The part no one can promise

I still don't know whether Murder in Marketing will become the thing I hope it becomes, whether people will watch all 36 episodes, fall in love with the characters, guess the murderer, or stop me at a conference to complain about the ending, a possibility I would absolutely adore. I will measure views, engagement, audience growth, and the conversations that follow because I am responsible for the business behind this creative experiment. And the woman in London gave me another question to carry into that work: could the anticipation I saw in her become a feeling people wanted to return to?

My mother has a saying that has followed me around for years: “If you don’t have haters, you’re doing something wrong,” and recently Freddie Öst of SNASK, someone I admire deeply and hope to work with, said onstage, “I’d rather make enemies than gain raving fans.” I hear permission in those words to have a real point of view, to make something with enough conviction that people can respond to it, and I know that pushing the boundary has gotten me into trouble before. If the series fails, if someone hates it, even if I get fired, I will carry what I learned into the next thing I make, with more nerve and a clearer understanding of what the work asks of me.

I have always believed that if you are not growing, you are dying, and this project asked me to grow in ways I could never have put into a career plan. It asked me to become a beginner in rooms full of experts, bring people into a risk that would take months of their lives, and keep making decisions while the outcome remained uncertain; I have the highest expectations of myself and other people, which may be a fatal flaw, a gift, or some troublesome combination of both, and I felt the weight of those expectations throughout the making of this. Go big or stay home; if I am going to put on my shoes, do my makeup, and step into the world asking people to believe in something, I owe it the full force of my effort.

Some of that growth felt like finding my way back to the curiosity I had before I learned which ideas were too strange to explain in a meeting, before every possibility arrived with a list of reasons to make it smaller. I wanted to bring that unedited wonder into the rooms where I build plans and decide what is worth risking, and a year after I told Tara she could fire me if I failed to make a difference, the series is ready to meet its audience as the most elaborate performance review of my career.

Picture a marketer closing a laptop, opening TikTok, and finding a funny video featuring a fictional non-alcoholic sparkling-wine company with a dead executive and a range of suspects; maybe she stays for ninety seconds, then gives me another ninety, then sends the series to a colleague with a message that says, “This is you.” Marketing is hard, life is hard, working across the globe is hard, and AI has made the unknown feel even larger, so if she recognizes herself, laughs, and feels the small warmth of being understood, the story has earned a place in her day. Maybe a character or a line will find her again later, the way a fragrance returns you to a person or a room, carrying the feeling long after the first encounter.

Maybe, the dead executive will get his tombstone, the camPAIN will certainly earn its own place in those weird history books about chronic pain mysteries, and I will keep the memory of that warehouse with me: August heat, the silence, the lack of air conditioning, Dan beside me on my first Hollywood set, a room full of people laughing through twelve-hour days, and my cheeks still aching when we wrapped.