Introduction 

I just stood there in the bathroom for several minutes, staring at myself in the mirror with an anguished expression on my face. 

I had been in my current job for six months. When I started, I saw so much opportunity for improvement. I mean, the bar was very low. The brand was a mess. The website was a disaster. Our presence on the search engines was non-existent. From a marketing perspective, we were doing everything wrong that you could possibly do wrong.

When I started the job, I thought to myself, “Man, I am going to absolutely crush it.” But, here I was six months later, and I hadn’t really made much progress. Things just weren’t moving fast enough. 

It wasn’t that I wasn’t working hard or didn’t know what to do. I just wasn’t making the progress I needed to make. I wasn’t moving fast enough. And after six months, I couldn’t just blame the previous marketing team. This was my mess now. I owned it.

Before I left the bathroom, I looked at myself one more time, shook my head, and blurted out loud, “you suck.”

Part 1: Why You Suck at Marketing

You Suck

The feeling of “sucking” at your job is just horrible. But I’ve found that it is all too common for many marketers. 

I was speaking at the Digital Summit in Atlanta, GA, a few years back. The title for my session: “How Not to Suck at Marketing.” I thought it would be a catchy title. Digital Summit is one of those conferences where there are always 3-4 different sessions going on at the same time. So, having a good title is key to getting a big audience. 

But I wasn’t prepared for how many people showed up for my session. It was totally packed. Standing room only. Some people were even sitting on the floor.

I started the presentation by saying, “Welcome, I guess this is a support group for marketers who suck.” It got a big laugh. But the best humor is always grounded in some truth. And the truth is, a lot of us do suck at our jobs.

It is understandable. Marketing today is very hard. It is increasingly complex and always changing. You just look at Scott Brinker’s annual Martech Landscape chart, and you can see why being a marketer today is a big challenge. 

But, it hasn’t always been this way. 

The “Good Old Days”

 When I started my career in the mid-1990s, I worked for a big ad agency in New York City - Saatchi & Saatchi. My client was Procter & Gamble. I worked on the Tide and Cascade brands. I always thought it was funny that I lived in a tiny NYC apartment without a dishwasher or washer/dryer, yet I did the advertising for the biggest dish and laundry detergent brands in the world.

Back in the 90s, advertising was much simpler. If you wanted to do an ad, you really only had a few options - print, TV, radio, or outdoor. The internet as we know it today was just emerging. There was no Google. Just a random assortment of now-defunct search engines like Alta Vista, Web Crawler, Excite, and HotBot. There really wasn’t much online advertising at all.

Making decisions about where to advertise was relatively easy. It was really all about the thirty-second TV spot. At the agency, we would joke that you would say to the client, “The answer is a thirty-second spot, now tell me what your business problem is.”

There was a truth to that. I remember we would spend most of our time debating each individual frame of a storyboard and each word in the copy. Then we would present it to the client, and we would debate some more. Then we would move on to the qualitative testing. Then the quantitative testing. Finally, we would have a spot that we would produce. After we filmed it, we would do another round of research before it would air on TV. It was a lot of work to get a thirty-second spot on the air.

In a given year, we might have done 4 TV ads. That was all we did for 12 months—120 seconds of video to promote a brand. Looking back now, it almost seems impossible that you would accomplish so little over that time period. But that was just how things worked.

The Rise of Internet Advertising

Then in the late ’90s, internet advertising started to emerge. But this was totally different from anything I had done before. Instead of spending months researching every single aspect of a TV ad, we would just throw stuff online and see how it performed. We’d see one banner got more clicks than another banner, so we’d remove the banner that was underperforming. 

What an amazing time it was to be a marketer. We’d test concepts and messaging in real-time with real customers. Then optimize on the fly! We felt like we were the kings of this new marketing world. 

I remember doing digital advertising for the merger of ExxonMobil in 1998. They were mostly doing TV and print ads for the campaign, but they decided to throw a “little” money into digital. They were planning to spend just a few million dollars online, about 2% of the total campaign budget. At the time, there was so little internet advertising spend that we basically owned the internet. There wasn’t that much inventory, so you couldn’t go to a site without seeing an ExxonMobil banner.

From those humble beginnings, digital advertising started to consume everything. It changed the way marketers would allocate budgets. It even changed our vernacular as everything in the digital world seems to be an acronym – CPC, CPA, CTR, KPI, CLV, SQL, LTV, MQL, PPC, SEO, SEM, VTC, CPL, CTA, RTB, ROS, RON... When I look at all these acronyms, I mean modern marketers can basically speak in complete sentences using only acronyms. All I can say is, “WTF.”

The New Normal for Marketers

While this new wave of digital advertising has created a great opportunity for marketers to be more effective and accountable, it has also created significant challenges. Today, the pressure on marketing is greater than ever because there is a belief by many executives that all marketing investments should be clearly measurable. You need to show an immediate ROI on every single penny spent.

This is a significant shift for many marketers who grew up hearing John Wannamaker’s famous quote, “I know half of my marketing dollars are being wasted. I just don’t know what half.” It’s not that marketers don’t want accountability. But, the idea that you will be measured and judged for everything you do is a pretty scary prospect.

 In my experience, marketing has always been about the long game. You don’t spend money now to drive an immediate result. Rather, it’s about sustained investment over time. It’s about building awareness and interest. And in most cases, you can’t do that overnight.

 Therein lies the trap for the modern marketer. You have all these new digital tactics where you can track immediate results. But effective marketing has always required patience. Imagine if Nike ran a few print ads with the “Just Do It” tagline and shoe sales didn’t immediately go up. Would Phil Knight have pulled all the marketing budget? No. That’s why “Just Do It” is one of the most memorable taglines in history. It’s been around for 32 years!

The old rules of marketing are still valid. Brands take time and money to build. But in a world where you can track everything and CEOs and boards are looking for immediate returns, it’s getting harder and harder for marketers to make that case. 

Is Marketing at Risk?

 The reality is, many marketers today are at risk. I’ve worked at several companies in the past few years where marketing has been literally blown up every few months.

The CEO of one of my previous employers said to me that “nothing was working, so he fired the marketing department.” You heard that right. He “fired the marketing department.” And this wasn’t a small department. This was a department of 50+ people that was walked out the door. The CEO didn’t see the results he wanted. So, he decided to blow the whole thing up. 

The last company I worked for, QASymphony (now called Tricentis), had four marketing leaders from 2013 - 2015 before I joined. That’s right—four marketing leaders in two years. Luckily for me, I've lasted much longer than my predecessors. And my current job at ParkMobile, the previous CMO was in-and-out in six months. 

But why? Why have I had success where others have failed?

I will tell you; it's not because I'm smarter, or more experienced, or a better marketer.

More than anything, I believe that it probably has more to do with my mindset when it comes to marketing and my approach to the job. 

In the following chapters, I’ll provide some practical advice on how to be a better marketer, how to build a great marketing team, and how to strengthen relationships between marketing and other departments. I’ll also provide some tips on how to build a career in marketing that doesn’t suck. 

Are you in? Let’s get started.