Partly, it’s noticing what direction I’m being pointed toward — and going the other way.
I’ve developed a simple rule of thumb over the years: the harder something is being advertised to me, the more suspicious I get. Not because I think every marketer is a con artist, but because the math doesn’t lie. If a product needs to be in every commercial break, plastered on every billboard, and shoved into my social media feed sixteen times a day, someone is spending an enormous amount of money to change my behavior. That money has to come from somewhere. And it’s coming from the margin between what the thing costs to make and what they can get me to pay for it. The bigger the ad budget, the wider that margin probably is — and the wider that margin, the more I’m getting the short end of the deal.
The best things in my life never came with a jingle.
Here’s the example I keep coming back to: in roofing, the best contractors I’ve ever encountered don’t advertise. Not a little — not at all. No website, no yard signs, no Google Business Profile. They work by word of mouth only, and they stay booked out months in advance because the people who’ve used them tell other people, and that’s the whole operation. The work is the marketing. There’s something almost defiant about it — a quiet confidence that quality will find its own audience without needing to be sold.
I’ll admit the irony here. I have a website. I think about my online presence. I’m doing things that those guys would probably find faintly ridiculous. But I understand why they don’t need any of it, and I respect the principle underneath it: if you’re genuinely good at what you do, the advertising is just noise you add to compensate for something.
I think about this beyond just products and contractors. Society advertises certain life paths pretty aggressively too — certain definitions of success, certain timelines, certain things you’re supposed to want by certain ages. And I apply the same filter. Who benefits if I follow this particular road? What’s the margin they’re collecting? Is this actually good for me, or does it just photograph well?
Going the opposite direction isn’t contrarianism for its own sake. It’s just paying attention to who’s doing the pointing — and asking why.
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