TruEffect Blog

Online Marketers are Wimps

Online Marketing is for Wimps

Don’t bother telling me I’m wrong about this, because frankly I just don’t care. 

Media is numbers. 

Numbers are predictable and can be forecasted, they can be manipulated and influenced.  Yeah that’s right, I said it.  It’s all about samples and segments, products and offers.

Phew… now that I have all that drama out my system, let’s move on.  Media and furthermore all of marketing, is about people; Real, fleshy organic beings that ate breakfast this morning while surfing the web for the latest headlines.  We are all people, we’re all the same, we all hope and dream.

True, media and marketing may be summarized by numbers, but those are not symbolic of inanimate objects.   Each impression and follower is a real person.  Each interaction is an opportunity to connect with those people, to promote your brand in their lives. I know this is marketing 101, but after working with hundreds of agencies and thousands of folks in those agencies, I can honestly say this fact is lost.  If in the end marketing is people, and people are sustained through relationships, they key to marketing is to sustain relationships, right?  And if a relationship is a give and take, an interaction with various degrees of intimacy, shouldn’t marketing comprehend that relationship and its variety? 

Truth is, marketers, it’s much easier for us to rely on numbers than it is to connect to people.  It’s as if there is an inherent risk in people, too dangerous to build a multimillion campaign around.  Nah, the campaigns are built around numbers: impressions, clicks, tweets and a million different three letter acronyms.  I’m guilty as charged, just like most of us.

But don’t fear and fret, friends.  The future is people.  And as I shamelessly plug our un-wimpyness, it’s only because I really believe we’ve recaptured the relationship in media.  We’ve introduced a tool capable of turning display into a true medium for brands to build relationships.  That’s right, display can be a give and take conversation, where each consumer has a voice that they can communicate directly with the advertiser.  To be able to understand that a customer is not just represented by a click and impression, but rather by a story which marketers can use to offer the right product at the right time is finally possible on the internet.

Marketing is all about people.  Let’s stop relying on the wimpy numbers and focus on real people.

- Brian Murphy

Autonomy. Mastery. Purpose.

I just finished watching Daniel Pink’s (@danielpink) lecture on what really motivates people. It’s a packed 18 minutes of YouTube glory, but I want to chat about a few points that really stuck with me.  

•Incentives only work well with mechanical tasks – That’s right, commissions and bonuses mean nothing to people working on abstract tasks and solving problems.  Wow, talk about punching a hole into just about every salesman’s balloon.  When you first think about it, it might seem completely obtuse, flying in the face of our beautiful free-market capitalism.

But after listening to Dan a little longer, it starts to make sense. Adding a little to his lecture, my take is pretty simple.  It’s not just about the money; people need to believe when they spend 8 hours a day, five days a week for decades working on something, that they are working towards a greater cause.  It’s gotta mean something, not just to the worker but to the World. 

• “Management didn’t emanate from nature.  Management is not a tree, it’s a TV… someone invented it, and it doesn’t mean it’s going to work forever.”  This one is sure to make disgruntled employees around the world thrust their fist in the air in defiance of their overlord managers.  But don’t get too carried away because the implications of not being managed may not be evident at first take.

It’s pretty simple – you’re going to have to think for yourself.

Yup, that’s right. No management means you have to figure out the problem, not wait for someone to tell you what to do.  If we’re all honest for a minute, we’ve really gotten comfy with other people making decisions that we are cleared to not care about and f-up. Yikes, a zinger there, but… deep in your soul search, and find it true you will.

•Fedex days – You have 24 hours to work on anything you want.  Only catch, you have to deliver something at the end of those 24 hours and present it to the company.  Maybe a new code, develop a flash game or maybe “get your creative on” a process that sucks right now, it’s totally up to you.  He claims 50% of Google’s innovations come from days like this, where their super geeks are able to let their mind run wild and not be confined by the cage of the everyday.

Next post will be about how this can be applied to a marketing company – agency, technology, advertiser or random guy tweeting allllll the time (uuuhhh… I didn’t mean me!?!?).  Stay tuned, feels like this framework fits well into our industry.  In the meantime, feel free to send across any ideas you may have.

– Brian Murphy