First name / Hello,,
It's a wild time to work in the world of marketing.
Those of us with a conscience have been pausing to reflect on what's coming down the pike.
This time of year it’s common for marketers to share predictions and analyses of upcoming trends and changes. And while we have done that in the past at Fearless Foundry, something about doing it in this moment just doesn't sit right with us.
This January, instead, we've been having deep conversations as a team, asking important questions about what it means to be working in marketing at a time when many in our industry are doing more harm than good.
While we see the work we do in our Creative Collective as something much bigger than simply creating content, we also know how quickly we can be pigeonholed alongside others who share our skill sets but use them to cause strife, stress, and outright harm through media.
We have created organic social media content for our clients almost since our infancy. Our team is one of the lucky ones.
All of us participate in social media in our own ways—for our businesses, our client brands, and for our own personal interests. All of us, too, have benefited over the years from the power of social media and the internet:
- It helps pay our bills.
- It allows our team to work flexibly and remotely from around the world.
- It allows us to connect with clients and projects that we could never have dreamed of if we were only allowed to work within the confines of the towns we come from.
But we’re also old enough to remember the world before social media.
We’re able to have conscious conversations about what it means to live in an era where this kind of media is increasingly unregulated.
This experience means we're thinking hard about what our work looks like and how we want to shift strategies, not to simply stand out, but to stand in alignment with our clients' values and beliefs.
As these platforms continue to feel like more and more precarious places, what we’ve come to at Fearless Foundry is this: it is much more important for us to focus on creating community and conversations than it is to simply create content for content’s sake.
In this expansive era of the Internet, where more people have access to misinformation than ever before, we believe it’s our responsibility to not only be inquisitive but be accurate and to take a beat whenever possible.
We refuse to add inflammatory information or ideas into a world already filled with content designed to incite and elicit reactions that harm people's nervous systems.
At our core, our team is made up of creatives. We're in it for the artistry, for how the content we've created allows people to connect and convene in ways they wouldn't have otherwise.
Yet, we also believe we have a responsibility as creatives to envision a future where these forms of media, the internet made possible, are utilized for more than that.
One where they are to make a meaningful and positive difference.
As the year unfolds, I have no doubt we'll continue this conversation with our entire community. Adapting strategies at an individual level and sharing our experiences collectively. Our goal is to ensure that everything we create aligns not only with our values but with what our clients believe is best for their businesses and the communities they serve.
And while I wish I had abundant answers here in this email, I think it's important for us to slow down enough to ask the right questions:
Is this content designed to create a reaction, or is it designed to create a conversation?
Is this content calling somebody in? Or repelling people in a way that furthers a binary notion of "us versus them"?
Is this content something that even needs to exist, or are we simply creating content for content's sake?
In asking these questions internally (and alongside those we work with) we hope to reshape our approach to allow our work to be not only meaningful but inspire thoughtful dialogue that brings people together rather than creating division.
My hope is that you'll join us in asking these important questions and share with us what you're reconsidering about how you create content for your brand and engage with media in the months ahead.
We will be listening.
With love,
Madeline
