Guest Post by Marian Hurducaș, Marketing & Strategy Consultant
I was thinking about something yesterday while stuck in traffic – in my spare time, I also work as an Uber driver for my daughter – sparked by a private conversation and a LinkedIn job post someone sent me: OpenAI is hiring a Global Head of Events.
For anyone who somehow missed it, this is the company that triggered the global frenzy around AI algorithms and total automation. And, counterintuitive as it may sound, they’re looking for someone whose job will be to bring more people together in physical rooms, put them under spotlights and in front of microphones, and build real-life experiences with them.
Just as the corporate world has convinced itself that the future is all about screens, feeds and budgets burned on digital advertising, OpenAI is taking a step back towards one of the oldest marketing tools in history: physical presence.
And that should make all of us who have turned marketing into a never-ending circus built around bread and multimedia content stop and think.
I’m deliberately using “us” here because I have no problem admitting that I once believed digital was the Holy Grail of marketing too.
We turned the whole thing upside down
Somewhere along the way, over at least the past ten years, we managed the remarkable achievement of completely reversing basic business logic.
Back in my day – and I’m not talking about dusty nostalgia here, but basic business economics – the order was sacred:
- First, you built an exceptional product or delivered an impeccable service. The product was the foundation, the core, the reason you existed in the market.
- Communication and marketing came next, translating that value, making it visible and anchoring it in people’s minds.
Today, according to the new world order of business, the product has been pushed into second place. Or third.
Mainly because we collectively declared that “every brand must now become a media company.”
And guess what? We got exactly what we asked for.
At first, it worked well for those who could afford it. Ten years ago, setting up a video studio wasn’t that simple. You needed serious investment.
I’m saying this as someone who graduated from journalism school, did a master’s degree in media production, launched one of the first digital agencies in Transylvania and, in 2015, poured pretty much everything the agency was making into building a studio.
Yes, eleven years ago I saw the trend coming and moved in that direction. Before long, in-house content production became one of the main reasons clients in Transylvania chose to work with us.
Technology changed the game, and today the barrier to entry has fallen almost to zero.
You can become your own TV station with the phone in your pocket, and it doesn’t even have to be top of the line. A perfectly average phone will technically do much of what my cameras and microphones did back in 2015.
And low barriers to entry create what they create in every industry: massive dilution.
It’s similar to what happened with Chinese electric cars competing with European combustion-engine manufacturers. Building great combustion engines required decades of engineering, patents and technical refinement. EV technology is far more modular and easier to assemble at scale, so the market quickly filled with options.
But having a 4K camera in your hand doesn’t mean you have distribution, authority, respect or the knowledge required to run a media business.
It simply means you’ve increased the volume of background noise.
Competing with the entire planet and the “tourist country” syndrome
Once you start behaving like a media company, you’re no longer competing only with the direct competitor in your niche.
You’re competing with the entire planet.
You’re competing with billions of people, streamers, influencers, memes and cats dancing on the internet for the attention of the same human being. You’re competing with a YouTube playlist, a book, a podcast, even sleep.
Every minute someone spends looking at something else is a minute your brand will never get back.
And what do we do when we feel we’re losing that race?
We panic. We force ourselves to produce even more multimedia content.
We behave exactly like a country flooded with seasonal tourists: squeeze as much money out of them as possible right now, through overpriced products, services and experiences, because somewhere deep down we assume they probably won’t come back anyway.
Long-term communication, that slow and steady relationship built on trust – slow marketing, if you will, as Robert Katai calls it in his book of the same name – gets thrown away.
Instead, we pour enormous budgets into rapid acquisition and emergency campaigns.
It isn’t even a rat race. It’s worse. It’s a hamster wheel.
And it leads nowhere except to our own exhaustion.
The illusion of loyalty bought one teaspoon at a time
This, I think, is where we get to the heart of the problem.
In the digital world we live in, with its illusion of endless abundance, customers increasingly vote with their wallets. Loyalty carries less weight when switching is easy and alternatives are everywhere.
