Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.
Hello rock star!
It’s that time of year, as my chum Robert Rose said on our “Rose & Rockstar” podcast series this week, quoting from his own Content Marketing Institute blog post:
“the air smells faintly of pumpkin-spiced Excel spreadsheets. That potent blend of caffeine, desperation, and conditional formatted pivot tables can only mean one thing: it’s time to plan for 2026”.
Beautifully said, and yes, we need to decide what more we will do in 2026.
But what about what we will NOT do?
When evaluating what we have planned, it's typically a budget conversation, and we list our planned spend against the return we expect. What to include and what to cut is a discussion with the CEO and CFO over a marketing balance sheet.
What we won’t spend money on is fairly regularily reviewed.
But what is often missing from the scrutiny of our pumpkin-spiced spreadsheet are those things that have a low cost in terms of budget, but are things the marketing team spends time on.
There is often a quiet hum of a hamster wheel in most marketing departments, with a proportion of the team’s time spent running around it, doing all the things that fall under the heading of “we’ve always done them”, “sales expect them”, or “it’s just the sort of thing that companies like us do”.
Aside from the fact that all this noisy stuff, of doing more for the sake of more, is working against us, stealing valuable attention from our audience, away from what we really want them to focus on.
It makes marketing a back-office service rather than a strategic, on-the-front-foot function, able to plan for impact in 2026, weighed down by what is perceived as business-as-usual.
We do these things without really considering whether they're moving the needle on our ability to create ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust).
Does that blog, newsletter, podcast, eBook, series of product flyers, being on TikFace… whatever it is… create ART?
And, of course, the tune for this week giving me the subject line, is classic Snoop Dogg, whose planning spreadsheets are probably not done with the whiff of pumpkin spice….
Have a splendid week!
Cheers!
Ian
Ian Truscott
Host & Chief Bottle Washer - Rockstar CMO podcast
Managing Partner - Velocity B
Personal website: iantruscott.com
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