Marketing Pilgrim

A few weeks ago I heard some SEO friends talking about how an SEO they know of had screwed over a bunch of his clients. After talking with them a bit more it also sounded like this same SEO didn’t know very much about SEO at all. It got me thinking about a strange phenomenon I have witnessed in the field of marketing.

If you are bad at marketing, there’s a high probability that you are also a scumbag. Think about all of the jerks you have met in marketing, now ask yourself, were they good marketers? Probably not. This odd reality seems to only be true in marketing though. For example you can be a really horrible plumber and also a really nice guy at the same time. You can be an amazing dentist, but a huge jerk as well.

The ad business has always been stressful and cutthroat. I know this because I grew up watching Darren Stevens on Bewitched burning the midnight oil desperately searching for that brilliant tagline. Then, on the verge of losing his job, his wacky witch wife would make a mistake which would end up leading to the best ad campaign ever created.

Oh, if only we were all married to witches or to Don Draper. He makes the ad business look cool.

In the real world, without magic and martinis, it’s become even harder to land that big client mostly because the rules have changed. AdAge says the agency review process has gotten “totally out of control.” They participated in a panel discussion with top agency search consultants and what they heard was a lot of frustration and few solutions.

Poor Yahoo. Just the other day we reported about their new small business marketing dashboard. It looked pretty neat and you got the sense that the company was trying to do something relevant that was pointed at a market segment in need. It seemed as if the company under the direction of their latest CEO, Scott Thompson, was heading in the right direction. Not only were new products being brought to market but the company was in the process of streamlining its offerings. All positive things.

That was until it was discovered that Thompson has a little discrepancy on his resume. Apparently the computer science degree he claims to hold from Stonehill College is, well, not real. According to All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher both Yahoo and Stonehill have confirmed that despite Thompson’s claims to having a degree in accounting and computer science only the first half is true.