MARKETING AND ME

When I first started my journey into marketing and advertising back in the ‘good old days’ of the late nineties, my thoughts were how the heck am I going to manage this with no sales experience and a very minimal understanding of marketing. I soon realised that the sales side of things withinadvertising came pretty naturally as I love to talk and meet new people and it became clear that the old adage “people buy people” was spot on.

The marketing side of things back in 1998, however, was a little more challenging and there were a good number of ways we could reach our audiences from advertising features in print, radio and television and of course there was this new thing called the world wide web which “would probably be a passing phase” and who was this Google anyway?

Little did I know that we were heading into the dot.com bubble which would change marketing in its entirety. Our start up training within the media industry was robust and covered off all the benefits of reaching our audience using targeting, I use this term in the lightest of contexts, because this was, in effect, placing features and adverts within a section of the paper that was classified for a particular area of industry i.e. business section, property section, recruitment section, you get the picture.

We knew this was where people searched for business opportunities or new staff etc. My colleagues who covered television or radio advertising used localised platforms within the specification they worked for which meant that their advertising campaigns were only seen or heard by people living in the areas that these programmes were broadcast. We thought this was amazing at the time, could you be anymore targeted? Then we were introduced to digital advertising….

This rocked our world as you can imagine. There were many questions and to be honest very few in depth correct answers as it was new to everyone and we were, how should I phrase this….winging it!

So now, fast forward to present day marketing and we have not only managed to target our audiences using basic demographics i.e. age, gender, profession and social demographic

backgrounds, we can also identify their media consumption, habits, income level, pain points hobbies, purchasing history…. the list goes on.

We can, and do, use the information obtained from cookies dropped during the users journeys online to target them using contextual, behavioural, search re-targeting, site re-targeting and predictive targeting. Most of these are key methods of marketing to a very specific audience and can be highly effective but some pose questions regarding privacy and the use of AI and that’s a whole different blog!

In general terms marketing is still promoting and selling products or services using market research and advertising but it’s now done on a whole different level. Sadly, print is almost obsolete but the opportunities in advancement for marketing seems endless and very exciting and I feel privileged to be a part of this evolution.

So in summary, am I happy with the amazing progression in marketing from the late nineties to present day, yes I love the opportunities that are now available to help businesses thrive and be successful, but I’m also a little sad that the simplicity of speaking with your clients as you interact with them personally to gain an understanding of their sales journey has almost disappeared.

Remember, in the marketing arena, cookies in general are a delightful necessity whether it be digital or edible, they both add a little sweetness to our lives. ��