Clark Barron launches REACH, the marketing podcast for people who hate marketing podcasts. In this inaugural episode, he explores the difference between burnout and grief, shares his obsession with Lana Del Rey, and reveals the moment he almost walked away from marketing entirely. From the broken podcast ecosystem to a transformative meeting that changed everything, this is therapy disguised as a marketing show.
Resources mentioned:
This episode sets the foundation for REACH as authentic marketing therapy rather than tactical advice.
REACH_Ep1_FLORENCE
Clark Barron You know what I've realized about marketing podcasts? They're all shit. They're
not made for marketers. They're made for other marketing podcasters. Everyone's interviewing
the same 15 people about the same five topics, hoping to catch lightning in a bottle that
someone else already caught three years ago. Today we're talking about attribution modeling.
Build a demand engine with the future of account based marketing with. Oh, look, Andy, Dick,
Carrot Top, and Kathy Griffin are all yet on another celebrity game show. Of course they are.
What else would they do? Act. Be funny. Look, I've done it too. I played that game. I've had
those conversations. I've been on those podcasts. I can invite pretty frequently. Some are
decent conversations. Some hosts are prepared, others not so much. But the vast majority of
them are. That episode from The Simpsons, where all the kids in class turn around to Bart and
say one thing. Say the thing, Bart. Fuck! Gartner. And the crowd went wild. But here's the
thing. I used to do something different. I had a podcast called Demand Gen Therapy and it was
exactly what it sounds like. Real conversations, deep shit. Tim Davidson, told his audience on
LinkedIn that I made him rethink his entire life. Most of my guests actually say I should have
been a therapist because that's what marketing needs therapy, not tactics or playbooks or any
other shit. I cannot tell you how excited I was when I booked Chris Walker as my first guest on
Demand Gen Therapy. I thought, okay, awesome, this is my coming of age tale. This is how I
enter the spotlight. This is going to be different. It's going to be real. It wasn't. Despite my best
efforts, I couldn't take the conversation in any other direction than what you've already heard
him say a thousand times on any podcast or media you've already seen from him. Same
talking points, same performance, same bullshit. After a while, I realized what was happening.
Strategy is to cast a wide net, appear everywhere, recite the same performance, and then use
the content for himself, denying traction to the owner, considering the speed at which you can
produce content. So you know what I did? I killed the episode. I never released it. And I never
intend to. But yet people still heard it. How? Turns out, Chris was actually recording the whole
thing on his end without my knowledge, which he then published on his platform before I was
even done cutting the video together. I posted about it on LinkedIn and called out the entire
system. That was the moment I realized the whole marketing podcast ecosystem was broken.
Everyone's just performing their greatest hits for each other while it's education, insight,
whatever. But here's what I never said in any of those interviews, or any of the ones that I've
ever been on. Sometimes I sit in my car after calls and wonder if anything I just said actually
mattered. Sometimes I hate marketing so much that I fantasize about deleting everything and
becoming anonymous again. We're told that if it doesn't make money, then it doesn't matter.
And if it doesn't drive impact, then we should keep tweaking it until it does. But when did the
truth stop being its own impact? You can't say that on most marketing podcasts, but you bet
your ass I can say it here, because this is the marketing podcast for people that hate marketing
podcasts. If that's you, then get ready. Because this isn't just my return to form. This is reach.
I'm madly in love with a woman named Elizabeth Grant. You may know her by her stage name,
Lana Del Rey. On one hand, some of you may think it's her music, her success, her vibe in the
most cliche tumbler corps turned Pinterest quote obsessive way. Alternatively, some of you
may think it's the way she smokes cigarettes on stage in a white sundress and chews gum
between verses of Summertime Sadness in front of thousands of people listening to her
haunting, gritty contralto voice that makes my soul yearn for an ethereal, melancholic single
moment of nostalgia that never happened. A look in her dark, tired eyes saying, Clark, please
buy a vintage motorcycle and take me away from all this. Yeah, it's, uh, it's one of those. She
moves through the world like she belongs there. Not asking permission, not performing for
anyone. And it was that odd feeling of recognizing something you didn't even know you were
looking for. By then, I'd spent years in conference rooms. I already knew what that
performance looked like, what it felt like. I'd always been smoothing edges and arranging
words to make broken things sound whole. And here was someone who just refused to play
the game. Even on stage, even while performing, she somehow wasn't performing
performance. For a moment, I remembered what it felt like before I learned that everything was
supposed to be calculated, and before I understood that authenticity was risky. When the most
attractive thing about someone was simply that they were unapologetically themselves. That
was my reminder of what happens when someone just is. When they don't apologize for taking
up space. Days. They don't smooth their edges for an audience. They trust that who they are is
enough. I'd forgotten somewhere along the way that that was even still possible. I live about an
hour from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, home to arguably the most famous recording studio in
history. Right there on Jackson. Something way, Jackson way. It's a place where Lana Del Rey
recorded a few of her albums. A place where she, after years of playing that part, just
vanished. No press release, no record deal. Drama. Nothing. Gone. And where did they find
her? Waffle House, the waffle House in Florence, which is about 20 minutes away from Muscle
Shoals. Serving coffee. Not eating? Working. Blue shirt, name tag, smoke breaks and all. And
after I read that this was happening and considered immediately driving to Florence, you know,
for reasons, for the first time in a long time, I understood something that I hadn't been able to
articulate. That it's not burnout that I dealt with. It's grief, the kind that only shows up when you
realize the thing you gave everything to, whether it be music or marketing or to someone else,
was never going to love you back. Florence is a real place, but in my head, it became a
metaphor for when you almost walked away, when the noise got a little too loud. When you
needed to vanish. Just enough to remember who the hell you actually are. Florence was an
escape. It was a rehearsal for leaving, for remembering that if I ever needed to vanish, I could.
