Buddhist Marketer

On becoming part of the solution

When I joined Sapient last October, I proclaimed it was the last company I’d ever work for as a full-time employee.  I didn’t know at the time that after a decade-long career as a marketer, I was about to realize what I was meant to do with my life.  My old excuses for being grumpy at jobs (deeply insane management teams, more money elsewhere, deeply unhappy self) weren’t the case at Sapient:  I liked the vast majority of my fellow Sapientes, was compensated in the same ballpark as other offers that came my way, and I no longer use work as an escape mechanism (which is to say, I like myself).  But the hard truth about being a day-in, day-out marketing practitioner is that you don’t really get to ask real marketing questions, and when you do, those around you don’t understand the value of your questions and/or don’t even understand  your question.

A couple of years ago I attributed this to the talent-sourcing mechanism of most companies. Most companies, when trying to hire for a marketer, demand a degree in marketing or advertising. From my January 2007 post “Ad industry decline“:

It’s really hard to get into an agency these days. They require degrees in marketing or advertising. They expect that you know how to operate the metaphorical machinery of the advertising engine. Which is good and fine for executional grunt work. But what about the big picture?

Yale University does not offer a “marketing” or “advertising” degree. It’s a liberal arts institution. It, and places like it, teach you how to think. So that when you encounter a problem — e.g., “How can I shift the brand consciousness in the minds of consumers for this bar of whale fat?” — you understand how to tackle it.

From what I gather, most folks still don’t appreciate the full line of reasoning detailed in the post from which the above quotation is excerpted.  In fact, just this morning the CMO of Sapient, Gaston Legorburu (who, for the record, is a human that has excellent taste in cars and is someone that I like), wrote the following in “Cleaning up the Marketing Department“:

One recent study in the US suggested more than two thirds of marketers had zero formal marketing training or education. Zero!

We at Sapient also recently did a survey and asked marketers whether they thought too few people in marketing have strategic marketing competencies. An incredible 77 percent of those surveyed strongly agreed this was a problem.

This may not surprise you, but it disturbs me. Imagine is 70% of the folks in your finance department did not have a finance degree. Would it make you nervous if 70% of the folks in your legal department did not pass the BAR exam.

Since Gaston is no longer the boss of me, I feel a bit more comfortable running my yap (though truth be told he doesn’t strike me as the kind of person that requires silencing of said yap):  formal marketing training or education does not correlate with strategic marketing competencies. Again from my aforementioned post:

Learning to build a media plan in your pursuit of an advertising degree is akin to learning to make a widget. It has nothing to do with learning how to think, how to tackle and approach problems in an original and expansive way. Anyone can make a widget. Anyone can build a media plan. Anyone can puke out most of the advertising units rolling in front of our eyeballs these days.

And as one of my college roommates asked after I shared that my end game post-doctorate is to be a business school professor, “Isn’t marketing, I don’t know, kind of tactical and very, umm … applicable?”  I immediately thought of the line from Back To The Future:

Yes, definitely, goddammit George, swear!

Right now, as-is, marketing is ghettoized in what I snootily refer to as vocational or trade schools.  Harvard doesn’t even offer a PhD; marketing gets the back-of-the-bus DBA from the ole’ Cantabbers.  Which, in my mind, is a deep disservice to the essential value of marketing.

Capitalism isn’t going away anytime soon, hyperinflation or otherwise, and insofar as poor Karl Marx is losing the battle and humans continue to alienate-from-self by commodification, marketing and commodity and the markets are the means through which humans articulate self. Before the industrial revolution and massive distribution platforms, those who valued self-articulation had the Arts, like literature.  And while I won’t go so far as to say that marketing is today’s literature, I will say that the revolution continues and with it necessarily must come a revolution in the way in which we think about what marketing means and the role it plays in the expression of human authenticity (yeah, I went there).

My little sister complained last night that sometimes I come up with these high-falutin’ ideas and it’s hard to keep up, that sometimes I should just zip it and let her plow through her to-do list.  Fair enough.  I won’t go too far along on this tangent as we all have our to-do lists to return to and I need to find me some lunchtime grub.

But I will say this:  I’m excited to be a potential future formal educator in marketing, so that instead of simply puking out intellectual numpties, these vocational and trade schools can actually graduate humans that understand the complexities of marketing and its interrelationship with the liberal arts (and yes, those diagrams intersect).  And while I have already blogged about what I am up against

… there is no structure or system that can shift an eighteen-year-old disinclined to ask the questions towards becoming a deep thinker. You either have this intrinsic drive or you don’t; no system of rewards or punishments will conjure it.

