What Marketing Means to Me -

A Manifesto

My fascination with marketing probably started long before I knew what marketing was.

As a child, I was obsessed with Koh-Lanta—the French version of Survivor. Every episode followed the same pattern: contestants would spend an hour starving on a deserted island, betraying one another over a tiny piece of meat. It felt like watching Scar and Mufasa's rivalry, except they were fighting for an entire kingdom, not a quarter of a coconut. Then, almost on cue, the commercial break would begin: Charal steak, Oasis fruit juice and more food.

Week after week, I found myself wondering: this can't be a coincidence! I was far too young to understand media planning, consumer psychology or advertising strategy.

But I was old enough to ask myself that question:

Why show food to people who have just spent an hour watching other people desperately trying to eat?

Years later, I watched 99 Francs, starring Jean Dujardin. Most people remember it as a satire of the advertising industry. What stayed with me was something else entirely: the idea of La Fabrique du Désir—The Manufacture of Desire. That expression fascinated me then, and it still does today.

When we hear the word factory, we instinctively picture something tangible: a car, a chair or a phone. A factory produces objects we can touch, weigh and measure.

Desire is the exact opposite. It is invisible. Intangible. It exists only in our minds. Perhaps it is one of the least tangible things we ever experience: the awareness of a lack, the feeling that something is missing, the aspiration towards something that promises to fill that absence. And yet entire industries have been built around the idea that this invisible thing can be manufactured.

That idea has always struck me as extraordinary. Desire is one of the most intimate parts of our humanity. We like to believe that it belongs entirely to us, that our aspirations emerge naturally from within. Marketing challenges that belief.

Prometheus defied the gods by stealing fire and giving it to mankind. Marketers don't just steal fire; they sell it afterward. They're doing something just as audacious by trying to influence one of the most intimate parts of our humanity: the desires we believe are entirely our own. That is an astonishing form of power if you think about it!

Later, I joined Publicis. Around the same time, I wrote my thesis on advertising, where I quoted Patrick Le Lay, the former CEO of TF1, France's largest television network. His words became infamous because they articulated, with unusual honesty, what advertising had always been trying to achieve:

« Il y a beaucoup de façons de parler de la télévision. Mais dans une perspective business, soyons réaliste : à la base, le métier de TF1, c'est d'aider Coca-Cola, par exemple, à vendre son produit. Or, pour qu'un message publicitaire soit perçu, il faut que le cerveau du téléspectateur soit disponible. Nos émissions ont pour vocation de le rendre disponible : c'est-à-dire de le divertir, de le détendre pour le préparer entre deux messages. Ce que nous vendons à Coca-Cola, c'est du temps de cerveau humain disponible.

Rien n'est plus difficile que d'obtenir cette disponibilité. C'est là que se trouve le changement permanent. Il faut chercher en permanence les programmes qui marchent, suivre les modes, surfer sur les tendances, dans un contexte où l'information s'accélère, se multiplie et se banalise. »

Translated:

"There are many ways to talk about television. But from a business perspective, let's be realistic: TF1's core business is helping companies like Coca-Cola sell their products. For an advertisement to be effective, the viewer's brain must be available. Our programmes exist to make that brain available—to entertain viewers, relax them, and prepare them between commercial breaks. What we sell to Coca-Cola is available human brain time.

Nothing is harder than obtaining that availability. That's where constant change comes from. We must continuously search for programmes that work, follow trends and adapt to an environment where information accelerates, multiplies and becomes increasingly commonplace."

Source: Patrick Le Lay, Les dirigeants face au changement, Éditions du Huitième Jour, 2004.

Twenty years later, I find myself asking a different question. Patrick Le Lay wondered how to make human brain time available. Today, I wonder whether it is still available at all.

Competition for our attention already existed when he made that statement. Television competed with radio, newspapers, magazines and countless other forms of media. But today's environment operates on an entirely different scale. Smartphones, social media, streaming platforms, AI, newsletters, podcasts, connected devices and notifications compete relentlessly for the same finite resource. Content is faster, algorithms are more addictive, and every platform has become remarkably good at keeping us engaged.

In that world, is there still such a thing as available brain time?

Marketing has evolved tremendously. Today, we have AI, attribution models, dashboards, behavioural analytics and more data than marketers could ever have dreamed of twenty years ago. Data has become indispensable.

But it has one fundamental limitation: it is always a snapshot of a moment in time. By the time we begin analysing it, that moment already belongs to the past. Yet businesses rely on yesterday's data to make tomorrow's decisions.

Marketing is, above all, a profoundly human discipline. Understanding psychology, neuroscience, cognitive biases and human behaviour, what creates fear, desire, belonging, jealousy, status, aspiration and the countless unconscious mechanisms that shape our decisions is essential.

Then there is intuition.

For centuries, philosophers and scientists have tried to define it. Bergson described intuition as the ability to grasp what is unique and inexpressible about something. Alain saw it as the ability to understand, perceive or know something immediately, without passing through the stages of analysis, reasoning or reflection. Poincaré considered intuition the very instrument of invention, capable of preceding demonstration.

I find it fascinating that, after centuries of philosophy and scientific inquiry, intuition remains partly unexplained. Yet some of humanity's greatest discoveries, masterpieces and breakthroughs began with an intuition long before they could be demonstrated. I believe marketing is no different.

Matter of fact, marketing hasn't fundamentally changed.

AI didn't change it.

Dashboards didn't change it.

Technology didn't change it.

They simply gave us better tools. At its core, marketing remains exactly what it has always been: one human trying to understand another. And that's what fascinates me! Understanding another human being—their behaviors, their habits, what they love and hate, the moments in their life, their doubts, their joys, their fears and worries, and their way of seeing the world. Understanding them and putting into words what they haven’t yet been able to grasp, by getting to know them on a level they haven’t had the chance to discover for themselves.

This website is simply an extension of that curiosity. Through my encounters, my travels, my projects, the events I attend and, yes, my emmerdes, I keep challenging my own understanding of marketing.

Finally, I don't believe great marketers ever graduate, I believe they remain students of the discipline for the rest of their lives.

Renée D.