There was a period, maybe a year, maybe longer when I told people I was burned out. That's
the language we use now, isn't it? Burnout. It's clinical. It's non-threatening. It's socially
acceptable. It's the kind of diagnosis your boss can nod sympathetically without having to
actually fucking do anything. They'll let you take a mental health day for burnout. But grief grief
gets you replaced. Burnout is an industry sanctioned form of giving up. It is approved,
respectable, treatable. But grief is non-compliant because grief means that you can see the
machine clearly. And once you can see it, you stop pretending that it's worth saving. I told
people I was tired and warmed down and running on fumes. I just need some time to recharge.
I said it's just the pace. It's not the work. It'd just been a hard year. But that wasn't the truth.
Burnout is the safe word we use when the truth would get us fired. Burnout implies that the fuel
ran out. But I wasn't out of fuel. I was out of willingness to keep lying. For people who would
rather burn me down than tell the truth. And the longer I use that word burnout, the more I
realized I was letting myself off the hook for admitting what had actually happened. What I
really meant was I couldn't keep writing about a product that I didn't believe in. What happened
was this. I hadn't fully processed the moment when I stopped believing the people around me
actually gave a shit. I wasn't grieving the loss of what marketing had become. I was grieving
the possibility that it was ever what I thought it was in the first place. When you're in marketing,
when your entire job is to make people feel something, it becomes very, very hard to do your
job when the people you're doing it for are emotionally bankrupt. And when you're the one that
does care, it's brutal. It's absolutely devastating to your mental health. They wait for permission
to leave a system that was never built for them. So they say burnout because I quit lying for a
living doesn't look good on a resume. I remember the exact meeting, actually, that changed
me. I could walk you through the layout of the room. I'm sure you've been there. Brand colors
on the wall, the whiteboard stained faintly with ghosted diagrams From a meeting three weeks
before. Product roadmap had just been updated and someone from revenue leadership, CRO
or whatever, maybe a founder with a sales background looks across the table and says we
need the story to feel bigger. You know, make the launch sound like it's already working. Just
just get out. Just get out ahead of it. No one in the room flinched. They all nodded. It was said
with such casual ease as if it were just a small favor, as if the truth was a seasoning you had at
the end. I didn't speak. I nodded to my stomach, turned, but I nodded. And that's when I
realized it wasn't just this meeting that was broken. It was the entire culture that we were
floating around in. It's the entire ecosystem where everybody was smiling while quietly listening
to someone ask for a lie. And they didn't think of it that way. They thought of it as alignment, as
positioning. Ever heard that before? Sound familiar? Preemptive storytelling. But I know what it
was. And so do you. It was erosion. See, when you're good at marketing, I mean, really fucking
good people. Stop protecting you. And they start using you. They hand you a problem, and
they don't want insight. What they're looking for is insulation. They want to use your words to
wrap around a half built product, a premature promise, a political compromise and make it feel
like momentum. They want you to give shape to something that hasn't earned it yet. So you
become the fixer, the translator, the one who knows how to tell the story. But no one ever asks
what it costs to keep making something sound true when it just isn't. I didn't almost quit
because I was tired. I almost quit because I couldn't keep telling myself that I wasn't complicit,
that I wasn't slowly turning into someone who smiled while making something hollow look full,
and that I wasn't becoming the very thing that I used to hate. And it's not that every company is
evil. It's not what I'm saying. It's worse than that. The people I worked for and with were, for the
most part, kind, well-meaning. They were smart people. They didn't think they were asking for
something unreasonable or unethical. But that's exactly how erosion works. It doesn't show up
as the villain in the main story. It shows up as a smile, as a compliment, as alignment. I used to
believe marketing was alchemy. Thanks, Rory. How'd that work out for us? I used to believe
that it was this sacred intersection of language and instinct and emotion. The ability to take raw
truth and shape it into something unforgettable. The right words at the right moment, the right
person, and the world shifts. I believed in that. Still do. But somewhere along the way,
marketing became the department responsible for pretending, for smoothing everything over,
for making things feel finished that were in fact broken and in some cases were never meant to
be built in the first place. And that creates this kind of cognitive dissonance where it will kill you
slowly because you're good at it, because the better you are at marketing, the more dangerous
you become to yourself. Grief isn't just about lost ethics. It's about lost faith. We used to speak
the language of transformation. Now we're just translators for what someone else is afraid to
say out loud. You start writing things you don't fully believe. But they sound right. You start
building narratives that aren't lies. Exactly. But they're not the truth either. They're what the
team needs to hear right now. What sales needs to close this quarter and what the board
wants to hear? Always. You do it once, then again. And then one day you wake up and you
haven't told the truth in months. You've just been arranging mirrors, creating illusions and
performing confidence, and no one sees it. They just keep asking for more because you're so
good at what you do. You want to know what the worst part is? You don't know how to stop.
