(You Can’t) Knock The Hustle
A realist is always hated in a society of
sanctimonious hustlers, which is what America is.
—Gore Vidal
My hustle of choice: the advertising and marketing industry. Been in it for 15 years. Now the best way to explain marketing is this: Hold up your hand, either one: Go ’head, get it up—I’ll wait (lol)... Okay, now think of your hand as the marketplace:
Look at your fingers—they’re products within the marketplace; or better yet, consider them as competing products within the same category (i.e., cars, airlines, restaurants, etc.) Now answer these questions: Which finger do you use to point? Which finger do you use to flip someone off? Without thinking, I bet you said the index finger and the middle finger, respectively. Why? Because those are the tasks we’ve all been conditioned to identify those fingers with. Whether we like those fingers or not is secondary. What matters most is that those fingers have a purpose, an identity, aka a brand. And that folks, is marketing.
On an execution level, marketing is like baseball—even topnotch all-stars only hit a little over .350. For every successful catchphrase-inducing, sales-spiking marketing campaign, 20 fail, while another 5 or 6 more not only fail but also get someone fired. For every successful product or brand, hundreds more fall off. Why? Because consumers are just people and sometimes people are just straight up flaky. Consequently, great marketing is like great hitting or great comedy—it’s mostly timing. The rest is art, educated guesses, and whose guesses and art you’re willing to ride with. Any CEO, researcher, or guru who claims otherwise is just hustling you. (And themselves.)
But the ad game’s biggest enemy is corporate denial. Most advertising agencies just can’t accept the fact that building brands and advertising isn’t the same thing. Usually the best ROI (return on investment) isn’t a print ad or a TV commercial. Sometimes it’s street teams and sampling. Sometimes it’s a sponsorship angle or a product placement in movies or videogames. Sometimes it’s getting an emcee to name-check you. Sometimes it’s an online promotion or a ring-tone or an IM campaign. Sometimes it’s a mixture of all these things. Sometimes it’s just good old fashioned word-of-mouth... But whatever the solution, ad agencies will admit this much: If it isn’t advertising, we probably can’t bill for it; and if we can’t bill for it, it’s competition, a threat to our bottom line and the client doesn’t need to know about it. After all, they’re called advertising agencies and not branding agencies for a reason.
Speaking of which...
Marketing has changed. Target audiences are about as stable as an Israel-Palestine peace treaty. Consequently the traditionally billable and lucrative marketing mix of TV/Radio /Print with the occasional sponsorship has become less and less effective and the ad world knows it. That’s why most ad agencies are doing all they can to get while the getting is still good in addition to buying up and boxing out competition wherever they can. But it won’t last much longer. Seasons change and spring’s right around the corner.
(We’ll discuss the future of marketing in “Tribes, Merchantnaries and Warlords.”)
It’s worth noting that an earlier use of the term “branding”—
as in burning a symbol of a rancher’s identity into the
hide of cattle—is the forbearer of the logo. (1)
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