As Shaan Puri recently wrote about AI tools: “I have zero loyalty. If a new tool comes along and gives me 10% more, I’ll switch in a second.”
Now translate that into consumer behaviour towards brands in general, far beyond Romania.
When products become merely “good enough” at “decent enough” prices, brands struggle to generate organic retention. So they try to buy it.
How?
Giveaways. Cars. Phones. Holidays. Coupons. Aggressive discounts.
That isn’t loyalty.
It’s a protection tax against abandonment. Commercial blackmail dressed up as customer engagement.
The second you turn off the stream of prizes and promotions, the customer moves to the next stall in the marketplace. The same thing happens when you switch off your paid campaigns on digital platforms.
And frankly, people have fewer reasons to be loyal.
Products and services are increasingly mediocre, good at best, and when everything starts looking and feeling the same, one of the few remaining differentiators becomes brand personality.
That’s also part of the reason influencers become influencers.
And all of this happens because brands now want to be media companies first and everything else second.
Why?
Because it looks easier. Because it’s shinier. Because it feels accessible and gives you the impression of power.
But you don’t have that power.
Without an excellent product or an impeccable service, you can’t even build a sustainable media company. Just look at the economics of actual media companies and what having a genuinely good product means there.
And keeping this illusion of a powerful brand alive requires three times the effort.
You have to pump out content continuously, burn media budgets, invent new formats and keep raising the stakes just to avoid being forgotten.
The biggest problem?
There’s no beginning and no end. There’s no strategy.
No business strategy. No brand strategy. No marketing strategy.
We call this lăutărie.
The answer isn’t more content. It’s more substance.
That’s why OpenAI’s move – or the fact that smart B2B brands are increasingly building their own local tours, practical meetings with partners and closed-door events – points towards a very rational direction.
It comes back to something I’ve been preaching for years:
We need to get back to basics.
The algorithm is not your friend. The algorithm is a monster, a mythical creature we feed every day, hoping it will lend us a tiny piece of people’s attention.
But that attention is rented. You don’t own it.
If you want to build a business that lasts ten, twenty or thirty years, the order needs to be reset:
1. Make the damn product remarkable first.
Create real reasons why leaving you would be difficult or inconvenient. Do things so well that you don’t need to give someone a car just to make sure they remember you exist.
2. Build physical context and human relationships.
If you’re in B2B, bring your customers, partners and suppliers into the same room. Talk about real industry problems instead of repeating marketing slogans.
Trust isn’t built through a random 15-second Reel produced just to tick off the latest trend.
3. Treat content as a vehicle for brand image, messages and values, rather than transactional noise.
If you’re going to broadcast something, make sure it brings perspective, education or substance instead of another cosmetically enhanced ad.
Otherwise, let the music play.
The first rule I learned in radio – and probably one of the more useful rules in life – is that when you have nothing worth saying, say nothing and let the music play.
We are running an expensive, noisy circus that can become dangerous to the profitability of any company.
Today’s customers have become mercenaries because we trained them to behave that way.
And it’s also up to us to return to the basics – the dusty, unfashionable ones that still work.
Marian Hurducaș holds a degree in Journalism and a Master’s in Media Production (FPAC, UBB Cluj). He has over 18 years of experience in media, communications, and digital marketing – a significant portion of which was spent in radio as a journalist.
He became an entrepreneur and founded Necktie Agency in Cluj-Napoca, then moved to Bucharest to start fresh as a communications and marketing strategy consultant, handling projects that included crisis communications.
He has coordinated and implemented digital communication strategies for major brands, events, and festivals. Concurrently, he has been active in content creation, launching HURDUcast and serving as the strategist behind Murdar – Romania’s first fiction podcast.
He served as a communications advisor to the Minister of Research, Innovation, and Digitalisation and maintains a keen interest in tech and digital culture, entrepreneurship, and marketing communications.
He talks a lot – sometimes into a microphone, as a moderator or radio host. He reads even more.
Some say Marian is too blunt. He says that, after so many years in the industry, he has simply run out of patience for work done superficially.
We say he has interesting things to say. So, we handed him the microphone. Virtually, for now.