Let’s be honest. We’ve all scrolled past a post, an ad, or a video and physically winced. A forced joke that doesn’t land, an overly earnest sales pitch, a desperate attempt at a trend—it all radiates a specific, soul-squirming energy. We label it “cringey” and keep scrolling, safe in our own good taste. But here’s the uncomfortable secret no one wants to admit: that cringe is not the opposite of good marketing. It is very often its birthplace. To become genuinely skilled, you have to be willing to be the person who makes others scroll a little faster, at least for a while.
This is because effective marketing is, at its core, a public performance. It requires putting a piece of yourself, your ideas, or your product out into the uncaring void of the internet where it can be ignored, mocked, or dismissed. When you’re starting, you’re untrained. Your timing is off. Your voice wobbles. You’re trying on styles that don’t quite fit, mimicking the confidence of experts without the experience to back it up. You are, in essence, a teenager at the school dance of commerce, all awkward limbs and desperate hope. This phase is not a detour; it is the only possible path.
The instinct to avoid cringe is, fundamentally, the instinct to avoid judgment. It’s the voice that whispers, “Play it safe. Sound professional. Don’t be too loud, too silly, too different.” That voice builds a prison of perfect mediocrity. True connection in marketing—the kind that stops the scroll and builds a community—requires risk. It requires trying the joke that might bomb, using the bold visual that clashes with convention, or speaking with a vulnerability that feels raw and exposed. The first attempts at this will almost certainly miss the mark. They will be, in a word, cringey. But within that failure lies the invaluable data you cannot get any other way.
Think of it as calibration. You cannot find your authentic voice without first hearing the hollow echo of an inauthentic one. You cannot learn what resonates with your audience without first putting out something that resonates only with the inside of your own skull. That cringey post isn’t just a failure; it’s a probe you send into the world. The silence, the confused comments, or the single supportive message from your aunt—all of it is feedback. It teaches you about tone, about audience tolerance, about the fragile line between clever and try-hard. The polished, seamless marketing you admire from experts was forged in a thousand small, awkward experiments they now hope you’ve forgotten.
Embracing the short-run cringe is an act of courage. It means prioritizing progress over perfection, learning over likability. It means understanding that skill is not bestowed but built, brick by awkward brick. The goal is not to remain cringey, but to move through it. To listen, to adapt, to refine. The mannerisms that once felt forced become natural. The attempts at trend-jacking evolve into a unique point of view. The desperate pitch softens into a confident conversation. What was once an awkward performance slowly becomes simply how you show up in the world.
So, if you’re holding back, waiting for the flawless idea that will guarantee no one ever cringes at your work, you are waiting for a ghost. The path to skill is paved with the embarrassing things you created, had the guts to publish, and the resilience to learn from. The marketers you look up to aren’t people who never felt that sting; they’re the ones who felt it, winced, and then hit “post” anyway. Your future audience is waiting on the other side of that fear. They’re just waiting for you to get the cringe out of your system first.