. I mean, what is AI going to do? It’s going to remove process. What is marketing when it’s done well? Process.
“Agentic AI in particular could work eventually, but if you [rolled it out now] it would be a disaster.”
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Despite all of that, he does think there is an incoming calamity. It isn’t an AI calamity, but modest innovations brought about by AI will likely enable something better. “The analysis of synthetic data, the building of synthetic brand plans and, crucially, the testing of those plans in a synthetic world… if it’s doable, and eventually it will be, is an existential threat for most marketers in the business.”
Next, we move on to how to write a column. As opinion editor, I’m aware of far too many columnists who try to emulate Ritson’s success or tone and it rarely works, so here is the secret of his success: 25 years as a marketing professor and then more than a decade as a columnist.
He was “really bad” for the first few years, he says. “You’ve got to write for a long time to get good at it. And it’s not a matter of intellect. You have just got to do it.”
Back then, his work would reference previous columns he had written (“As if I expected people to remember them... idiotic”) and sometimes he would even dare to call them “pieces” (“Don’t do that”).
Next is knowing what to talk about. “Just write about the fucking work,” he says. “Don’t write about your take on fucking personalization. Nobody cares, man. It’s all about the work. We’re like plumbers. This is Plumbers’ Weekly. Write about pipes.”
Another thing I see is columnists quitting because they run out of ideas or aren’t seeing Ritson-level engagement, which Ritson echoes. “You’ve got to do it every week. Everyone wants to be a fucking columnist for about three weeks. But you’ve got to be able to sit down in your underpants and bang one out in two hours or less every week, or ideally a couple of times a week.”
You’re not writing something you think everyone will agree with. You’re not writing something dull that everyone should already know [his example: ‘Why listening to the customer is a good idea’].
Mark’s goal with his first editor was to get fired. If he didn’t have a sickly sense of fear, hitting publish, was it even worth it? Well, it certainly hasn’t hurt him in the long term. [He caveats: “You’ve got to believe what you’re saying, but it can’t be what everyone else thinks because that’s boring.”]
His last bit of advice is to go early. “You can’t be writing about fucking Jaguar literally a year late like [name of well-known thought leader redacted]. It had to be within 36 hours, ideally 12, because, otherwise, nobody cares, man, right?”
Well, we couldn’t agree more, which is why we’re counting down the days until Ritson joins The Drum as a columnist this September.
Mark Ritson will dial into The Drum Live in September. You can help pick his first column topic. Tickets here.