Marketing Outside the Lines: Why Your Next Big Idea Might Come from a Poetry Class
The best marketers are explorers. Here's why your next breakthrough might come from a poetry class.
Usually, my car rides are filled with podcasts and audiobooks (anything spanning from golf to business to fantasy football is usually my sweet spot). But today was different. As I drove to my first poetry class in over a decade, Post Malone's F1 Trillion album thundered through the speakers—the closest thing to poetry I could think of in the moment.
Walking into the classroom, I was greeted by the unexpected sight of typewriters scattered around the room. Not computers, not iPads—legit typewriters. As someone who's never touched one, this was going to be interesting. The steady click-clack of keys would soon become the soundtrack to one of the most surprising evenings of my professional life.
Two hours later, I emerged with a poem about a stranger's cat, inky (and sore) fingers from wrestling with typewriter ribbons, and an unexpected revelation about marketing. In trying to capture the essence of a pet I'd never met within the constraints of poetic form, I'd accidentally stumbled upon a masterclass in what makes great marketing work: the ability to evoke emotion and create connection within strict limitations.
Here's the thing about business books, podcasts, and other media—they're essential, but they're not enough. We need them, just like a chef needs cookbooks and techniques. But if that chef never leaves the kitchen, never tastes new flavors, never experiences life beyond the pass, their food will always lack something vital: soul.
The same is true for marketers. We need our Ogilvy, our Hopkins, our fundamental marketing education. But we also need poetry classes, sci-fi novels, modern art museums, and whatever else lights up our curiosity. Here's why and how giving yourself permission to explore beyond marketing's borders might lead to your next breakthrough.
Breaking Marketing's Echo Chamber
Marketing fundamentals are non-negotiable. But mastering Ogilvy and Hopkins isn't enough—the campaigns that actually move culture come from somewhere else entirely.
Take Apple's "1984." Its brilliance came from a perfect storm of influences outside marketing: Orwell's dystopian vision, Ridley Scott's sci-fi aesthetic from Blade Runner, and Apple's rebel spirit. Or look at Spotify Wrapped which blend massive amounts of data with the type of insights that music obsessives love. They turned year-end listening data into a cultural moment because they understood music's role in identity, not just metrics.
Here's what these revolutionary campaigns share: they happened when marketers stopped thinking like marketers. When they brought their whole selves—their reading habits, their obsessions, their lives outside the office—to the work.
Great marketing recognizes that people bring their entire selves to every interaction. When you're selling running shoes, you're not just talking to a runner—you're talking to someone who might tear up at movie scores, quote Shakespeare at dinner parties, or binge fantasy novels on weekends. The most powerful marketing taps into these different dimensions of human experience.
Let me share a personal example. While working on email campaigns for ANCORE, I was deep into Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings. Instead of writing another standard product email, I wove elements of fantasy storytelling into a campaign about "mythical items that power an ANCORE Pro."
Another time, I channeled Shakespeare to announce our Black Friday deals. Both campaigns worked because they connected with readers on multiple levels—yes, they were about fitness equipment, but they spoke to people's broader cultural touchpoints.
Most importantly, though, both executions broke through the sea of sameness that plagues marketing today. When every brand looks the same, talks the same, and acts the same, drawing inspiration from unexpected sources gives you a natural way to stand out. After all, no other fitness company is explaining their Black Friday deals through Shakespearean sonnets.
This is where different disciplines spark creativity. They push us beyond the comfortable boundaries of marketing conventions. Take poetry, for instance. Its fluid form and emphasis on emotion over structure forces us to think differently about how we communicate. When you bring that poetic sensibility back to marketing copy, you're suddenly writing with a freshness that's hard to find in standard marketing playbooks.
When every brand sounds the same, cross-pollination gives you natural differentiation. It's your secret ingredient in a world of cookie-cutter marketing.
The Three Benefits of "Impractical" Learning
1. Creative Expansion
Marketing tunnel vision is real: Write copy. Send email. Create ad. Repeat. But breakthrough ideas rarely come from staring harder at the same screen.
Consider how different disciplines reshape your thinking:
Poetry teaches emotional impact through constraint
Architecture shows how structure creates experience
Improv comedy reveals the power of unexpected connections
Each "impractical" pursuit rewires your creative circuitry. A photographer learns to frame problems differently. A musician develops rhythm in writing. A rock climber gains new perspectives on overcoming obstacles.
Breaking away from marketing's echo chamber also helps us escape the buzzword trap. Your customers don't care about your "cutting-edge solutions" or "paradigm-shifting innovations." They care about clear, honest communication that speaks to their needs. Expanding our horizons is the best way to innoculate ourselves against jargon syndrome and communicate clearly.
