#57 I went to PMA Summit and talked about being boring. Here's what happened.

This week I attended the PMA Summit in NYC. I ran a PMM dinner the night before, facilitated a roundtable, and gave a 20-minute keynote called "Don't Be Boring."

No pressure.

Here's how it went.

The dinner first.

Wednesday night, 20 PMMs in a room, organized together with Guideflow, a great interactive demo tool. It was great meeting the New Yorker PMMs and discussing topics like: will AI replace us one day? (don’t think so but more on that later!), and do brand and product marketing work together or are they separate?

Great way to learn from one another (while enjoying really good food).

Then the keynote.

My talk was about “messaging that moves”, and specifically, how most B2B messaging is forgettable by design. Not on purpose. It happens because we default to safe. We describe instead of provoke. We optimize for "no one will complain about this" instead of "no one will forget this."

I've been thinking about this for a while, but honestly? Getting to say it out loud to a room of PMMs who nodded along made it land differently.

Here are the slides. Judge the "don't be boring" talk by whether the deck is boring!

What I took away.

PMMs are hungry for permission to do bolder work. Not reckless. Not off-brand. Just... not boring.

The roundtable earlier in the day confirmed it. People aren't struggling with tactics. They're struggling with conviction and the confidence to push messaging past "technically accurate" into actually interesting.

That's the work. And it's not a template problem. It's a courage (and stakeholder blocking creativity) problem.

What's next.

More on the "Don't Be Boring" framework in a future edition, I want to break it down properly.

And if you were at the dinner or the keynote and you're reading this: hi, thank you, let's stay in touch! 💌