Ya gotta market yourself

Marketing yourself and selling your services can be incredibly stressful. 

You're not alone.

Here are a dozen videos that can inject a little fun into the process. Hopefully this will help lighten the load the next time you have to bust out of your comfort zone and ask a prospect or client to make a commitment to buy your services.

Tommy Boy: We Don’t Take No for an Answer

The Office: Our Prices Have Never Been Lower

Key and Peele: The Telemarketer (Uncensored)

Used Cars: Fishing For Customers

Best Sales Lesson Ever: Jeremy Piven

Alec Baldwin Glengarry Glen Ross Speech

Key and Peele: Bagels are for Sales Associates (Uncensored) 

Robert DeNiro: Mob Boss Car Salesperson

The Wolf of Wall Street: Best Sales Pitch

Boiler Room: Daily News

Saturday Night Live: PowerPoint

Mad Men: Don Draper’s Best Sales Pitch Ever

Introducing a New Campaign

Seen this?

Watch it again.

Haven't seen it? Buckle your seat belt.

Required viewing for every person involved in marketing and branding:

Steve Jobs introduces Apple's "Think Different" campaign.

Columbus Day Rant

 

These days it seems that Columbus Day is a holiday that manages to start more arguments than actual celebrations.

Most holidays know what they are. Halloween? Costumes. Valentine's Day? Chocolate. Labor Day? Sales. Columbus Day, however, walks into the room like, "Good morning. Today we'll be discussing five centuries of history, exploration, colonization, national identity, and public policy."

And while I’m trying to determine if the banks and post offices are open, everyone else becomes an expert on 1492 … and whether we should be having a parade celebrating Columbus’ voyage or proclamations denouncing it. Social media transforms into the world's least organized graduate seminar, where every comment begins with "Actually..." and ends with someone muting their uncle.

Meanwhile, the retail industry has no idea what to do with the holiday. There's no official Columbus Day candy. No inflatable explorer decorations. No "Christopher's Pumpkin Spice Voyage." Just a handful of mattress sales awkwardly pretending this has always been a shopping event.

The result? Millions of people collectively discovering that history is a lot more complicated than the version that fit on an elementary school worksheet with instructions on how to build a construction paper Santa Maria.

Happy Columbus Day.

Or Indigenous Peoples' Day.

Or Monday.

Whatever you're calling it, I hope you at least remember to check whether the post office is open before leaving the house.

Readers Don't Care

All this hand-wringing about “human writing vs AI writing” feels slightly off. Readers don’t care about the process nearly as much as we think. They care if it holds their attention. If it gives them something.

The real shift is this: competence is now cheap.

So the question for writers isn’t “Should I use AI?” It’s “Am I saying anything that isn’t interchangeable?”

Because if the answer is, “No,” the machine’s already got you covered (and it doesn’t even need coffee).