The media and marketing industry, much like the financial industry before it, has become blinded by metrics that they don’t understand. Somehow, the notion of accountability has morphed into a misguided quest for the sure thing in the form of ROI metrics for just about everything.
This is silly. In actuality, when we talk about marketing ROI, individual actions don’t account for much. What really matters is portfolio performance and that’s what both buyers and sellers need to focus on.
To see why, we only have to look at the mess the financial industry made when they ignored the simple fact that every investment involves risks that can’t be quantified.
Einstein said, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
In a similar vein, I often tell my analysts that I want them to be dumber. The problem is that the people I hire tend to have achieved some measure of academic success, which they attained by impressing idle professors how sophisticated their thinking was.
Stupid people, on the other hand, look for what is obvious and useful and therefore can often accomplish more. Over the years, I’ve come up with some ways to help smart people to become dumber. Here’s a few of them:
Advertising agencies, once a cottage industry made up of small innovative firms, have consolidated into enormous firms with global scale and massive reach yet still manage to not make much money.
What’s missing is a businesslike approach. That is, agencies aren’t run like other businesses, but as idea factories and the logical consequence is that there is an oversupply of meaningless ideas- lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The solution is for marketing services companies to operate as money making enterprises whose primary objective is to capture value in the marketplace. That means adopting the business best practices of this century.
There are those who believe that the era of free content is over and we are entering a new age of paid media. They are surely wrong.
The fact is, that when these people say “free” they really mean “ad financed,” (which is how we’ve gotten most of our content for decades). The simple economical reality is that consumers are worth more to advertisers than content is to consumers and that works against paid models ever becoming dominant.
Not only is this historically true, it’s a trend that’s likely to continue.
How much do we need specialized experts for the information economy?
If history is any guide, probably not much. It makes little sense for capable people to spend an entire career doing the same job when they would probably be much more effective if they gained experience in more than one area.
The irony of many great discoveries is that they really weren’t discoveries at all, at least not in the sense that Columbus discovered America. In actuality, they came from people who took well established concepts and applied them to new domains.
Two big stories have come out recently that appear to be in stark contrast to each other: Apple’s emergence as the most valuable tech company on the planet and John Sculley’s speaking out on firing Steve Jobs back in 1985.
What’s interesting is that so many of the character flaws that led the board to oust Jobs 25 years ago are still present today. In fact he remains infamous for them. Then, as now, Jobs was brilliant and petulant, inspiring and frustrating. With Jobs at the helm, the question remains whether Apple’s success will perpetuate or be just another peak in a roller coaster career.
It’s a question worth asking and, whatever the answer, there are lessons there for all of us.
Before you go ahead and drop $300 on a webinar this summer, you might want to think about spending a fraction of that at your local book store and investing the rest on beer.
The truth is that you can gain much more understanding into the hot topics floating around the web today by reading what true pioneers have to say about them. In many cases, their books are not only more informative, but more readable than the posers.
What’s your next move? That’s the key question every strategist needs to answer.
Game theory can help guide you. It has proved useful in fields such as economics, politics and negotiations, but is much neglected by marketers. That’s unfortunate because there are valuable insights to be gained.
“The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analyzed until they are well understood.”
That’s how Claude Hopkins unfortunately began his 1923 classic, Scientific Advertising, which has had an enormous effect on not just advertising, but the marketing profession as a whole.
What Mr. Hopkins describes is neither marketing nor science. Good marketing, like good science, is about the questions you ask not the answers you give nor the knowledge you think you have.
Who is the President of the United States? How many centimeters in a meter?
Arguably, these are not crucial pieces of information for our daily lives. We can get by without them. However, they are things that educated people should know. Those who don’t are open to ridicule, and rightly so.
It is the same with marketing. Many professionals can get through their jobs each day lacking critical knowledge and can go a long time without getting noticed. However, that doesn’t mean that their performance is what it could be.
Here’s a partial list of some things every marketer should know.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
