Back in 1997, Apple launched a campaign that became modern folklore. “Think Different” honored the rebels and misfits — the troublemakers who viewed the world through a different lens and, in doing so, reshaped it.
Apple tapped into a core truth: most limits on imagination aren’t real. They’re inherited, absorbed and rarely questioned. The people who broke through weren’t necessarily more gifted; they simply rejected the idea that those limits applied to them.
Nearly three decades later, marketing has arrived at its own Think Different inflection point.
The old constraints have vanished. Technology has stripped them away. AI can spin up endless variations. Data platforms surface insights in real time. Orchestration tools synchronize every channel instantly. What once demanded large teams, long timelines and layers of approval now lives inside platforms any motivated marketer can master.
Yet most marketers still behave as if the box is real.
They wait for the data team to pull the numbers. They wait for creative to ship the assets. They wait for engineering to wire up the integration. They continue to operate inside constraints that technology has already removed — not out of necessity, but because assembly-line marketing conditioned them to believe that’s how it must work.
Data waits on analytics. Campaigns wait on creative. Launch waits on engineering. Work moves from station to station, passed from one department to the next. That was the assembly line. That was the box.
That box no longer exists. The muscle memory does.
Here’s to the marketers who refuse to wait for approval
The ones who spot a customer signal at 3 p.m. and have a tailored journey live by 4 p.m. — not because they chased sign-offs, but because the customer needed a response in the moment.
The ones who don’t fire off briefs to three separate teams. They pull the data, create the assets and orchestrate the campaign themselves. Not to replace specialists, but because spending days on what they can do in hours squanders opportunity.
The ones who treat experimentation as a constant, not a quarterly event. Who test 10 variations, not two. Who optimize for lift, not just clicks. Who understand that meaningful insight emerges from iteration, not from analysis paralysis.
Here’s to the ones who see campaigns where others see dependencies
They don’t see a handoff to analytics. They see customer data they can tap instantly to decode behavior, anticipate intent and target with precision.
They don’t see a slow creative approval chain. They see AI systems that produce channel-ready assets in minutes, enabling true personalization at scale instead of trading it away for efficiency.
They don’t see an engineering queue. They see orchestration platforms that automate journeys, run experiments and tune performance — no tickets required.
They’re not reckless. They’re not cowboys
They’re simply working at the pace today’s technology allows, limited by strategy and judgment instead of hierarchy and process.
This is Positionless Marketing: using Data Power, Creative Power and Optimization Power all at once. Not because everyone else has been removed, but because technology has removed the dependencies that once made those handoffs unavoidable.
And here’s what most people miss: This isn’t just about speed. It’s about potential
When marketers were locked into assembly-line infrastructure, their primary role was to manage the line. Draft the brief. Coordinate the players. Push work through approvals. Wait for each station to complete its part. The marketer’s core skill was project management. Their value lay in orchestrating others.
Now? Your job in marketing has changed entirely
Your role is no longer to shepherd process. Your role is to unlock potential. To help everyone on your team (and yourself) discover what they can do once the constraints are gone. To prove that the data they’ve been waiting on is already at their fingertips. That the creative they’ve been briefing can be produced on demand. That the campaigns they’ve been coordinating can be orchestrated autonomously.
Teach people to think outside the box by showing them there is no longer a box
The data analyst who once only delivered reports can now build predictive models and deploy them in real time. The campaign manager who used to manage handoffs can now independently design, test and refine full-funnel journeys. The creative strategist who only wrote briefs can now generate and launch assets across every channel.
This is the real revolution: not that technology does the job for us, but that it dismantles the barriers that kept people from doing work they were always capable of.
The misfits and rebels of 1997 saw opportunity where others saw walls. They refused to accept that work had to follow the same patterns it always had.
The Positionless Marketers of today are doing the same thing
They refuse to wait when customers need action immediately. They refuse to believe that insight must take weeks when platforms can surface it in seconds. They refuse to stay inside constraints that technology has already erased.
They’re thinking differently — not to be contrarian, but because the old mindset no longer fits the new landscape of what’s possible.
In 1997, Apple declared: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
In 2025, the people bold enough to believe they can deliver personalized experiences at scale, launch campaigns in hours instead of weeks and operate without dependencies are the ones who will.
The constraints have disappeared.
The assembly-line marketing box has no place anymore.