Discerning Sounds

Everything is so loud. My god.

There’s noise everywhere. There is noise everywhere, and it’s not just my kids watching “KPop Demon Hunters” for the 6,000^th time.

The noise is there when 100 job alerts blur together or a dozen “urgent” campaigns come knocking for activation space. It’s louder when you’re working in marketing or when you’re being marketed to (and that’s… you know… all the time). It’s loudEST when individual leads are slamming down on your OKR review with the illusion of progress.

Noisy downloads or form fills, though, aren’t sending you any signals. They aren’t telling you that opportunity – be it revenue or a new CMO role – is real.

The real signals are in the buying groups.

Multiple people at the same account suddenly leaning in with a mix of roles showing in the data. Activity that builds into intent or desire, beyond just a single click.

The best marketing leaders and teams I’ve ever been around understood this. They stopped chasing volume of pointless things and started looking at the signals around the groups. That’s where the pipeline was coming from.

I’m learning the same thing in this role search.

Look, I like impressions. They’re fancy and make me feel good. “People saw the words that I wrote and didn’t think I used too many line breaks!” But… noise.

My signals for this next role are when multiple people inside the same company connect, comment, and ask for a conversation. That’s when something’s real. Marketing leadership can’t be about doing more. It’s got to keep becoming something that filters out the noise (with sweet, sweet, noise-canceling headphones – not a sponsored post).

Noise is so busy, and noxious. Signals? Those compound. With the right frequency, they sing.

(Coincidentally… Netflix just announced KPop Demon Hunters passed 236 million views. That should be higher, considering my household accounts for a solid 200 million of those.)