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- I guess things get funny as you get older. I’ve always thought of myself as progressive when it came to marketing. After all, I’ve been in the business for over 20 years and have always been interested in technology. But about 5 years ago I started to notice something. In the context of marketing, I started to become like that old man that yells at people to get off his lawn. I was getting annoyed with all the new fangled media, and felt that as marketers we were getting out of control.
We were coming up with new ways to advertise and get our messages out there, but they were being invented so quickly, no one knew what was going on.
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To quote my friend Ferris Beuller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you may miss it.” And this was happening all over the place in the advertising and media landscape.
The problem wasn’t really the media companies (at the time anyway). They were just trying to make a buck. It was us idiots on the corporate side. Not once would we stop to ask ourselves, “hey, is this working?”
So, as a late 30s marketer I started to ask the question, “we’re shifting all this money over to digital advertising and social, and, every time we run the numbers, it seems its not doing anything.” Whoops.
Neophyte.
Fool.
Washed Up.
DINOSAUR.
Yup, by simply asking the effectiveness question, suddenly, I was on the outs. The marketing landscape, over-run by digital media companies, overwhelmed the system. And since the majority of a company’s employee base are not marketers, when someone was asking questions counter to what pop culture and all the marketing publications said were the next big thing, people started to believe I was falling behind the times.
But there is hope. Now the bleeding edge of marketing is starting to be wrestled away from the media companies and agencies and returning to the marketing practitioners. Tried and true concepts that were once deemed “dead” like the 4Ps, which admittedly need to evolve with the times, have people saying, “wait, maybe there was some value in that.” The marketers who can connect the conceptual past with the present, are most likely to succeed in the brave new world.
Marketing’s day of reckoning is coming. And the ones who put effectiveness – not ENGAGEMENT, first, are the ones who will survive. So here’s to the Marketing Dinosaurs who actually did go to school and study the practice. Here’s to the marketing practitioners who have learned how not only to build fancy powerpoints, but also drive value for your enterprise. This blog is dedicated to you.
themarketingdinosaur.com 