Did you go to Meta Connect? Bro are you at Dev Day? Doordash announced an agent at Forward. I think she’s speaking at Forge by Braze, it’s right after, uh... Beanstalk? Want to do a dinner at Clay’s GTM conference Sculpt after Tech Week?
If it seems like you’ve seen a flood of tech events, with… mixed results, you’re not wrong.
In today’s HYPER we shall talk about the marketing of technology.
To set the stage, marketers are getting PREMIUMS to work in tech.
Ramp was hiring a Head of Content up to $350k/year, BlackRock (they’re essentially tech, Aladdin is Palantir for assets?) same job up to $270k. Because the value in successfully executing content strategy for more traditional categories is ASTRONOMICAL.
In AI Claude has a Head of Community listing with reported comp around $400,000/year, while Luma has a social media manager position going for $300k--a premium for both because the topics require so much nuance in messaging to succeed. And the intangible roles too, “storytelling” as a marketing concept has become a meme, but one compliance technology Vanta’s is paying up $274,000k to be ahead of, and the real truth is, for a lot of of true A players at these jobs they’re also gonna be creators, or not want to be stuck on one project and these numbers may not be high enough.
In a world where building has become a game of aggression, getting the right attention and having it resonate is worth everything, the hardest part is finding people tapped in enough to succeed here with experience navigating corporate environments. Too complex? There’s always Nvidia hiring for up to $218k in Creative Operations for... merch.
So here’s the scenario.
Everyone’s building the same things, incrementally better. Opus 5.5 is the hot model of the week after Astra was the hot model of the prior week BUT WAIT, Google Deepmind has released ARGON. The gas? No no it’s a model, but feel free to release the gas at this point too.
Grokbot, Muse, Dots, Cue, Town + 27 other entrants all selling the same thing. The only difference is marketing.
I was at Meta Connect, with hundreds of other creators. Mostly out of curiosity. I wasn’t paid to be there, I felt kinda washed the whole time. Watching influencers elbow each other out of the way to get selfie’s with Mosseri... yeah idk. But it spoke to what Meta has that no one else does. Instagram. They have Kylie, they have LISA. James Cameron and Mike Amiri (dream blunt rotation? nightmare blunt rotation?) are at the afterparty.
Every creator will do content for Muse, because Muse is by Meta, Meta has Instagram, and Instagram is the life blood of American culture with more power than we can conceive of. Is Kylie doing an Anthropic deal with Dario on TV preaching end times? Probably not. I tried Muse, I think Dots is better, and it doesn’t really matter because the rollout of Muse was legendary and the rollout of Dots was the third of the big bots to come out so many weeks.
Meta’s Alexandr Wang on the topic.
In the midst of all this, Sam Altman is getting mini-mic interviewed by randos in a production line. Dog, let the man go back to shaping the universe, Sam Altman should never be faced with a miniature microphone, we cannot live like this. But even the most powerful companies in the world are in a relentless attention battle.
You want to compete with any of these new tools, you have to be doing influencer marketing, and influencer at scale. I do campaigns with all these brands, I have made content with Anthropic, Grok, OpenAI, Google and Meta AI, there’s often 100 creators on the briefing call. You want to be a new dog coming at an incumbent, prepare to pay the tax of attention at scale, and its a steep one.
And that’s just the AI labs.
If you have an existing offering, some SAAS of incredible scale, you’re already public, no amount of revenue will appease the inventory base, you must be INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY and telling the world you are integrating that technology, so you don’t go the way of Getty Images (couldn’t happen to a nicer company!).
So investments in these new channels are do or die for stock price and valuation, and marketers are WORKING for it.
So... what should they actually be doing?
THE CREATION OF MEDIA
For the first time in recent history, the general public wants to be educated about technology, and is willing to consume short and longform content about it if positioned in an interesting and intelligent way, no matter how dense. There are formats for ANY topic to become digestible, and interesting, and algorithms exceptionally good at feeding it to people that are interesting
Ex: my friend Natalie draws intricate explainers of popular concepts.
If you don’t have ideas for your niche, and want to get started on this, try my Content Oracle.
ADS
Tech brands are spending more on Meta, TikTok and Youtube than ever, and it’s working. At Darkroom, we create a constant flow of ads, and our biggest inbound inquiries this year are all technology. As we’ve audited the space, the scale should excite anyone in SAAS or hardware. Hundreds of ads in ad accounts, the creative volume tactics of consumer packaged goods applied to an industry without physical product COGS and shipping. But it is certainly not… put a few statics and a launch video in an ad account. It’s adopting a constant flow of volume, in B2B and B2C, of unique concepts and styles that merge statics, modern visual learning formats, and the use of a wide swath of creators to tell your story. Speaking of which…
CREATOR
If you look at emerging technology brands that seem to have a ton of organic groundswell, there’s likely dozens to 100+ creators behind it. Creating content on individual accounts, contributing ads to ad accounts, and executing explainers. At Darkroom, we’ve found this structure to be the most compelling.
Anchor influencers up top: 2-3 recognizable names who make amazing concept and drive excitement and credibility for the brand, without worrying too much about direct ROI.
Middle tier: good value for views with up and coming creators who have an audience, know the space, have affinity, and are still breaking out to push ROI driven media that gets paid ads put behind it as well to find scalable economics for leads and signups.
Lower tier: an army of smaller creators, UGC, and variations and ideas executed cheaply, with winning concepts from the bigger influencers moved down the value chain, and outliers put into the paid ads machine.
EVENTS
You may have remembered earlier this year when I went on tour with Air. Note, not a tradeshow, or a brand conference, a tech brand and a creator doing value-driven events for their ICP. We had 40 marketing leaders in each room, workshopping content and creative operations. As everyone talks about IRL they quickly descend into ultra-expensive conferences and sponsorships, when the real alpha is still value-driven and its in collaboration with the community that’s being deployed above.
Kitchen Sink
More on the branding arms race:
On next-generation brand systems
How can we short Nike even further?
Until next week,
Oren
Want to scale your brand with us? darkroomagency.com
The next Cut30 short form bootcamp starts October 30th: https://cut30.co