I also think that if anyone should be on the front lines of molding the next generation of deep marketing thinkers, it should be me.  Perhaps marketing will be appreciated for the liberal art it is, perhaps I’ll help create the “Bar Exam for Marketers” (if you will), perhaps my research will be devoured by intelligent practitioners, perhaps business school students will sell their organs on the open market for a spot in one of my classes.

Perhaps.

But first, I’ve got to rustle up some transcripts for my applications.

And get some darn lunch.

Ad industry decline

Hal Riney opines on the decline of the advertising industry in the January 8, 2007 issue of Adweek:

It is appalling what has happened to the industry in general. Ad people have no faith in the long-term effects of brand image, so the human element is lacking in the work… Advertising has been relegated to middle management…

This is a business built on ability and imagination. You need a magnificent group of creative people and remarkable clients who want to have fun and not just do the same thing.

I’ve given some thought to this over the past few years. And I know that what I’m about to say might be politically incorrect …

What did you just say?!?!

… but I can’t help it.

When I worked at Digitas as a menial grunt working sixty-plus hour weeks for ten grand less than the job before it (whimper), I admired the work of Steve Olderman, a fellow Yale grad who, despite not attending a traditional arts school (he received his Bachelor’s in Engineering in 1963), was then the Chief Creative Officer.

How was it, I thought, that he was able to fashion his career in such a way?

I guarantee you that a Stephen Olderman circa 2007 n’existe pas. The path to becoming a creative director these days is through the halls of SVA, RISD, Pratt, and the like. Or, perhaps you crossover from a different role within an agency — a role like media planning or copywriting.

Except. Well. It’s really hard to get into an agency these days. They require degrees in marketing or advertising. They expect that you know how to operate the metaphorical machinery of the advertising engine. Which is good and fine for executional grunt work. But what about the big picture?

Yale University does not offer a “marketing” or “advertising” degree. It’s a liberal arts institution. It, and places like it, teach you how to think. So that when you encounter a problem — e.g., “How can I shift the brand consciousness in the minds of consumers for this bar of whale fat?” — you understand how to tackle it. These are the kinds of minds that the advertising industry needs, to inject the “human element” of which Hal Riney speaks, to guide clients to consider greatness, to prevent this kind of creative exploration from being “relegated to middle management”.

The problem is that institutionally, it’s nearly impossible for these budding potential great minds, these Stephen Oldermans circa 2007, to get in to the industry. If someone with an engineering degree walked into HR at an agency and said they wanted to be a creative, they’d get laughed at.

But if they do get into one (I was an account person — not exactly the rockstars of an agency, of course), they find themselves surrounded by attendees of what have essentially become vocational schools. Look, I don’t look down my nose on those who learned how to use Comscore or Nielsen Netratings to build a media plan during their undergraduate days. I believe that an honest day’s work is an honest day’s work, and learning a trade to eke yourself to a higher tax bracket is an honorable thing.

But it’s just that. A trade. Learning to build a media plan in your pursuit of an advertising degree is akin to learning to make a widget. It has nothing to do with learning how to think, how to tackle and approach problems in an original and expansive way. Anyone can make a widget. Anyone can build a media plan. Anyone can puke out most of the advertising units rolling in front of our eyeballs these days.

And so the industry, I think, begins to look a bit like it does today. Rife with art school grads who can certainly make something look pretty but lack the ability to inject meaning and substance into the smoke and mirrors. Laden with voc school grads who can pull some placements for women 18-35, single, no children but can’t consider the implications for a psychographic shift or a product positioning tilt. But lacking just the kind of flexible, intellectually-curious, hungry minds that could tackle huge problems and deliver an elegant, unique solution with a depth of consideration and historical relevance that will also positively impact the bottom line.

So I think that Hal Riney’s right in his observations about the ad industry. And I don’t disagree that the obeisance to shareholder value or commodification of everything don’t play important roles. But I also feel that the places from which the industry sources its talent and the ways in which the industry’s recruiters and human resources professionals populate the entry level cubicles also play a very important role.

Just my opinion. And again, not trying to hate on state school grads who majored in advertising. A place for everyone and all. They all make more than me anyway, I’m sure.