How Do We Cure What Ails Marketing?

Today’s marketers have more tools, toys, and targeting at their disposal than ever before. They’ve never been better armed to fight the wars of commerce. And yet something is rotten in our state. The quality isn’t improving. The effectiveness isn’t improving.

Think about your own experiences over the past few years. Are the targeted ads reaching you more accurate than they were five years ago? Are the paid tweets that you read any better than they were five years ago? Is the subjective experience of being advertised to online any more pleasant than it was five years ago? What about offline? Is that stuff any better?

No, it isn't . In fact, many things are getting worse . Logos, assets, and copy are becoming increasingly bland and formulaic (how many "Find Your X" taglines does the world need?). Much of what we thought was happening in the digital realm has proven fraudulent . And we always seem to be looking to the past for best-in-class examples, not the present.

So what's happened? There are no shortage of complaints and theories. And the problems are multitude. But I think the biggest problem, that lies at the root of or has accelerated a lot of the other ones, has been that the Internet has happened. And a once-analog industry has struggled to adapt to the digital age.

That vaunted digital transformation that we’re always talking about really hasn’t worked out very well. And I see this manifesting in three core problems when it comes to how marketing is being done today. I don’t necessarily think these are the sources or even the biggest of all the problems (it would take an entire book to untangle those), but I do see them as useful buckets when it comes to remedies.

1. Marketing’s Human Craft Has Been Devalued

In 2018 CMOs started investing more in marketing technology than on internal staff, and I think that pretty much says it all right there. Technology no longer exists to serve marketers; marketers exist to serve technology.

The rise of digital data reading, ad buying, and SEO have has been mirrored by a devaluing of empathy, creativity, copywriting, and the other human skills of marketing. And it’s not that I don’t think digital skills shouldn’t be valued, seeing as you absolutely need them. I just think the relative valuing has gotten a little lopsided. In terms of marketing spend, it seems like we’ve got less food and more mouths to feed than we did before, and the new mouths seem to be getting most of it, leaving the creatives and copywriters with little more than watery soup.

The reasons why this is happening are multitude, but I think the most important is a mindset change. In the past, marketing was fundamentally about making better and more appealing products, and persuading people to buy them. But I feel the rise of SEO/SEM and digital retargeting, combined with expectations for the future set by movies like “Minority Report,” have changed the marketing mindset into a game more akin to real estate, with potential buyers wandering onto one of your properties, by deliberate promotion or arranged accident, and undergoing high-pressure sales tactics from that point on until they buy.

If that’s how you see it, you’re not going to see the value in old-fashioned Mad Men work. And with channels proliferating, companies are overextending themselves because of pressure by the marketing gods to constantly fill them with content. This pressure on every organization to build their own content factory, and the pressure to automate every other part of the process as much as possible, even though automation only really works under circumstances where conformity and uniformity are desirable (which is not how I would describe marketing), has led to factory thinking across the entire marketing process. And creativity will never be welcome at a factory (hence the increasingly dull sameness of what's being produced).

What’s more, the constant emergence of new digital channels has fed into a youth movement, agency-side and client-side, causing an exodus of anyone with the experience to recognize repeating historical patterns or empathize with someone over the age of 35.

The nature of digital also doesn’t exactly reward human craft either. The scrolling, SEO’ed, tight-windowed, fractured-attention-span nature of digital media rewards obviousness at the expense of subtlety (more on this later). Don’t believe me? Then answer these questions. Why is advertising not getting better? Why are consultancies eating agencies' lunch?

With all our digital tools and all our data, the quality of marketing, advertising, and strategy should have improved by leaps and bounds, but it hasn’t. The targeting has improved, but so has the fraud, and what we send out mostly sucks .

The primary reason why it’s not improving is because the human craft is just awful. Data and digital have made us lazy. We've been trying to use them as a shortcut, and we got fooled (partially by ad fraud and partially by self-delusion) into thinking that with better targeting we wouldn’t need to be so creative, and it’s killing us as a discipline.

2. No Strategic Commitment

Marketing is also beset by indecisiveness, which has transformed it into a game of tactics instead of strategy. Marketing has lost its willingness to make long-term decisions or set strategic priorities, while also being entirely excluded from business decisionmaking in many organizations. The reasons for this are also multitude.

But I think the problem boils down to a lack of strategic commitment, a lack of willingness to choose a goal and go after it with all you’ve got. Successful organizations do this. They set out to achieve a few key things, and then achieve the shit of them. But such will seems rare nowadays.

Modern work has become focused on technology, and optimizing for it, and technology changes rapidly, causing our goalposts to always be shifting, which undermines our willingness to commit (while creating a somewhat misguided desire for agility). People just don’t feel sufficiently certain about what's going to happen next (another area where data has completely and utterly failed us) to set long-term goals.

But worrying about what happens next, in and of itself, reflects backwards thinking. Long-term goal-setting isn't about what happens next. It's about where we're going to be in a few years, and working backwards from that (not the other way around). And long-term trends often have an arc that's easier to predict than those for short-term events.

For instance, if you went back in time to 2011 and told them that remote work would be very common in 2021, it would surprise no one. The only surprise would be that it would take a global pandemic in 2020 to get us there.

Of course, marketers are not incentivized to set or even think much about long-term goals. Valuations and stock prices discourage it. As do short job tenures, and increasing focus on RoI and other financial metrics in the marketing discipline.

When you lack long-term goals, it’s very easy to chase every shiny object down the rabbit hole. The short-term benefits of a shiny object can aid in short-term goals. And if you have nothing else to assess the usefulness of that shiny object against, it's very easy to get suckered into fashionable causes, brand purpose, and other nonsense that marketing industry leaders have no choice but to peddle since they’ve fired all of the actual creative talent.

