17541: The Tech Bro-ification Of Marketing Is Technically BS.

 

Time published content titled, “The Tech Bro-ification of Marketing,” whereby the author believes White men are seizing control of marketing despite being outnumbered by White women.

 

Okay, except it’s common knowledge the White men versus White women numbers skew in favor of females, but White men still dominate in positions of power and pay.

 

And don’t forget White men and White women—separately and collectively—do waaaaay better in the marketing arena than people of color.

 

The true problem remains the whitewashing—that is, white privilege, systemic whiteness, and white supremacy—of marketing.

 

The Tech Bro-ification of Marketing

 

By Miranda Shanahan

 

Miranda Shanahan is a brand consultant, content creator, and speaker.

 

Scroll through LinkedIn, and you will find a flurry of new job listings with curious titles: “Narrative Engineer”, “UGC Engineer”, “Media Engineer.” At first glance, they sound like entirely new disciplines. Look closer, and they feel suspiciously familiar. 

 

As someone who has built a decade-long career in the marketing industry, I wondered: Why are these marketing roles being relabeled? I took my question to social media. “Is marketing being rebranded so boys can do it too?” I quipped on TikTok between meetings. 

 

I checked back a few hours later, and my comments section was aflame with marketers, tech folk, and VCs. Some had sensed something was off but couldn’t quite name it; others shared the most absurd titles they’d come across; and some pushed back, arguing that something genuinely new was emerging.

 

The tech bro-ification of marketing is underway. It’s not the first time a profession has been repackaged like this. But beneath this trend lies a broader pattern around how work is named, coded, and valued. The question: why is this happening to marketing—and why now?

 

Part of the answer lies in who marketing has come to be associated with. According to a study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), 67% to 70% of marketing practitioners are women, making it one of the few female-dominated fields in the corporate sector. Research consistently shows that as a profession becomes associated with women, its pay and status tend to decline, and marketing is no exception. Plenty of professions skew one way or another, but those patterns aren’t driven by biology but rather our cultural stereotypes about who is good at what kind of work. 

 

The marketing industry is a broad church, but decades of cultural shorthand have flattened it into something quite specific. Shows like Sex and the City and, more recently, Emily in Paris have portrayed marketing as women and gay men throwing parties and coming up with zany ideas. Over on social media, this has calcified into the “marketing girlie” trope: the personality hire who makes things pretty in Canva and forces her boss to do TikTok dances. The cliché of a tech bro, by contrast, is that of a hyper-optimized lone wolf genius. These are stereotypes, but they have economic implications. 

 

The perceived value of a profession, the language used to describe it, and who is seen to be performing it have always been intertwined. Before “software engineer” was a job title, coding was a secretarial task, mainly done by women. Cosmopolitan even ran an article in 1967 titled The Computer Girls, touting it as an ideal career for women.

 

Software was “soft” work versus the “hard” work of building physical things. Even Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist at NASA in the 1960s, described feeling like a misplaced “stepchild” among the hardware engineers.

 

Hamilton coined the term “software engineer” in an effort to get her work taken seriously, much to the amusement of her almost exclusively male colleagues. Yet through the 70s and 80s, “software engineering” emerged as a bona fide profession: well-paid, prestigious, and over time, predominantly male. 

 

There were many different forces responsible for the shifting demographics of the software engineering profession, but it is undeniable that changing language has a habit of changing who feels welcome. Research has shown that women are less likely to apply for roles unless they feel they are 100% qualified or, in other words, welcome. 

 

The same dynamic is now playing out in marketing in reverse. In consumer brands, marketing has always been a core discipline. I would argue Nike’s most valuable asset isn’t the technical spec of a sneaker, but the story around it. However, in Silicon Valley, the hierarchy works differently: those who build sit above those who sell. Except now the very thing they’ve relied on for growth—coding and technical creation—has been commoditized by AI.

 

The first inkling of recalibration came when tech bros suddenly started emphasizing the importance of taste. “Taste is a new core skill,” declared OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. “In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make,” pronounced technologist Paul Graham. 

 

As Snap CEO Evan Spiegel put it: AI makes it easier to build new products, so distribution is the biggest challenge facing consumer technology businesses. 

 

The truth is that taste, distribution, and marketing have always been important. But now that AI is cheapening other kinds of work, tech has been forced to admit that marketing actually matters. 

 

The problem is, “marketing” comes with baggage. Decades of cultural coding have made it a hard sell internally, so tech is dressing it up in clothes they feel comfortable wearing. Brand strategists become narrative engineers. Marketing managers become growth architects. This shouldn't be much of a surprise. Tech has a penchant for taking familiar ideas and selling them back to us as revolutionary. Taxis become Ubers, bed and breakfasts become Airbnbs. Marketing is just the Emperor’s latest outfit. 

 

In some cases, these roles are genuinely becoming more technical, but mostly the language is being stretched so thin it’s hard to separate reality from corporate fiction. Just like using a calculator doesn’t make you a mathematician, using vibe coding and automation tools doesn’t make you an engineer. Marketing has always been part science, part art. The irony is, AI is automating the technical parts faster than anything else. Creative intuition, human judgment, and, yes, taste, are still the hardest things to replace. Yet still, employers reach for technical language to signal value. 

 

Perhaps the upside will be that job titles with a technical veneer could command higher salaries and more respect from leaders who respond better to “engineer” than “marketer.” The problem, though, is the more we conflate value with tech, the more we devalue the art of marketing and the people who practice it.

 

It might not seem that deep, but marketing’s rebrand is part of a bigger pattern. When you control the vocabulary of a field, you decide who deserves a place. Tech has always been good at making familiar ideas feel like breakthroughs, and marketing is just the latest one.

