Marketing For SuperVillains: Diabolical Tips on Differentiation, Decommoditization and World Domination

PART I

THE WHY:

1: LET’S DO THIS

Let’s Do It.

—Gary Gilmore

Revolution is the answer.

To what question? you may ask.

To the question What do supervillains want? (Besides a towering solid-gold statue of themselves, of course.) We want revolution!

For far too long, marketers have gotten the short end of the stick. We cater to the crazy, uneducated whims of clients’ changes. Worse, we cater to the demands of their left-brained financial analysts or legal teams who, at best, water down our most creative ideas and, at worst, create their own and simply ask us to be order takers for their brain-numbing, white-noise minutiae. Sadly, for many of us to earn a living, this has become a normal and accepted casualty of doing business. And we pay a large price in our creative energy and self-esteem for doing so.

This effin’ industry of mine needs a kick in the ass. Need I remind you that marketing is everything? Hell, without marketing, the current powers that be would likely not be in power at all.

Take one of the most egregious examples: Hollywood. Hollywood executives (the moneymen) throw hundreds of millions of dollars into the production budget of a blockbuster movie. They then feel that the prowess of their finances also gives them the liberty to tinker with the very product they hired a team of creative professionals to produce. After everyone in the C-suite gets their dirty little fingerprints onto the final product, they realize their movie has become shit.

This effin’ industry.

So what do they do? They call in the person who, like Pulp Fiction’s Jimmie Dimmick (played by Quentin Tarantino), can make the problem go away. Similar to Harvey Keitel’s cold-blooded, hardened character Mr. Wolf, who can clean up any mess, it is our marketing brethren who are summoned.

We create the movie posters and the trailers. We manufacture the buzz to help the bigwigs recoup their investments and hopefully eke out a profit. Without marketing, Hollywood would simply implode.

Why is it you can easily name Tom Cruise and his latest costar and recite the tagline for the latest summer blockbuster, but you have no idea who meticulously crafted the kickass trailer that got you off your ass and into the theater? Why is there no Academy Award for the marketing forces who are the saviors of an entire industry?

Why do I want an industry revolution?

Because we need to unite, organize, and mobilize. We need to stop rolling over for clients and fight for our creative ideas. At its core, marketing has deep roots in nonconformist thinking and I am taking a stand for more nonconformist ideas to be birthed into the world completely unscathed by client influence.

The debate of superhero or supervillain is simply a matter of perspective. You can say rebels are leaders of a revolution or insurrectionists attempting a coup. You can call them freedom fighters or terrorists.

Batman breaks laws and enforces vigilante justice to safeguard a town gone mad. Some could certainly say he’s a villain. Others could see him as heroic—someone who risks their own health and well-being for the benefit of others.

I repeat: Superhero or supervillain is all just a matter of perspective.

Unfortunately, the perspective we seem to rely on most is that of the general public. Focus group after focus group, as well as countless scientific studies, have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the people have no idea what they truly want.

Marketing supervillainy will unquestionably draw fire from the average person. But who cares? You’ve tried being average, and it sucked.

At the closing of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Lt. James Gordon explains the hero/villain conundrum to a child: [He’s] the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him. Because he can take it. Don’t be afraid if you are hunted. Instead, exalt in the fact that you so challenge the way things operate that someone feels the need to silence you.

Dan Wieden of the Wieden+Kennedy agency found inspiration in the 1976 story of Gary Gilmore. Nike’s slogan JUST DO IT had its origin in Gilmore’s last words before firing squad execution: Let’s Do It. To be clear, I’m not romanticizing his horrific actions. But for the iconic sneaker company, the call of defiance, in the face of adversity, was exactly what they wanted the spirit of their brand to represent.

According to industry research, more than 95% percent of you holding this book will never make it to the final page. To the remaining, defiant 5% percent who are ready to act, I implore you to pump your fist in the air and join me in the war chant of our revolution, LET’S DO IT.

Even if its inspiration came from a convicted murderer.

