How Technology Killed Marketing

Time was that marketing was glamorous. The heyday of marketing can be viewed every week in the television show Mad Men. In that glamorous world, the marketeer (represented by the quintessential ad exec) is a master of the universe.

In that world, marketing was seen as the engine that drove sales. Clever ideas and memorable brands, expressed through pricey advertising, created business success. Marketing "created demand" and the sales group was simply a means to fulfill that demand.

But now technology has killed Mad Men marketing... by making demand creation measurable.

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Time was that marketing was glamorous. The heyday of marketing can be viewed every week in the television show Mad Men. In that glamorous world, the marketeer (represented by the quintessential ad exec) is a master of the universe.

In that world, marketing was seen as the engine that drove sales. Clever ideas and memorable brands, expressed through pricey advertising, created business success. Marketing "created demand" and the sales group was simply a means to fulfill that demand.

But now technology has killed Mad Men marketing... by making demand creation measurable.

You may have read the stories about newspapers going bankrupt. It's been positioned as part of the meltdown, but in fact such bankruptcies were inevitable, because advertising sales for print publications have been declining for years.

The reason? The Internet.

When you run a print ad, you have no idea whether or not it has any impact on anyone. While that impact was taken for granted in the Mad Men era, the truth is that almost nobody reads newspaper advertisements. They never did.

And here's another dirty little secret. Ever since the invention of the remote control, nobody has watched television ads unless they were background noise. Tivo and on-demand video has made TV ads even less effective.

By contrast, when you run an Internet ad, you know exactly how many people click on it and then you know exactly what they do afterwards. If your ad generates a lead, you can track that lead, in detail, all the way through to the closing.

For years, marketing groups were only corporate organizations allowed to measure themselves. The Mad Men myth was so pervasive that most firms automatically funded marketing, simply because it was assumed to be crucial to success.

But with the Internet, marketing is now completely measurable. And as a result, the rest of the corporation is dragging the marketing group, kicking and screaming, into a brave new world where the Mad Men are revealed as naked emperors.

No longer can a marketing group pretend that revising a logo, running an ad, or spouting "brand strategy" has automatic value. No longer can they pretend that they're "driving sales" by spending 2 percent of a company's revenue.

Ironically, back in the days of the Mad Men, there was one kind of marketing that WAS measurable: direct mail. And direct mail was the armpit of the marketing group, the sad sacks about whom the masters of the universe made disparaging jokes.

The direct mail guys didn't wear Brooks Bros... they wore green eyeshades. They knew exactly how many people responded and could track what happened after. They were accountants and statisticians -- the antithesis of the Mad Man.

But now that marketing is measurable, ALL marketing is like direct mail. The marketeer of the future will be a quant, a scientist, a functionary who actually does what the Mad Man was supposed to be doing -- generate leads.

I sympathize with all you marketing executives out there. You got into this line of work because you knew that your success was guaranteed if you could simply play your political cards correctly and secure your share of the automatic budget.

Now you've got to go out and prove your worth, just like the sales guys that you were pretending to "drive" for so many years. It's not nearly as fun as flouncing into the boardroom, bloviating about brand, and then blowing the big bucks.

So welcome to the new world, and to your new job.

If you still have one, that is, after the CFO runs your numbers.