Your Marketing Family

Today’s Marketing Cookie is asks you to consider marketing itself as your family, and what can happen when you lose touch with your craft.

If you’ve grown up with marketing over the last 30 years, you may not have noticed how quickly it changes. I’ve lived on the bleeding edge or at least the leading edge of marketing tech and tactics for my entire career — except for those five years when I didn’t. 

In the agency world, clients need you to have finger on the pulse of every new solution for their marketing stack that could give them an advantage. They need you to find new ways and means for increasing brand awareness, driving engagement and improving lead generation performance. You must be in-the-know of all the big stuff like noticing subtle tweaks to Google’s algorithm for example, or an unannounced change to the advertising console on LinkedIn, or maybe being read up on how to leverage a new feature in HubSpot. Those are the table stakes to play in the marketing agency game. 

Your value increases exponentially when you can get an incremental lift with tiny hacks, clever tricks, and secret workarounds. It’s real-time wisdom that can only be earned by scraping your knuckles on the machinery, being eager enough to seek better ways, diligent enough to experiment, and unsatisfied enough to question every success. Meanwhile your best clients are being cold-called by other smart specialists and effective can-doers with new widgets and gadgets. It will always be your combination of relentless curiosity and hands-on experience that sets you apart and keeps your name at the top of their A-team first call list.

You will become known throughout the marketing family for being good at what you do. You’ll write books, go on the speaking circuit, expand your marketing community connections, and some enticing offers from executive recruiters will start finding their way to your inbox. They’ll encourage you to leave the marketing agency world for a cool leadership role on the client side. Eventually, one offer will come along that is just too good to pass up.

When you make that leap from an agile, 200-miles-an-hour, always-on-call, frenzied marketing agency life into a corporate environment, you’ll quickly realize how slowly everything moves over there. Now that you’re managing 16 direct reports, you’ll notice that you’re no longer out front as the best doer but are now called to inspire and lead others toward their own greatness. You’re pretty good at it, but sometimes you get homesick for those good ol’ marketing agency days.

Fast forward five years. 

You’ve been away too long. You finally decide to trade your rising position on the corporate ladder for a role back on the ground floor in a new ad agency you’ve started. You love managing people but can’t wait to get your hands dirty with all the details again! But when you try to use your old go-to tools, you quickly see that everything has changed in the last five years. The tech, tactics, tools and terminologies—all of it must be relearned.

Steven King’s “The Shawshank Redemption” captures this feeling perfectly with the story of an elderly inmate Brooks, who was finally released from prison after serving 49 years. He suddenly found himself in a world completely transformed. The familiar streets of his youth were now bustling with automobiles and new technologies that he could hardly comprehend. The world old Brooks returned to bore little resemblance to the one he left behind, making his adjustment to freedom an insurmountable challenge. 

Taking that amazing leadership gig removed me from the daily doing of marketing. It was like leaving my loved ones for a long mission overseas, only to return home and find everything changed. The kids had grown up, the neighborhood looked different, and I had lost touch with my community. The funniest part of reuniting with the practice of marketing is that even when you’re running at top speed again, this family is still always changing — and faster than ever. I guess it’ll always be just as today’s fortune says, “Your family isn't done f***ing you up. Not by a long shot.”