Substandard marketing training
We owe it to the next generation of marketers to give them a better grounding
This newsletter may sound like an advert for a marketing course. But hopefully it gives a bit of thought as to how we can do better for people entering the industry today. Or agencies for the first time, which can be truly baffling places.
Onwards.
Are we giving junior marketers the tools they need to grow and thrive?
It took me until my 30s to actually understand what a media agency actually did. It took me even longer to figure out that what they did wasn't just buying advertising space. And then a bit longer to realise just exactly how media properly built a brand.
Given a large part of my role today includes directing and planning media buying, that may sound like a very strange confession. But one that isn't unfamiliar. Among my peers, colleagues and friends I've heard similar stories.
One theory is that plenty of today's senior marketers started their careers in niche, specialist or emerging areas. In my case, it was a mixture of journalism, PR, and social media.
It was only when I stepped into a more senior role at Direct Line Group in 2015 that I got a (very good) crash course in the marketing landscape.
In some respects this is understandable. If your career is in social media and your job is to sell social media solutions then of course social media can seem like it's the most important part of the marketing mix.
There are probably more than a few of us who, when working in social circa 2009-2012 had many conversations over a drink bemoaning brands just not getting social.
We were probably losing our collective excrement over Oreo's Dunk In The Dark, without really asking how the viral reach of one Tweet measured up against the number of people who purchased a pack of Oreos each year, or whether anybody outside of marketers and Twitter users had actually seen or recalled the advert.
The same goes for SEO, adtech, influencer marketing, loyalty, content, AR, experiential or other more specialist marketing disciplines.
In their own way, they can be hugely effective. But as good as, say, SEO is, it works even better when combined with channels like TV or PR.
Some digital channels don't differ wildly from point-of-sale. Direct mail can be a hugely effective tool, but no brand will ever grow by solely focusing on its database of existing users.
Some of the best people I know in marketing are experts in their field but, crucially, also know what they don't know and have a very good understanding of where their role fits into the wider scheme of things.
How can we train if we can’t train ourselves?
All of this is a very roundabout way of getting to two perennial issues in marketing: training and objectives.
I don't subscribe to the theory that you have to be trained in marketing to be good at marketing.
I've worked with many people who have a natural aptitude for marketing but had training in wildly different industries. One of my current team started their career as a broker.
But I do strongly believe that being trained in marketing makes you a much better marketer.
If you're a few years into your career and have no formal training, you could do a lot worse than investing in courses like Mark Ritson's Mini MBA in Marketing.
The second strong belief I have is that senior leaders, organisations and agencies have a responsibility to provide some form of training or guidance to their staff.
That sounds obvious. But it's a lot harder than it sounds. Agencies sell time, and there's always another client pitch or last minute project that bumps learning time, to say nothing of the time the person delivering the training has to deliver.
A stressed young account manager with looming deadlines from demanding clients probably won't be receptive to an afternoon spent back in the classroom on a topic that seems abstract against a demanding client's work.
In-house can be similarly busy. Training budgets can easily go unspent without the will to plan out a learning schedule. Direct Line Group is the only place I've worked where there was a role with this exact responsibility.
But the good companies and leaders take time to train up their staff. The best creatives I've worked with understood how strategy and media fed into their roles. The really good account directors looked beyond what the client was asking.
The media planners who understood the long-term effects of brand, the need to balance with the short, and the role creative played in it all were worth their weight in gold.
Breaking bad habits
The flipside to this: bad habits are very easy to take hold, especially with junior staff.
It's incredibly easy to train somebody to say yes to every client request. Or to solely focus on leads over sales revenue, or sales revenue over margin and profit.
It is exceptionally easy to view agencies that do a different job as the enemy, especially if their proposal appears to run counter to your own project. It's very easy for clients to view agencies as a cost to be squeezed.
It is incredibly hard to get an agency village and client to work in harmony, or at least effective collaboration.
The lack of understanding and adversarial relationships come, in part, due to poor training. Bad briefs - and bad responses to briefs - are one of these.
When a client decides they want a TV commercial one week and changes their mind to digital display adverts the next (a sadly true experience) it's unsurprising if there's a level of chaos from equally untrained staff.
