Last month, Timothée Chalamet released an 18-minute promotional video for his upcoming film Marty Supreme. The premise was simple: Chalamet joins his agency team on a Zoom call to share his "GREAT IDEAS" for promoting the Christmas Day release.
He wants to be on a Wheaties box. He has a theme color picked out—"hardcore orange"—and plans to paint both the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower in that exact shade. The session concludes in a 60-second team meditation on the values of "integration, culmination, and fruitionizing."
The agency team nods along. They take notes. Then, they approve everything.
The video is satire, but the discomfort it creates is real. If you’ve ever sat through a marketing meeting, you’ll likely recognize the dynamic immediately: tactics flying around the room like confetti, each one more theatrical than the last, while the fundamental questions remain unasked.
Who are we trying to reach?
What do we want them to think?
Why would any of this matter to them?
Chalamet didn't set out to drag marketers, but he exposed something most of us would rather not admit: Too many marketing plans look like that fictional call. A chaotic parade of ideas on a tightrope.
Marketing expert Mark Ritson watched the video and coined a term for what he saw: “tactification.”