What's life like in advertising these days? When I was a child you could buy a commercial during the Saturday morning cartoons to sell your toy (or buy the whole cartoon) and you could put your car commercial on during the Evening News.

And you'd reach most of your "demographic."

But now? a maze of influencers and fragmented media (I don't think influencers really matter much, they are just the most familiar item in the new landscape for advertisers.)

The ability to hold a big audience in the millions of a predictable demographic is deeply sought after. To me that just seems like trying to wind the clock back to the 80s when things were simple.

Social media plays a huge role here, and that is exactly why I think we should promote the idea that advertising on social media is as rude as advertising at a funeral or bat mitzvah.

@futurebird advertising back in the day was heavy on correlative data to determine success.

Advertising today gives has more direct cause and affect traceability for ROAS (return on ad spend) especially in the form of online advertising, direct marketing, and SEO. Happy to dive deep into this stuff with you if you want.

However to be honest, as far as I know, all this "improvement" hasn't really lead to any sort of decrease in marketing spend as a function of gross revenue.

My soap boxy thing is that a lot of people in marketing departments today want to think they're being very quantitative but in reality they're really bad at it and lack a lot of functional skill. As a result a lot of departments no longer deep dive into customer personas and demographic focused messaging.

Everyone just wants to do scattershot marketing to hit kpis but pretend they're not.

@grumpasaurus @futurebird

Maaaaaaaaaaan, the early 2010s when the marketing department where I worked would tout followers on social media as something significant to ROI, and me catching an earful for chuckling about it in front of everyone, like, it was all vibes and no actual cradle to grave analysis of how a banner ad led to a 3 day booking.