Good old Carlton Draught have a new ad...
In my last post I blamed universities for creating bad clients. But maybe I could blame the industry.When I started my undergraduate degree at the tender age of seventeen, I had no idea what marketing was. Neither did any of my mates. We were all under the impression that marketing was advertising, and I'm sure many would argue this perception often doesn't change, even after you graduate.Our dream of working on ads was soon crushed by crippling numbers and boring accounting lectures. But maybe the reason we have bad clients is not because of the way marketing is taught. Instead perhaps all marketers inherently want to be advertisers, a misconceived possibility pushed upon them before OWeek due to ignorance.Is the marketing industry not marketing itself appropriately to high school students?...
In at least two of my units throughout my marketing degree I've been asked to develop a marketing plan as a piece of major assessment. This degree, for the most part, and particularly these units, is designed to teach people how to be marketers. Or as I prefer to call them; clients.But in both cases, the assessment involved putting together a campaign. Any assignment that said, "We'll get our advertising agency to develop and build a creative strategy" would have failed, Instead, students were required to develop creative (as the client), and in most cases without any kind of strategy.Coming from the arrogant advertising side, is this not giving students the wrong idea of how things work?Do these students go on to become that client who gets way too involved with the creative? Or comes up with an idea early on and pushes it from the start? Or perhaps they'll simply be unwilling to pay for strategy because they've never heard of it before?Anyway, I think the way marketing is taught is the reason to blame for poor client behavior. Ironically, the poor campaign that results is usually blamed on the agency.And on a side note, I wonder if media peeps have similar feelings....
Advertising is a B2B service.Discuss....
I got some feedback about my last post. And it reminded me of something my now boss Russel Howcroft once said at a student event he spoke at. On career advice he could give to young marketers he said, "Always listen to your advertising agency." As someone who now works in advertising, I couldn't agree more. ;] So while the client might be the one who pays for those expensive award applications, and has the ability to make your co workers redundant, sometimes they're wrong. I guess Henry Ford's quote, "If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse" applies to more than just the people buying your product of shelves. Sometimes I think I think about this stuff too much....
After two and a half years, writing this blog has served its initial purpose. I now work in advertising. This week I started as the Social Media Manager at George Patterson Y&R Melbourne. It's a part time gig while I finish my fourth and final year of university. I can't state enough how validating it is after doing nothing but talk for almost 28 months to actually do an internship and have people impressed with your work, enough so that they're willing to pay you to keep you around. And luckily for you lot, this blog will continue to kick on....
I think it's a tell of a struggling medium when it advertises the fact you can advertise with them. I imagine their advertising revenue can't be too successful if they have no ads to place in that media space. You see it all the time on websites with banner ads suggesting one could "advertise here". It's also pretty popular on the inside of trains. And I realised today, that radio has been doing it for a while with a pretty heavy push lately. Is this the sign of a dying medium, or at least a profitable one? And how long until we see a major television networks running similar ads?...
There's a lot I hate about the marketing industry. I hate...
I made a decision today. I will never have any AdSense running on this blog.I am the angry mob who wants to burn all banner ads and interruptive media. The only way I'd be interested in monetising this blog is through sponsorship, even then it has to be relevant and beneficial to you guys.I suppose that counts as a New Year's Resolution, yeah?...
As more so an experiment than an attempt to build my audience, I ran some banner ads on Facebook yesterday. Here are the statistics on ads shown only to people interested in marketing, advertising and blogging in Australia...