14682: Torn On The Fourth Of July.

Time published the Independence Day musings of Frederick Douglass—“an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more…”

13926: Time’s Adperson Of The Year…?

Time magazine’s 2017 Person of the Year honor went to “The Silence Breakers”—represented by a predominately female group—to salute people who spoke out against sexual harassment and assault. JWT Global Communications Officer Erin Johnson wasn’t featured among the assembly, though she technically qualifies. Of course, expect Kat Gordon and Cindy Gallop to barge into the conversation.

11299: Editorial Evolution At Essence.

From The New York Times…

Awaiting Another Top Editor, Essence Faces Identity Questions

By Tanzina Vega

Essence Communications, which has been without an editor in chief for its flagship publication since February, is said to be in the final stages of choosing a new leader for the magazine, the fifth such appointment in 13 years.

The new editor will be part of a healthy franchise that includes the Essence Festival, the brand’s annual entertainment event, but running the magazine — once seen as a lifestyle and beauty beacon for African-American women — may prove challenging.

While the festival has repeatedly drawn hundreds of thousands of people and attracted A-list performers like Beyoncé, Essence, the magazine, has faced increasing competition from Web sites aimed at African-Americans. The magazine, which is 43 years old, has been buffeted by the frequent leadership changes, including the completion of its purchase by Time Inc. in 2005. That acquisition may now be contributing to one of Essence’s latest challenges: a growing sense among some readers, bloggers and media analysts that the magazine has lost its editorial direction.

“They’ve lost some of the specific focus, who their audience is and what they want to say to them,” said Noliwe M. Rooks, an associate professor of Africana studies at Cornell University and author of “Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture That Made Them.” “They keep doing more of the same as opposed to actually innovating.”

In February, after a wave of layoffs at Time Inc., the magazine fired three members of its newsroom staff, the editor in chief, Constance C. R. White, the beauty editor and the creative director. Articles about Ms. White’s departure were filled with comments from Essence readers, many of whom said they had stopped reading the magazine. Others lamented the absence of Susan L. Taylor, who led the magazine from 1981 through 2000, and some objected to the fact that Time Inc. was a media company largely owned and managed by whites.

That complaint is not new. In 2010, when Essence appointed Ellianna Placas as the magazine’s first white fashion director, Michaela Angela Davis, a former fashion editor at Essence, wrote on her Facebook page that she felt as if a girlfriend had died. In an interview, Ms. Davis said that for black fashion editors, the fashion editor role at Essence was “a gateway to working at other magazines. The only place that was reserved for us, was taken away by us.” (Ms. Placas is no longer with the magazine.)

Michelle Ebanks, the president of Essence Communications, said she understood the concern among some readers that Time Inc. had hurt the publication. “What we know is that African-Americans historically, and it is still true today, believe that media in general does an O.K. to poor job of reflecting their lives accurately,” Ms. Ebanks said.

But, she added, “I can tell you that journalistic independence is something Essence enjoys here at Time Inc., along with every other title.”

Ms. Ebanks highlighted the magazine’s success with its audience. According to data provided by the company, based on industry research from GfK MRI, 75 percent of the women who read Essence consider it very good or one of their favorite magazines and 62 percent say they read three out of every four issues.

In an interview in April, Ms. Ebanks said, “The percentage of African-American women who read Essence is nearly 40 percent.” That penetration, she said, is reflected in the close relationship the magazine has with its readers.

“Over the decades, Essence has had a great deal of feedback in letters, e-mails, a lot of conversation in blogs,” Ms. Ebanks said. “This is not a liability. This is an asset. Our editors, now and as they always have, take that dialogue very seriously. It’s precious.”

Read the full story here.

7847: Bill Cosby Lives.

From Time.com…

Death By Twitter: Cosby Proves Self Alive on CNN

By James Poniewozik

Larry King Live may be the go-to destination for coverage of celebrity deaths, but last night, Bill Cosby called in to confirm that he is quite alive. This, in contradiction to the Trending Topics list on Twitter—the list of most-mentioned subjects on the social-networking service—which for much of the day was topped by the phrase “Bill Cosby Died.” While Cosby initially seemed to be taking the rumor in stride, he was clearly not entirely amused by the misinformation— as he indicated on Twitter itself. “It is no longer fun,” said the multiple victim of false-death rumors.

Cosby repeatedly addressed “the person” who spread the rumor online, though it’s not entirely clear to whom the rumor can be spread, or if it had a single source. The nature of Trending Topics, of course, is that by the time a subject tops it, it’s been tweeted about so often that it’s difficult to mine it for the first appearance of a particular hoax.

It’s a harmless enough story—in that no one actually died, anyway—but there’s a lesson in trusting Twitter as a news source. That lesson is not, “Don’t use Twitter as a news source,” though. I check my Twitter stream constantly for news and have first learned of a lot of breaking news stories from it over the last couple of years (some of those being, yes, celebrity deaths).

But it does show that on Twitter as everywhere else, it’s important to use sources you trust—a person, or news outlet you know to be reliable is a more bankable form of news than the aggregated Trending list, which indicates what people are tweeting about but doesn’t verify anything. (The latter, though, is a reliable reminder of when the Bachelorette is on.)

The CNN interview takes an odd turn toward the end, as guest host Kyra Phillips uses the moment to ask Cosby to envision his own death and how he’d like it treated. Cosby pivots and replies that, if there’s ever a movie made about him, he’d like to be played by Steven Wright, to which Phillips reacts with raucous laughter even though, evidently, she does not know who Wright is.

Elsewhere in the clip, Cosby offers his definition of Hell: a place where everybody’s laughing, but nothing is funny. That, I believe, describes the circle where they house the death-rumor spreaders.