Mad Men, Mongrels & Marketing Unicorns.

My Father Was a Storyteller.

He grew up dirt-poor - the son of a small farmer, in a quaint Nigerian village.?

My father hated farming. With a PASSION. Like hating farming was his job.

So, when the first schools opened up and provided free elementary education, my Dad ran off to school and never looked back.

You see - he'd told himself a different story from his reality.?

He saw possibility beyond his circumstance. And found a vehicle to get him there.?

While his hands were slow at the till, his mind was quick. He earned accolades and scholarships.

He earned a PhD, married my Mom (a PhD MD), and brought his family to America. My two siblings and I were all raised knowing that we too, would be medical doctors.?

After all - that vehicle had transformed the family tree for my parents. And it would for their kids.

My big sister indeed chose medicine.

I, on the other hand, chose computers. (The sight of blood makes me fall out.)

Growing up as a nerdy, curious, anxiety-ridden kid in Nigeria, I found my stories of transformation through... well... comic books.?

(Stay with me for a moment…)

Stan Lee, tag-teaming with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, transported me to a world of possibility with their modern mythology.?

I was Peter Parker. Awkward, isolated, and beset-upon.?

But I could, become Spiderman. With great power. But also, great responsibility.

I love the transformative power of Story, to take someone from where they are, through a transformative transition, to where they want to be.?

Where did your coming of age marketer's journey begin?

120-Years of Marketing.

Late 1800s:?

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don't know which half.” – John Wanamaker.

Wanamaker was a wildly successful department store pioneer.

His willingness to invest in advertisements that could build awareness and interest in stores, allows him to eventually be purchased by Macy's.?

1920s.

AT&T drives the golden age of radio advertising, bringing mass market brands like Procter & Gamble to advertise their cleaning (soap) products during on-air dramas, still known today as "soap" operas, thanks to P&G. Awareness was everything.

1960s:

TV revolutionizes marketing. Madison Avenue ad agencies capitalizes by bringing new consumer delights to more households, more directly, and in a more engaging format. The fictional Don Draper of AMC's "Mad Men" epitomizes the impact of ad agencies on popular culture.

Mad Men in the Mirror.

Mad Men, the award-winning TV show, is a telling snapshot of what happens when we allow the lead of our story to be captured by men of ill intent. Based in the 1960s, Mad Men explores the gap between what people say, and what they actually mean.

Don Draper is an overconfident and self-centered strategist, who skillfully markets the American dream by framing it as something that can be found in his clients’ products.

He has a certain amount of empathy for subjects. Which makes him a good ad man. Don Draper is good enough to:

• Anticipate human needs.
• Capture attention.
• Convince belief in his panacea.
• Convert desire to dollars.

But he struggles with hypocrisy, and an ever-present lust for power and profits… at any cost. Which makes him a good manipulator.?

None of us wants to be SOLD TO.?

And yet... we SELL.

None of us wants to be CAPTURED, and FORCE-FED (...*cough* Nurtured...) like lambs being fattened for the slaughter.??

And yet we inflict that on the customers we're supposed to be championing. Stalk. Trap. Capture. Sell. Doesn't sound very “nurturing.”

Are you a good “ad man?”?

One Day, Everything Changed…

1999:

With increasing internet speeds, and cloud technology taking hold, Salesforce becomes a SaaS pioneer, and revolutionizes CRM.?

And then, Eloqua.

In 2003, Eloqua pioneers a new category - Marketing Automation SaaS.

For B2B Marketers – everything changed.?

Overnight, we could do:

• Lead Capture
• Lead Scoring
• Lead Nurturing. (Automated. What?!)
• Lead Routing to Salesforce CRM.
• And data? Metrics? We could finally PROVE how much we do to help the company!
• Impressions! (Yup.)
• Clicks! (Got ‘em.)
• Click-through rates! (Absolutely.)
• Opt-ins!
• Email Open Rates!
• And leads, leads, leads.

My technical background had afforded me a first job at the biggest branding company in the world – Procter & Gamble. Inventor of the “Soap Opera.”?

My curiosity and stubborn persistence had made me a good programmer. It allowed me to build a 30,000-person social network in 1999. Before MySpace (2003), Friendster (2003), and Facebook (2004).

But P&G was doing more than solving technical problems.

They were solving human problems.

I wanted to learn how. So, I returned to Atlanta for my MBA.

Two years of B-school, two years of branding at IBM, and I was about to run head-first into the world of B2B Marketing Automation.

In 2005, I landed at Red Hat, the #1 open source company in the world. And another SaaS pioneer.