2: THIS EFFIN’ INDUSTRY OF MINE

"They think I’m hiding in the shadows . . .

but I AM the shadows."

—The Batman (2022)

I thrive in the shadows.

However, today I seek them for a much different reason. It is the hottest year on record and I find myself in an uncommon, uncomfortable situation: I’m out in public. It’s August, I’m in Brooklyn at the Continental Army Plaza, and I am in desperate search of some relief. I find some solace from the oppressive heat in the shadows cast by a towering statue.

The statue is of a man I’m certain you’d never categorize as a supervillain. Ironically, he too preferred the shadows, much like the one he is providing for me now. Even though he was once considered an outsider, I’m willing to bet you’ve crossed a bridge bearing his name. You’ve probably visited or lived in a land named after him. At the very least, you definitely have a copy of his visage within reach.

He had pleurisy, as well as dentures created from the teeth of both animals and enslaved people. They caused not only visible physical differences but also affected his speech. He was so convinced others focused solely on his appearance that he rarely spoke and frequently attempted to blend into the background. Feeling shunned by society, he nevertheless remained singularly committed to his mission. Even though he was neither bold nor brash, he was still successful in gathering and convincing legions to go along with his bidding—an impossible feat without the mind of an MSV.

This outcast and his followers launched and led a secret attack against the opposition. It was an almost impossible, unthinkable assault with a treacherous, frozen river between them and victory. It occurred on Christmas Day, 1776.

Sometime after that, this introverted, shadow-dwelling, wooden-toothed outsider known as George Washington gained a new moniker: Mr. President.

Like GW, I too have an uncompromising will to win, at any cost.

How about you?

Never one to dream of being a cog in a bigger machine or having a boss, I started my own agency in an underground lair on Long Island (aka my mom’s basement) and I aimed to build the biggest and best marketing agency on the planet.

The timing was perfect. The internet was becoming ubiquitous. I couldn’t gobble up enough knowledge about HTML and the web’s inner workings. I’d spend every free moment tearing apart websites to learn what made them tick, what made them successful—or more importantly, what made them fail.

Things progressed and, like a fool, I fell into a common trap: Do what everyone else was doing, but do it better. I built a team who knew I accepted nothing short of excellence within my walls. And those walls? They quickly grew, out of mother’s dark basement and into the world, purposefully, for all to see.

Big, bright, Apple-esque agency headquarters with pristine white walls, pinball machines, Ping-Pong tables—you know, everything you’d come to expect from a cutting-edge design agency.

My ambition and hunger led me to a bigger arena. Along with that came more wonderful clients . . . and more insanity.

The clients would feed my ego and seek out my expertise. I felt proud and useful . . . until they ignored my expert knowledge and, in many cases, did the opposite of what I had strategized for them. I would allow these clients to occupy prime real estate in my brain (rent-free, I might add!). I’d review their cases over and over, on the drive to the office, in the shower, or lying in bed. At times, my wife would catch me distracted and inattentive during our time together as I obsessed over providing the absolute best, most creative solutions to my clients’ needs.

There were days when I could only surmise that some of these clients were indeed henchmen of a rival competitor, secretly placed inside my business with the singular goal of taking my entire company down, through their insane, illogical requests for changes.

Some patients walk into a doctor’s exam room, armed with a self-diagnosis and their own recommendation for a prescription, rather than listening to a professional. (Yeah, I’ll just toss you the script pad while I’m at it, since you clearly know how to fix all your problems.) My clients were like these nightmare patients. In our meetings, they would tell me what they needed, demanding social media marketing, SEO, or some other ineffective medicine that ultimately failed (even though they wouldn’t listen when I correctly predicted it). Of course, the fault was never their own; it was always on the part of the agency. So they would leave and find a different yes man agency that would execute their cockamamie self-prescribed, under-researched, FOMO solution.

And then there were my personal favorites, the clients who were clearly sent here from another dimension to try and torture me. You know, the dimension where time has no meaning or