All these factors have fed into a marketing culture where marketers actually seem to hate the act of actually selling stuff, and short-termism reigns. Short-termism is the opposite of brandbuilding, and has caused the latter to suffer, as have other trends such as the growing dominance of tech companies and their thinking in the business world at large (which tends to disregard branding and marketing).

3. Digital Has Proven An Inferior Substitute For Analog

The quality of the marketing and advertising output on digital channels today is flatout inferior to what came before. There are three basic reasons for this. One, the rules are much more restrictive. Google and Facebook largely decide what goes into assets, and their rules suck. Space is limited. Little room for subtlety or meaning. Geeky efficiency. No elegance or weight.

Two, the "approximated" and often shrunk nature of digital gives it a tendency to smooth things out, making them a little less distinctive than when presented in most analog formats (though things are improving).

And three, despite the fact that "going viral" is integral to our perceptions of the Internet and social media, digital marketing is actually not a shared experience. What you see is meant for you, and a few others like you, but not for everyone. Quality will always slip when something isn’t meant to be presented where everyone can see it.

When you see a TV commercial, the fact that it’s there, in the realm of the gods, where everyone can see it, gives it power and authority in a way that the same video on a digital channel just doesn’t. The exclusivity and social proof just aren't there.

And it’s the same with other digital ad formats. They lack power because the experience isn’t shared, and because there’s no significant quality control for digital. Even when you can do the exact same thing online that you can via an analog channel, the result will never be as good, no matter how careful the targeting or how personalized.

Personalization certainly commands attention, but it’s a shortcut, and it's coercive. Coercive shortcuts are a turnoff. People can sense their buttons being pushed. And so much of digital nowadays relies on coercive shortcuts. Pop-up banners that hijack the screen. Interruptive video ads. Retargeting. These things are more bothersome online that they would be otherwise because we consume digital media more actively and purposefully than we do other forms.

So What’s To Be Done?

The typical answer to this is "return to brandbuilding." This would help, and there are scattered (though inconclusive) signs that the industry may be heading in that direction, but this is too simplistic an answer for such a complex problem, since many of the forces affecting marketing are coming from outside marketing.

It's also unlikely to work as well as expected, seeing as very few great brands have emerged using contemporary digital marketing. I'm not saying we can't do brandbuilding anymore, I'm just saying we can't do it using the same problematic digital tactics that got us where we are now.

So What Should Be Done?

I chose my buckets specifically for where I see the most bang for the buck happening in terms of remedies that marketers are in a position to help administer.

First, the soft skills of marketing have to be reinvested in. We can’t keep up with this current situation where the technology consumes all the investment and the technicians make all the money. Marketing started dying when we started paying technicians more than creators. If we can get creators more involved, our marketing ideas will become less linear and more exponential, which should ease the quantity over quality pressures now driving our factory thinking.

Second, we have to get marketers involved in actual businesswork again. They’ve become fashionably disengaged, enabling their seduction by anti-capitalist forces that are the very enemy of what they do for a living. This requires serious changes in who gets hired, retained, and promoted at agencies and in marketing departments today. It also requires serious changes in what gets discussed in the industry discourse.

Marketers must do more homework concerning what they sell, and what customers want, and they must think beyond their siloes and specialties. To overcome short-termism, we need to start adding long-term metrics to the mix (margins, CoA, etc.), which are harder and take longer to measure than the short-term (and often fraudulent ) activation metrics that we focus on today.?

And third, we need to be more creative, about how we use digital and how we use analog. We keep using the former as a substitute for the latter, but it isn’t. Not even close. As a substitute, it’s inferior, and it always will be. This is bad news considering that digital sensibilities are increasingly infecting analog marketing as well. Logos all look like they’re displayed on flatscreens. Billboards look like social media posts. Serif fonts are dead.

But digital works better as a way to enhance old-fashioned media, not replace it. We need to bring digital capabilities, not sensibilities, to analog marketing assets. And marketing as a whole will start getting better when we focus less on the assets themselves, whether analog or digital (which have become an end more than a means over the last ten years), and focus more on the customer journey. Every print ad should have a QR code that leads to a product demonstration, some live consumer reviews, or perhaps unleashes some AR capabilities. Things like this. Then you'll have the best of both worlds.

Ads that start in the digital realm, on the other hand, are inherently less persuasive, and therefore must do more than offer simple content (i.e., another ad), they must offer something the audience values in exchange for interrupting your day. What that value is can vary. It could be monetary, or it could be something else, such as beauty, humor, or information (hence the need for creativity), but it must be valued, nonetheless.

If there's no value, there's no incentive to engage. And engagement (i.e., advancing the customer journey) is definitely what you want from a digital ad. Despite what many marketing authorities say, most digital ads are a lousy way to create awareness, for all those reasons I mentioned earlier.

Of course, actually doing these things this is hard. Despite all the talk about integrated marketing out there, and the need for integrated campaigns, our discipline still isn’t very integrated. Many companies are too siloed or lacking in the in-house expertise to run integrated campaigns, and that’s fine.

That’s why we have agencies. But many companies don’t use agencies that way. Instead they use them as vending machines (to borrow a metaphor from Jake Sanders ), or as outsourced art departments, which can be a waste of potential since many agencies, because of their diverse resources, offer better value for the money through complex big bang projects.

I know what I’m offering here is pretty weak sauce. I don’t have all the answers. And I’m not a big believer in one-size-fits-all advice (context is everything). It’s going to take a lot of experimenting, and a lot of courage, to cure what ails marketing.