Last Christmas

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!

Yes folks, I went there. The song that is giving this week’s newsletter its subject line is "Last Christmas” by Wham, which is probably a bad idea for a few reasons, chief among them that, if you are a regular reader, I used this as a subject line in 2023, and well, maybe you are tired of this being on repeat during the holidays.

But I have a different take on the analogy of the lyrics this time around.

Last Christmas // I gave you my heart // the very next day you gave it away..

What are you planning to give away - or stop in 2026?

That thought was triggered by Beehiiv, the platform I use for this newsletter, doing their version of Spotify’s 2025 Wrapped, called Rewind, which gave me all the stats for this newsletter for the year, one of which was that I have written over 30 thousand words.

Over 30 thousand words is a book.

OK, so maybe not a very long book, but it is a decent chunk of a book.

Combine that with my weekly Tuesday 2¢ post, blog posts for my business and various other writing I do, I’ve probably written more than enough words for a decent book.

I’ve long aspired to write a book and I have had a number of false starts, but the habit doesn’t stick and there are 17,826 words in my current favorite book writing app (Ulysses) gathering digital dust, another book attempt that has seemingly floundered on it’s journey from aspiration to Amazon.

Any coach would probably tell me that if I want to write a book, some of this writing habit needs to be better directed. I should stop something, but to be honest, I continue to procrastinate on that.

As the year comes to an end and we cast our eyes to 2026, we are full of plans for the new things we want to do, both personally and professionally, with our marketing teams.

But do you have a plan for what you want to stop?

It’s common advice, but I share this story, because Beehiiv gave me some data that got me thinking and in order to create a stop plan, we need to audit what we are doing, find a metric that helps compare these different things.

To do that, we need goals, in this story, that’s a book and the metric is number of words, but you know me, in my work I’m going to talk about measuring ART (Awareness, Revenue and Trust), review each activity against it’s contribution to these three.

So, as I strangle the lyrics of Mr Michael and Mr Ridgely, you may have given something your heart in 2025, but maybe this year, to save you from tears, you need to give that effort to something special.

(Sorry!)

Enjoy - have a great week.

Cheers!

Ian

Playing constantly in a mall near you…