Five shocking lessons from a lifetime in marketing

Why almost everything marketers do is wrong – and how to make it right

In 1956 I walked out of university to become a writer.

My father was horrified.

“Think of all the money we lavished on your education” he lamented. “All thrown away.”

Well, I did become a writer – but not the famous novelist I dreamt of. I became a trade journalist – assistant editor of a tiny magazine.

Then I went into advertising.

(Yes, I did write my novel. And it was published. But it never did bring me the fame I yearned for.)

However I enjoyed advertising, and worked hard. Just over 5 years later I was creative director of a well-known London advertising agency.

I cannot complain. I have made a damn good living. I have been able to travel the world and live a good life usually being paid to do so. But I do regret having spent my business life in an industry so full of phonies, bullshitters and fakes.

Did I succeed because I was unusually talented? Not at all. Even by the time I had become a creative director I was barely competent. I was just rather better than most other people.

This was largely because of the first lesson I learned about advertising and marketing.

1. Hardly anybody studies.

Marketers imagine theirs is a profession. It isn’t.  There is little proper discipline based on precedent  as in a real profession or trade. Few firms or agencies invest properly in training their people. Most do not train at all. People make it all up as they go along.

People think they can succeed almost by chance – by being charming, good-looking, knowing the right people: anything except studying what works, and why.

And you can do pretty well that way. But not for long. And only if you’re lucky.

I started studying what works and what doesn’t even before I got my first advertising job. I have never stopped. Eventually I was able to sell my own agency for millions.

Having talent or knowing the right people were not the reason I was able to do this: study was.

I am now 77. I still study every day. I still write copy every day – and it still works. As I was drafting this article – on a Saturday – I learned that an email I wrote in under half an hour earned me $2,830 in a day or so.

What else have I learned?

2. Most marketing fails because most marketers do not measure the results of their investment.

A report issued as I was revising this revealed that because marketers are too damned idle or stupid  to check up on what they pay for:

“By many estimates, more than half of online video ads are not seen, either because they are buried low on web pages or run in tiny, easily ignored video players on those pages, or run simultaneously with other ads. …  57 % of two billion video ads surveyed over two months (were) “unviewable.”

No proper business would operate on that basis. If you don’t know what your money produces you are like a man driving blindfold.

Why don’t people measure? It is because of a fatal misunderstanding of the purpose of marketing.

The second big discovery I made back in the late 1950’s was that advertising and marketing were divided into two opposing camps.

Some people just ran advertisements they liked or their wives liked or their friends liked. They made no attempt to measure return on investment. Other people only spent money what they knew made money – because they measured.

The first kind of person saw advertising as a cost or overhead – a luxury they could do without if times were hard. The second realised that it should be an investment: the lifeblood of their business.

How could I ever have dreamt that fifty-odd years later many – I would say most – marketers are still pretty clueless.

To give you an idea of just how clueless, take a quote from the report just mentioned.

Kellogg’s, the cereal and snack giant …. found that, at various times, nearly a third of the ads it wanted to run in the United States were running in a foreign country.

Aaron Fetters, director of Kellogg’s Insights and Analytics Solutions Center commented:

“We sort of made the case to our marketing heads that measurement will more than pay for itself. And it’s been like turning on a light in a dark closet. Now the lights are on and we can see what we need to clean up.”

You really have to ask yourself what those marketing heads – and for that matter Mr. Fetters – are paid for.

3. Marketers confuse cleverness and entertainment with effectiveness.

This is the third discovery I made – and the confusion is quite natural. That is because marketing uses media otherwise used to entertain or amuse – like TV, radio, magazines – and now the internet.

It seems natural, then, to conclude that if it does not entertain it will not get any attention.

But advertising is not a subset of entertainment. You are in the selling business. As my former boss David Ogilvy observed, “I don’t want people to say that is a good advertisement. I want them to say “I want to buy that product”.

In fact your messages have to stand out amidst the buzz of entertainment. To do so you must appeal to people’s self-interest so strongly that they will prefer your message to the ones that amuse them.

4. Marketers are foolish followers of fashion. They follow every new sexy idea.

As marketers do not measure, they cannot evaluate the impact of their activities. They cannot put them to the test and check the results of one approach, incentive or medium versus another. And they squander millions as a result.

Today’s big fashion is for “social media”. Results show that, to give one example, emails are about 40 times more effective at selling than Facebook and Twitter combined. Yet billions are being thrown away on these relatively unproven media.

One hugely misleading signal guides many, if not most marketers is. It is surveys into what other marketers are doing. This is almost always irrelevant for two reasons:

• What marketers are doing now is very often behind the times. You should be looking for what is about to work, not what is working today or has worked. It is a parallel with the world of investment. What made most money last year may well not do well next year because everybody is investing in it

•  What you should be watching is not what competitors are doing but what customers are doing, because they pay your wages. Very few marketers indeed do the obvious: be a customer yourself. Experience what your customers experience. Until you have done so, how can you know what they want?

The reason marketers squandered so many millions on the video ads mentioned in the report mentioned above is simple: everyone else was doing it.

5. Nothing breeds failure faster than success.

This lesson was learned when I started dealing with large clients at a senior level.

As soon as a business starts to do well and get big the entrepreneurs tend to lose favour and corporate politicians move in. They are better at climbing the corporate ladder than serving the customers. If you’re not careful they end up running the business.

That is when the rot sets in. It is extraordinarily hard to keep in touch with your customers when you spend your day in meetings talking about slogans and strategy or playing golf with your agency toadies, whilst they – the customers – are thinking about how to make ends meet.

Marketers, for the most part, are not in touch with where their money comes from, or what makes customers part with that money. This is fatal.

If you want to succeed, be your own customer. Email your firm with a question and see what happens. Buy something. Is it easy? Could it be easier? How was the sale followed up?

Then do the same with your competitors. Are they doing a better job than you? Where are they weak? Where are they strong? Can you outdo them somehow?

As business thinker Peter Drucker observed, “There is only one profit centre in business. It is your customer.

This is the report I refer to above.