Still lounging? Still scrolling? By now, you've made it through two of our beach reads. You know the deal: somewhere between a tan and a tension headache, we’re serving up Marketing Week meets Black Mirror. Bite-sized provocations for restless minds.
Here’s 3/8. A satirical think-piece à la McSweeney’s.
This is the one where planners get nervous. We mirror the voice of a smooth-talking strategist, now completely replaced by a well-dressed chatbot with a God complex. Think listicle meets lament.
Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash
Congratulations! You’re now a strategist.
Not officially, of course. But your boss sent you a link to a “vision deck” last week and told you to “chat it through with Claude” and now you’re three prompts deep into rewriting the brand platform from 2017.
Welcome to the gig.
Strategy used to require a beard, heavy framed black eyewear, and opinions about behavioral economics. Now it just needs an API key.
There was a time when strategists would wander the office murmuring about semiotics and tension. They wrote decks in Helvetica. They dropped phrases like “interrogate the insight.” They believed in something called The Truth.
Then ChatGPT got fine-tuned on every marketing blog ever written.
Now everyone’s got a playbook. Everyone’s got a framework. Everyone’s a bit strategic.
You’ve seen it.
The client says, “We want something fresh.”
You say, “Let’s triangulate between tension, category cues, and cultural momentum.”
You don’t know what that means.
Neither do they.
But Claude does.
You ask Claude, “What’s the emerging cultural tension between individuality and automation for a Gen Z crypto laundry brand?”
Claude replies with a moodboard, a manifesto, and three campaign territories. One of which makes you cry a little.
You feel powerful.
But here’s the thing: so does everyone else.
Creatives are running their own briefings now. Junior PMs are spitballing strategy in the war room. The intern just built a consumer journey map based on 400 pages of Reddit threads. The pitch is next Thursday. You haven’t opened PowerPoint in weeks.
And yet…
Something’s missing.
Because when everyone is a strategist, no one’s really responsible for the idea.
There’s no risk. No flavour. No one saying, “This is the hill I will die on.” Just an endless parade of “helpful suggestions” and “directionally interesting takes” synthesized from the same corpus of mid-tier blog posts and TEDx transcripts.
You start to wonder:
What if the job of a strategist was never to answer?
What if it was to provoke better questions?
You pause the AI. You pick up a pen. You write one real thing - the kind that doesn’t sound like a deck.
You show it to the team.
They nod.
Then they ask Claude to rewrite it in the tone of Vice circa 2014.
You smile.
You’re still useful.
Just not in the way you used to be.
To be continued…
Put your phone down. Stare up into the blue sky and think about how your brand might exist in a world where everyone is a strategist. Everyone is augmented. Or just order a drink. You can always have a chat with The Liberty Guild when you get back. We can help your brand narrative end well…