Consider Leonardo da Vinci, who used his knowledge of optics to revolutionize painting techniques. He didn't just study art. He studied light, anatomy, and engineering. These seemingly unrelated pursuits merged to create something extraordinary (rhymes with Rona Risa). The same principle applies to marketing: when you bring insights from poetry, literature, science, or any other field into your work, you create connections others miss.
This cross-pollination of ideas leads to fresh metaphors and perspectives that can transform how you communicate. Instead of reaching for tired marketing clichés, you might find yourself drawing parallels from a poem, a scientific concept, or even the mechanics of a typewriter. These unexpected connections make your marketing more interesting and more human.
2. Burnout Prevention
Think about this: your marketing career could span 40, 50, even 60 years. Being "obsessed" with marketing might work for a year or two, but what about decade three? The ones who last aren't just the ones with the best strategies—they're the ones who've built sustainable creative lives.
This is where "impractical" learning becomes a survival strategy. Poetry classes, sci-fi novels, photography—these are your creative renewal stations. It’s cross-training for your brain.
Just as a runner who only runs risks injury and plateau, a marketer who only markets risks creative burnout. Mix in diverse experiences and suddenly you're preventing burnout, building resilience and expanding your creative toolkit. That golf hobby that helps you unwind? It might just give you the perfect metaphor for tomorrow's campaign.
3. Personal Growth
The best marketers are renaissance professionals who bring full lives to their work. Don’t think about it in terms of balance. Rather, approach it as integration. Every experience becomes part of your professional toolkit.
Take long-distance running, for example. When you're twelve miles into a fifteen-mile run, dripping with sweat and fighting through fatigue, you're building more than endurance. You're developing tenacity that carries over into your professional life. Those quiet miles also provide space for ideas to collide and connect. Some of my best marketing insights have come not during a strategy session, but while pounding the pavement on a Saturday morning run.
This is why diverse experiences matter so much. Every hobby, every adventure, every new skill you develop becomes part of your creative arsenal. Want to write more compelling copy? Try reading Stephen King. Need fresh metaphors for your campaigns? Study astronomy.
Great marketers are artists at heart, and artists need rich lives to draw from. The more experiences you collect, the more colors you have on your palette. Someone who brings their whole life—their running insights, their poetry class discoveries, their amateur astronomy observations—to their marketing work will always create richer, more human connections than someone who only studies marketing.
Think about it: when you meet someone who's deeply curious about life, who has stories to tell and passions to share, don't you naturally want to listen? That's the kind of marketer you want to be. Someone whose work reflects not just professional expertise, but the fullness of human experience.
Your Permission Slip to Explore
Let's say the quiet part out loud: You have permission to explore beyond marketing.
You have permission to read science fiction instead of another business book. Permission to take a pottery class instead of a marketing webinar. Permission to spend an hour working on puzzles instead of analyzing CPMs.
What counts as "non-marketing" activities? Basically anything that doesn't involve creating ads, calculating ROAS, or using the word "leverage." Here's a starter list:
Reading fantasy novels
Writing poetry (yes, even bad poetry)
Going for long runs
Playing golf
Solving puzzles
Watching great movies
Making music
Underwater basket weaving (hey, why not?)
The trick is balancing these explorations with professional development. Start small. Can you carve out 30 minutes each day for something completely unrelated to marketing? Maybe it's reading a chapter of science fiction before bed. Maybe it's taking a walk without listening to a marketing podcast.
Don't pressure yourself to immediately see how these activities will improve your marketing. They will, but often in ways you can't predict. It's a bit like The Karate Kid. Mr. Miyagi didn't tell Daniel how waxing cars would help him learn karate. He just had to trust the process.
The same goes for your explorations. Trust that every new experience, every hobby, every adventure adds another color to your creative palette. You might not see the connection between poetry and marketing today, but six months from now, you might write the best copy of your career because you understood how to evoke emotion in seventeen syllables.
The only rule? It has to light you up. Choose activities that make you curious, that energize you, that make you lose track of time. The marketing benefits will follow naturally—but first, you have to give yourself permission to explore.
A Parting Lesson from David Ogilvy
Here's a secret about David Ogilvy, advertising's greatest master: before he started his legendary agency, he was a French chef, a door-to-door salesman, and even an Amish farmer. The father of modern advertising didn't start in advertising at all. He started by living.
When Ogilvy finally sat down to write ads, he didn't just bring marketing theory. He brought the precision of a French kitchen, the psychology of direct sales, and the earthly wisdom of farming. His "impractical" detours became the foundation of his genius.
If the master himself needed life experience to create legendary work, why are we trying to learn it all from marketing books?
The masters were explorers, experimenters, and lifelong learners. So go ahead. Take that poetry class. Read that science fiction novel. Learn to paint. Your marketing won't suffer; it will soar.
After all, you never know which of today's "impractical" experiences will lead to tomorrow's breakthrough insight.