Have you ever noticed that some people “just get” things and others can’t see things sitting right on the end of their nose? The Internet is one such area where this happens all the time. It seems that when a person is used to looking at things one way, many times they are simply incapable of looking at them through another perspective. People sem to develop mental models that leave them blind to certain things. Such is the case with advertising and marketing on the Internet. After college (Industrial Engineering @ U Pitt), I decided I wanted to go into marketing. That was after bartending and skiing for a year or so after getting done with my college edumacation.
Even going through engineering, there was a lot of material we covered and a lot of projects we did, just because that is what people did. They didn’t necessarily make any sense but we did them out of habit. Accounting classes were famous for this and the cost accounting mindset still poisons organizations because it distorts reality. It can be a good way to model things but when looking at how a business really operates, most cost accounting and efficiency measures need to be taken with a grain of salt or even tossed out the window in favor of looking at the reality of the way a business actually operates. Eli Goldratt & his best seller, The Goal clearly laid this out way back in 1984. If people would not only read it but ACT on it and pull thier heads out of their asses, they’d be able to run more profitable businesses.
At the time of graduation, it was really tough to even get an interview for a lowly marketing associate positon in ANY company. Maybe it still is for technical or engineering grads to get into marketing when they graduate. Lots of marketing people think they are a lot more important than they really are. There seems to be this mystique about marketing. Marketing people think that what we do is rocket science. If you have a good understanding of people and actually listen to people, you can rock in marketing. If you can listen and have a genuine desire to understand people, you can rule the world in online marketing & search marketing in particular. An awful lot of marketing people don’t seem to have the ability to listen and simply can’t get past the way they think things should work even if they obviously don’t work that way.
Traditional marketing doesn’t work, online media (banner advertising) doesn’t work in most cases. Just like pharmaceutical companies come up with diagnoses so they can come up with a new pill to sell, marketing people come up with new metrics to justify programs that don’t work by any sensible measure.
For the forseeable future, advertising and marketing revenues will continue to shrink when allocated to the traditional methods of marketing based on demographics and psychographics, particularly online.
The future of marketing is simple. A person goes to a search engine of some sort and asks a question in the form of a keyword search. The smart advertiser identifies a relevant keyword, creates an ad that shows the consumer that they understand the question the person is asking and then links to a page that provides the answer. It always has worked that way and probably always will. Companies are starting to get it but if you can understand just that one point you are smarter than 95% of the people who work in marketing and deserve a big fat raise.
