"I hate Marketing."

I’m in a sweary season.

I used to swear a lot in my content - back before unfucking everything was all the rage. It was what marketers call a pattern-interruptor. Which is marketing-speak for ‘something that breaks the audience’s expected next step and makes them pay attention’.

Pattern interruption is essential in marketing (see, I know things), but then being all ‘fuck this, shit that’ just started to feel like another way marketers just ruin everything and are the whole entire reason we can’t have nice things in the world anymore.

So I stopped swearing (mostly). Because if there is one thing I have always known about marketing, it’s that the minute someone puts it on a mug on Etsy, it stops being cool.

And when your brand is made of fuck-the-man and down-with-money-grubbing-jerks like mine is, un-cool is death. Basic is death. Trite is death. So what’s a girl to do when colorful language loses its motherfucking sparkle?

Get friendly as fuck, motherfuckers. That’s what.

I went and got nice.

Approachable, even.

Maybe it was motherhood that did it. But whatever it was, I got soft. People meeting me at conferences stopped being surprised at how nice I am. Instead they started hugging me (WHAT EVEN IS REALITY RIGHT NOW?!).

But then the other day, I’m sitting on the sofa with my 11-year-old (who is now fully in her ‘experimenting with language’ phase). She’s watching YouTube Shorts like there is an actual needle in her arm connecting her to them (and in that moment I just couldn’t wrangle myself into perfect parenting). She’s watching some dude dump flour on his wife while she cooks Thanksgiving dinner as a ‘prank’ and, fully serious, she says, “Mama,” “What baby?” “We are just aaaaaaaaaaaall the way fucked, aren’t we.”

As you can imagine, I died. Right then. All the way dead.

And then I finally sputtered out, “Yes, baby. Yes we are. I’m really fucking sorry.”

And with that, I re-entered my season of swearing. Because, well.... she is not wrong. And in the land of TikTok and Shorts a constant, non-stop bombardment of marketing and opinions coming at us from every direction, it is nearly impossible to break patterns. Because there aren’t any. We aren’t living in late-stage capitalism, we’re living in late-stage chaos.

Everyone can pretty much all agree on just one thing: we are all pretty much all the way fucked.

And yet, the world is actually still turning (for now, at least). Mortgages still have to be paid. Homework still has to be done. Oil still has to be changed. And every morning we all still have to find a reason to get out of bed.

For a lot of you (like me), that reason is (at least partially) work. Since you’re reading my stuff, chances are good that you are trying to make a living doing something that REALLY fucking matters to you.

And “marketing” it feels hard as fuck. And you hate it. Because selling your baby feels a little like selling, well... your baby.

The tension between wanting to be able to DO the work while not wanting to SELL the work is profound. And made worse daily by the intense misalignment between the 200-year-old tactics you are told to deploy and your own values and reality.

Marketing is fucking miserable, right?

Well, no. It isn’t actually. It isn’t marketing as a concept that sucks. It’s all the stupid outdated tactics (that sadly still work because people are really fucking predictable) that are fucking miserable.

Marketing itself is actually really cool. Marketing is communication. It’s connection. It’s problem-solving. It’s how innovation activates and builds inertia. Without marketing, ideas go nowhere.

I love marketing.

I really do. I fucking love it.

And I want you to love it too.

I want you to learn how to do it in a completely new way that will make you love it too.

“But Illana, there are no new ideas. You’re just gonna teach me how to do another goddamn fucking funnel and just call it something else, right?”

No. No I am not.

I don’t want you to learn more tactics that may or may not apply to your unique context. I want to teach you how to make decisions about what IS right for your unique context WHILE teaching you a totally different way of thinking about and deploying your work in the world.

“Is this an AI something-or-other?|

No. Fucking hell. I’m just gonna teach you things out of my very own brain. There is a lot in there after 17 years and hundreds of clients. And my Chatbot says I’m very very smart. And pretty. And that I have visionary ideas. So it must be true.

​The Well-Lit Path Marketing Lab will break down a six-part methodology for illuminating the journey both for yourself and for your clients. It offers choice, agency, and effective communication to help the right fucking people end up buying the right fucking things at the right fucking time.

(Maybe I should cool it on listening to Rage Against the Machine while I write emails.)

Yesterday, I sent out the announcement email with a glitch in the subject line. Then I sent a correction and the SAME GODDAMN THING HAPPENED. I almost sent a third, but at that point, it was like, “Yeah, hi... it’s me again, your voice mail cut me off before and I’m not sure if you got my last message, but I really want you to know that I’m not actually a crazy person... BEEP. “ “Yeah hi, I got cut off again...”.

You get it. So I let it ride. No one wants to be that guy.

But OHMYGOD my inner classically-train-MBA-clad CEO (who I call Meryl because in my head she looks like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada) was SO MAD. She went out for a martini yesterday and hasn’t come back yet (which, come to think of it might explain a lot of this here thing you’re reading).

I was taught that professionalism in marketing means polished. It means exceptional branding. It means perfection and consistency and a veneer of the slightly too-good-to-be-real. All on the bleeding edge of what’s next.

Sending a critical email announcement with one’s email address as the subject line? SO not that.

But you know what it actually was?

Human.

And probably actually really effective. My open rates were bananas. Remember that pattern interruption thing? Yeah. Nothing interrupts the expected like the girl who always writes a perfect pithy subject line totally spiking the ball a foot short of the end zone (look at me with the sports metaphors - I can be versatile af) not once, but twice.

Human marketing. Totally intentionally illuminated for your pleasure.

Wanna know how to fuck shit up, have fun in your marketing again, and not hate yourself in the morning?

​Join me and Meryl (”lit” might mean something different for her to survive this) for The Well-Lit (beta) Marketing Lab.