Because telling the truth now would mean unraveling months of performance. It would mean
becoming difficult, disruptive, a problem. So you smile. You nod. You launch. You present the
deck. You align, and then you go home and stare at the wall. And wonder where the part of
you went that used to care whether any of this mattered. That was the moment that I almost
walked away. Not from a company, not from a project, from the entire profession. Because I
knew that if I kept going down that path, if I kept nodding and writing and selling and smiling, I
would become someone I could not live with. I would become safe, polished, respected, but
completely hollow. But I didn't leave. And I'm going to tell you why. The loudest things that I've
ever said were whispered. Late night conversations with founders who were drowning, text
messages to marketing directors who were getting blamed for revenue problems. They didn't
create emails from people who were tired of pretending everything was working when it clearly
wasn't. That's where the real work happens in the quiet spaces, in the margins of all the noise.
Not on stage at conferences, not in viral LinkedIn posts, not in case studies that make
everything look easier than it actually was. It's in the 2 a.m. moments when someone's scared
they're failing, and they need to hear that they're not crazy, that the metrics don't make sense,
that most attribution is theater, that buyer behavior is mostly unknowable. And that's okay. I
stopped pretending that I was okay with the way things were. I stopped smoothing over
dysfunction with clever language. I stopped writing for people in the room and started writing
for the ones watching silently from the back. Because I've been there. So I started burning
things down. Not because I hate marketing. Because I love it. Because I still believe it's the
most powerful force in business. I still believe it can be sacred. Because I still believe that in
the hands of the people that actually give a damn, it can change everything. Look, this podcast
is not here to give you tactics. I want to be up front about that. It's not here to make you more
efficient. It is not a funnel. It is not a brand extension. It is a pressure valve. It's me sitting in
front of a mic, refusing to play along any longer. And if you've ever felt that same pressure
building inside you, if you've ever sat in one of those stupid meetings, one of those rooms or
one of those moments, one of those zoom calls where your instinct has screamed and your
mouth has stayed shut, then I need you to hear this. You weren't wrong. You weren't being too
emotional. You weren't dramatic or negative or difficult. You were awake. You were one of the
few people who still saw the thing for what it was and had the nerve to flinch. And so if this
episode does anything, I hope it reminds you that you're not crazy for wanting all of this to
mean something. And you're not alone for wanting it to be better. And you are not broken for
refusing to pretend. Not anymore. Not here. This is your return to form two. Welcome back. So
maybe Lana had it right. Maybe the answer isn't to get louder. Maybe it's to get quieter. Maybe
it's to find a place where you could be useful without being visible. Where you can pour coffee
and remember what it feels like to serve something real. Sometimes you actually want to go
where no one knows your name. And maybe that's exactly where I need to be. Maybe not.
Who knows? Maybe. Just always remember that I can if I want to. Like I said, not because I
hate marketing. Not because I'm burned out. Not because I won't miss it. It's not running away.
burnout is just what you call abuse when it wears a lanyard. It's about choosing to stay from a
position of strength. And The power of having an escape route. Because believe me, nothing
scares me anymore. Thanks, Lizzy. Thanks for listening. If this hits something real. Pass it on.
Reach is where I process the cost. And burn it down is where I expose the system that created
it. You can subscribe to both. If you're done pretending that any of this is normal. One is for the
silence. One is for the fire. Visit Burn Marketing to go deeper. And if you want more, reach,
subscribe or leave a review. That's how things keep going.