Becoming a Rogue Marketer After 13 Years In The Field
The marketing story typically ends with the purchase.
Visitor navigates the web.
Visitor sees an ad.
If the hook is sleek enough, they might even click.
If the lead magnet is persuasive enough, they might even opt-in.
If the product offer is designed well enough, they might even buy.
If the funnel tells the right story, they might even buy the upsells, down-sells or cross-sells.
The End
Unless you have tech issues, product storage complications, or God forbid, refund problems, as a marketer, you don't really have to think about what happens after the purchase. Until you remarket them to buy again, of course.
You cash your check, pocket your commission, pat yourself on the back, and call it a day. It's a good gig. I should know, I've been an online marketer for 13 years.
Thirteen years of market research, product creation, and story-selling. At the peak of my paid advertising days, I was putting $10k/day into Zuckerberg's pockets.
When I first got started, we were all just barely scraping the surface of online attention monetization. Facebook was still figuring out their ads model, dev-ops were still needed to build websites, the news was still written by journalists, and going viral was not really a thing.
For the most part, marketing meant using old-school copywriting techniques and applying them to the digital medium.
Marketing was direct mail, video sales letters, and long-form copy.
Marketing was David Ogilvy, Eugene Schwartz, and the great Gary Halbert (whose letters I used to re-write by hand.)
Marketing was attending conferences stuffed with men who got rich selling products off of ClickBank and were there to teach us plebs their counterintuitive 3-step process that would help us 10x our revenue in 10 days WITHOUT spending a cent on ads. (Spoiler alert! Doing it doesn't work, but selling it does.)
For better or worse, marketing was confined to the technology it operated in. If the ads were too overbearing you could have easily flipped the page over, changed the frequency, flicked the channel, or closed the website.
But now?
Marketing became synonymous with manipulation, fake information, and outsmarting customers.
Now, we play the game of maximized revenue.
Now, we promise first and figure things out later.
Now, we have completely destroyed trust on the internet.
(this is why we can't have nice things!)
We have robots writing persuasive plagiarized content, we're paying children for making themselves vulnerable online, we're isolating and punishing those that choose to not participate, we're building deep fakes that make us question reality, we're consuming promotional content without it being labeled as such...
And I know pragmatic arguments can only move you to a certain point (no matter how well-reasoned they are,) so I'll leave you with this:
- Children who have been cyberbullied are 3x more likely to contemplate suicide. Source.
- The amount of time spent using social media is significantly correlated with later levels of alcohol use, eating disorders and an inability to sustain attention for long.
- 77% of teenagers get their news from social media. Source.
- Fake news spreads 6 times faster (!) than true news. Source.
- 45% of tweets about coronavirus are from bots spreading fake information. Source.
- Children under the age of 14 spend nearly twice as long with tech devices as they do in conversation with their families. Source.
- Trump.
Out of all of the many negative externalities I could have chosen, my main focus is on children. For three reasons:
- They're highly impressionable and vulnerable.
- As we age, younger generations will be the ones expected to be making wise decisions for all of us. Is that really a fair expectation considering we're frying up their brains with TikTok? Yes, I went there.
- If we (millennials and older) grew up progressively learning about the dire state our planet is in, from the second they were born, these kids have been bombarded with constant existential threats caused by human choice and neglect. Our human choices and neglect, not theirs. Your choices and mine.
And you could be thinking, "These are not intrinsically marketing problems."
And you wouldn't be wrong...
So what does marketing have to do with it?
Taking advantage of humans isn't new. But doing it at this scale is. And scale is what marketing does best.
In an effort to stay relevant and adapt to changes in the market, marketers had to continually build new success metrics. View counts, bounce rates, opt-in rates, open rates, click-through rates, engagement rates, marketing qualified leads, product qualified leads, sales qualified leads... different words that pushed us further and further away from the most important success metric - wellbeing.
Most of the internet, but especially social media platforms, hook and captivate users by offering free content and entertainment, only to subsequently monetize their attention by selling it to advertisers and data collectors. Us.
We use that information to sell. We sell thoughts, ideas, free content, paid content - whatever makes the pendulum swing.
And thanks to the technology and the science we now have at our disposal, demand hasn't saturated, to the contrary, new needs and desires are being created every day.
You might, of course, argue, "More demand, equals more supply - a fundamental principle of capitalism, what's wrong with that?"
In a capitalist society, the consumer is king - their preferences influence and regulate this economic cycle we operate in. Producers respond to demand by creating products in line with the needs and desires of the consumers. To ensure this delicate balance works, we assume that consumers possess rationality and wield influence over their own desires. This is otherwise known as consumer sovereignty - the notion that consumers dictate the direction the marketplace takes.