They had just purchased Eloqua.

Tag, kid. You’re it.?Roll this out.

Months later, we were doing:

• Lead Capture
• Lead Scoring
• Lead Nurturing. (Automated. What?!)
• Lead Routing to Salesforce CRM.
• And leads, leads, leads.

One day, everything truly changed for B2B Marketers. We were handling tens of thousands of leads, and a million emails deployed, monthly.

Meanwhile, the Sales team was like “Wednesday Thursday Friday?!”

“Can we get some quality control up in here?!?”

Enter MQLs. Marketing Qualified Leads.

And so, the story goes.?

Progress kept marching forward.

Marketing Technology continued to advance. Exploding from a few dozen players, to over 8,000.

Marketers continued to advance – becoming savvier about interrupting, capturing, and force-feeding people leads, in order to feed the marketing funnel beast.

Audiences continued to advance – becoming savvier about ad blindness, ad blockers, spam filters (rightly so.)

Seventeen years after the birth of Marketing Automation, the complexity of the landscape had converted much of the work of Marketing to technical, operational, time-consuming and repetitive work. Feeding the machine.?

At the expense of deeply understanding our audience…

Earning their trust…

And entering the conversation already going on in their minds, with empathy and insight.

Is this all there is to Marketing now?

Are we becoming 2020 Don Drapers?

Mongrels and Unicorns.

“Don't take this the wrong way. But you're a mongrel.”

This is what one recruiter told me, in reviewing my varied work experience.

Having taken a hiatus from “Big Marketing” to grow my own Marketing Agency, and publish children’s books with my kids, I felt the marketplace was on the brink of another sea-change.?

And I wanted to help shepherd it in.

The problem is – I didn’t “fit” squarely.?

My experience was all over the place.

• Programmer.
• Techpreneur.
• Strategist.?
• Keynote Speaker.
• Children’s Author.
• Strategist.
• Copywriter.
• I even organized a cruise, and booked Chubb Rock as the entertainment. (He didn’t show up. It’s a long story.)

What that recruiter didn’t see, was what connected the disparate dots.

• Innovative Problem Solver.
• Go-To-Market Strategist.
• Customer advocate.
• Audience Builder.
• Translator of Buyer Needs into Product Benefits.

It's the same myopia that forces so many of us modern marketers into a box.

• Push the buttons.
• Get me leads.
• Repeat, and don't ask too many questions.

Multiple recruiters regaled me with job offers involving more of what I started doing 17 years ago, solving yesterday’s challenges.

Interviewers would ask:?

“How can we capture more leads?”

And I would respond:

“What if you're asking the wrong question?”

The Plight of Modern Marketing.

The stakes are high.

Sales has quotas, Management has expectations, and Marketing had better deliver.

Marketing anxiety is high.

Marketers aren’t allowed to fail. Every campaign must squarely hit the mark. Or, at the very least, Marketers musn’t make any choices not approved by the boss, lest they lose their jobs.

• Rule #1 of Marketing: Don’t Get Fired.
• Rule #2: Feed the Machine More Leads.

(Incidentally: Rule #10 is: “Enter the conversation already going on in the customer’s mind, with empathy and insight, early and often.” Most marketers never make it down that far.)

Marketing automation has evolved largely into a response to the need for Marketing to provide proof that their work moves the needle.

But here’s the thing about DATA: You can make it say whatever you want.?

Answering leading questions accurately to the 10th decimal is less valuable than asking the right questions. (Even when you don't know the answer.)

It’s 3am. Do you know where your customer’s head is?

Let’s be honest.?

Most of us marketers don’t have time to get to know… I mean really invest time to get to know our customer.

Why?

We’re too busy setting the next campaign that’s going into the Marketing systems. Or collating data and building pivot tables to analyze the flood of data coming out of the Marketing systems.

If you’ve found yourself here, or anywhere close to this neighborhood…

It’s not your fault.?

You are not alone.

It’s been a wild roller coaster of a ride for B2B Marketers, over the past 20 years.

But where we go from here, is up to us.

Hi. My name is Bolaji.?

And I’m a recovering Lead Capturing, Force-Feed Nurturing, Batch-and-Blasting, MarTech-Obsessing, Ad Man.

What's your Marketing origin story?

And what kind of marketer are you?

Bolaji Oyejide (Oh-yay-gee-day)

Comic Book Nerd

Kids Soccer Coach

Metadata Director of Demand Generation

Serial Techpreneur.

Mongrel Unicorn.