"I hate marketing..."

I’ve heard so many people say they hate marketing (and/or sales, same thing really).

You don’t hate marketing… you hate shitty marketing.

I’m forever in debt to Chris Cornell, former lead singer of Soundgarden, for paying for a facebook ad that invited me to his solo show at The Palais Theatre in St Kilda. I can’t remember the ad itself, I imagine it was a picture of Chris with a guitar and some dates, but I remember the show vividly.

I attended with my brothers, all three of us die-hard Soundgarden fans since the mid-90’s. He played his old classics, he played his best new material, he played heartfelt cover songs, he played requests called from audience. He told the story of the old rotary-dial red telephone sitting on a stool beside him. It had been installed in his house on a special separate phone line. His best friend, Jeff Buckley, had the same phone installed on an additional line to his house. They didn’t share the numbers of their second lines with anyone but each other. If Chris’ red phone rang, he knew it was Jeff.

He talked of his aching heart for his friend that had died many years ago.

Chris Cornell was on the stage, alone (surrounded by a captivated audience of people rapidly entering middle-age) for many hours. It was a incredible experience, and a deeply treasured memory of mine.

It’s a memory that is made even more important by the fact that not so long after that show, Chris died of depression. My brothers and I will never see him play again.

I am eternally grateful to Chris for marketing his show to me. It was a $120 experience that I would, in retrospect, happily pay $1000 for. If he’d never advertised the show, I almost certainly would have missed seeing him one last time.

I’m so glad I saw that ad, which meant to I was able to be there for that show.

When you're promoting your work to the peeps that follow you, work hard to avoid making the false equivalence between what you're doing and what those shitty clickbait-style internet-churn marketers are doing. You’re not a shitty internet marketing guy.

Remind yourself that for those people that you're here to serve, you're more like Chris Cornell, letting them know that an experience they might never have another chance to attend is coming up. You're giving them the chance to opt-in to something great.

Don’t take that opportunity away from them just because you hate those shitty marketing guys.