Sovereignty implies a choice. But is there really one?
Is your desire to buy that new Garmin watch really a choice or did Facebook tell me you're into sports? Is it a choice or is Garmin able to afford paying premium prices for premium eyeballs? Is it a choice or have I incessantly followed you around with ads once you've shown any sign of interest?
Is it really consumer sovereignty or just an illusion of agency?
(No shade to Garmin, I really love their watches, and had mine for 4 years)
Is consumer desire limitless or did we create it by toying with human's natural need for belonging, social status, egotistic tendencies, etc.?
And you could say, as I have in the past, "I'm just giving the people what they want. This is the type of content they respond to. These are the types of headlines they click on. These are the creatives they interact with."
Is clickbait really that bad if it ultimately pushes the visitor to an action that will ultimately serve them?
Well, is it really up to you to decide? Are you not just packaging hedonic products as necessities? Where do you draw the line between nice-to-have and must-have services? Are you ultimately not just taking advance of human nature?
We are primed to pay more attention to fearful stimuli because historically they kept us safe.
We tend to follow the popular opinion of those around us (especially if they come with hundreds of likes) as a way to build stronger communities.
All the pings, dings, and rings wash us with a firehose of dopamine that our brain is not really designed to absorb.
What's good for tech is not always good for humans.
What if, instead of giving users what they want, we respected human vulnerabilities?
What if, instead of obsessing over metrics, we obsessed with obtaining (positive) case studies?
What if, instead of exploiting these biases for short-term profits, we helped build sustainable consumption behaviors?
What if, instead of deferring responsibility, we admitted that what we're doing interacts with complex systems?
Let's pull together the threads spun so far...
Marketing is the main driver of hyper-consumption.
The race to go viral, the product obsolescence, the edifying of luxury experiences, the fads, the FOMO, the need for social affirmation, the social pressure, the convenience and apathy, the frustration, the skepticism, the worry.... they're all warranted. And I often feel like an idiot for trying to defend it.
But what I've come to realize is that the only way to lose this game is by turning skepticism into cynicism.
We have ample examples of marketing doing good in the world. The Ethisphere Institute consistently reports that the world's most ethical companies financially outperform their counterparts. Doing good is good business, who knew?
From various social media movements like #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, or the #IceBucketChallenge; to cause-related marketing campaigns like breast cancer awareness, quitting smoking, and wearing condoms; to businesses that run on ethical values like Patagonia, Cotopaxi, North Face, Warby Parker, etc.
I have no doubt that there will always be marketers that are fully committed to this ethos of:
- growth-at-all-costs imperative that attracts so many of our business leaders, and this
- technological mania that distracts us from realizing just how finite our life and world is, and this
- obsession with accumulation and superficiality that creates more garbage (both physically and digitally.)
But we (meaning you and I) have to do better.
We have to take responsibility for the environmental and social-economic externalities of the consumer culture we helped design.
We have to strive to do good in all parts of our value chain: from production to distribution, to consumption to post-consumption.
Marketing needs a paradigm shift. And like it or not, it's already happening…
Partially due to organic consumer maturity, partially due to the covid induced awakened consciousness, people are beginning to question their own consumption habits and the consequences of their buying behavior.
“We just have to get there before we perish under a sea of (anxiety) debt and trash.” (Bouckaert, Opdebeeck, and Zsolnai 2008)
Sacrificing ecological harm for economic growth is akin to a snake eating its own tail.
Not only do we have to put limits on growth, but we also have to expand the metrics we use to measure it. (The Triple Bottom Line approach comes to mind, but that is an article for a different time.)
We seem to believe that things will just level out because they always have. But that's not a guarantee. We first need to understand these issues in order to work towards changing them.
In all of the marketing books I've read, courses I've taken, and conferences I've attended, the question of ethics is rarely addressed. I created Human to Humans to answer this question.
We have to do better. If not now, when?
Thank you for reading.
P.S. It's taken me 13 years of experience and 9 hours to write this article, please excuse any grammar and syntax errors. I am only human :)
P.P.S. These words may be my own but I've had help. For further reading please read the Journal of Macromarketing, specifically A Macromarketing Manifesto, A Note on Marketing Systems and Social Media, Big Thinking About Marketing, Broadening the Concept of Luxury, Broadening the Definition of Social Responsibility Marketing. Please also visit the Center for Humane Technology and All Tech is Human. Also consider listening to Daniel Schmachtenberger and reading The Triple Bottom Line, The Sustainability Edge and Less is More.