There's not really one answer here. Some of it stems from culture, which is arguably a harder fix than training.
Good cultures, in my experience, tend to facilitate better learning, or at least a better awareness of who does what and why.
There's also the psychological safety for people to say I don't know, or at least know the limits of their skills, knowledge and abilities.
Marketing isn’t SMART
The other potential answer is objectives. Specifically good, clear objectives can overcome a lack of training or knowledge in other disciplines.
A clear SMART objective for an SEO team or social media agency should clearly show where the work fits into the wider business strategy, while ensuring the team stays resolutely focused on the task in hand.
That might sound simple, but there are plenty of SEO and social professionals who've been given vague targets such as "get us to number one on Google" (for what, why, and is it achievable?) or grow engagement.
Neither means anything but can often derail other teams.
This could be social media pushing for a media budget that drives engagement but detracts from the overall company objectives.
Or that SEO spends a year optimising for keywords that the business never has a hope in ranking for or aren’t really relevant to their target customer base.
Everything ultimately flows from the strategic choices (or lack of). It’s up to the teams as to whether they engage with the bigger picture or just their own individual targets.
But they can be helped by senior leadership being clear with where they fit into the bigger picture.
A social media professional doesn’t necessarily need to know econometric modelling or margins but they do need to know if they’re part of an acquisition or retention strategy, or whether their objectives sit at the top or the bottom of the funnel.
The same goes for PR, SEO, creative, CRM and the rest of the numerous departments. You don’t have to be a trained marketer to work here. But it helps.
Interesting reads
Twitter’s alternative business model
I’ve tried to avoid talking about Musk, partly because it moves so quickly and partly because the man doesn’t need any other coverage. But the chaos at Twitter has opened up an interesting discussion about the social network’s famously unprofitable business model. Twitter was never first on any advertiser’s plan but didn’t really have a substantial alternative stream of revenue. So weaning Twitter off advertising isn’t a crazy solution. Whether Twitter will be around for long enough to find an alternative business model is another question. Henry Innis goes into more detail here: LINK. And Brian Morrissey looks at Silicon Valley’s pivot away from advertising in general: LINK.
Don’t do discounting
Speaking of business models, I continue to be amazed at how much money businesses like The Athletic are missing out on due to an addiction to discounting at any cost. Further thoughts here: LINK.
Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure”
I’m pretty sure I wrote something circa seven years ago predicting voice could revolutionise search and voice assistant search placing would be vital. I wasn’t exactly right, but probably not as wrong as Amazon, who are scaling back their investment in Alexa. Their Echo kit still sells well, but people asking Alexa the weather or to turn up the thermostat doesn’t exactly monetise. The Echo and Alexa aren’t bad products in and of themselves, but the revenue forecasting appears to have been way off. LINK.
FAST channels’ discovery challenge
ITV has been heavily pushing ITVX, their narrow themed streaming service. FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV) channels are becoming a thing for traditional broadcasters. Let’s have an entire channel dedicated to one show or theme (insert your own ITV4 joke here). But there’s two main challenges here. If you have an infinite number of channels, how will people discover the FAST channel without marketing investment? And how will people decide what to watch, when they’re faced with a plethora of choice. EPGs and channel controller are still very relevant in this day and age. LINK.
Kia’s confusing logo
Last year car manufacturer went through a rebrand and introduced a slick new logo. One problem. A lot of people are Googling KN instead of Kia. I’ve seen plenty of comments praising the logo design and the “clever marketing”. But if you Google KN Car, Kia has ads running against it, which is a) costing them money; and b) suggests they’re aware of the problem. I’m from the school of thought that says don’t muck about with your distinctive assets (especially your logo) and make your brand as easy as possible to recognise. That said, Kia’s share price is up and they grew market share here in Australia (albeit from fulfilling existing orders, it seems), so what do I know. File as one to revisit in a few years. LINK.
Playing us out this week: Suede - Barriers. For some reason, their 2013 Bloodsports album isn’t available on Spotify, but this is a standout track. It’s very Suedey, so if you’re not a fan of Brett Anderson and co, this is unlikely to change your mind. That said, I’m of the opinion that had they released this in the mid 90s it would have been a Top 10 hit.