Tom Goodwin believes marketing has lost its way and that many of the ‘modern’ lessons are taking us backward. Here, he explains himself and shares what lessons we should salvage from the performance-heavy playbook.
I lost my temper on a podcast the other day. I was exhausted, jacked on espresso, and ended up ranting pretty hard about how messed up advertising has become.
Now that I’ve slept, petted a puppy, and bought a nice plant, I feel calmer.
But. I still stand by everything I said.
Now I just want to offer solutions to the chaotic mess I described.
No other industry has declined so badly in the past 20 years as marketing. I don’t think any other industry has so much fraud, as many lies, and as much general intellectual flimsiness as marketing.
If your doctor told you to try homeopathy, you’d laugh in their face, unless you were old and French. Yet at conferences, people parrot slogans like “people buy the why” or “working at the speed of culture” and get met with nods of gormless approval.
We’ve lost the plot.
The gap between what advertising promises and what it delivers is embarrassing. Be it automatically generated or not, there is an absolute sea of irrelevant ugly crap that we are served. It is a disgrace, and it seems, a growing problem.
But here’s the good news: brands aren’t dead—they’re more essential than ever. Marketing should be driving innovation, growth, and understanding. Instead, it’s become tactical, short-term, and aimless.
I don’t think any industry is as lost as marketing.
In the last 20 years, we’ve tossed out centuries of knowledge and replaced it with buzzwords, A/B tests, and shallow metrics. We worship data, even when it’s irrelevant. We change things constantly, but rarely stop to think.
The modern playbook is great if you’re a niche brand with a small budget and an online store. But for most companies?
It’s useless.
This playbook became the entire modern playbook. We have mass market brands that boast about the need to have one-on-one conversations with people at scale.
We have endless conversations about click-through rates in categories that are irrelevant.
We optimize against things that don’t matter.
We completely ignore the things that do, like whether humans see the ad, like it, remember it, or think it looks nice.
We are absolutely and tragically lost.
So, here are six ways to fix it:
1. Almost everything we knew about marketing in 1920 is still incredibly true today. If you write down a list of how to best do marketing: market orientation, targeting, positioning, propositions, target audiences, segmentation, the need for consistency, the need for salience, 99% of the rules are the same and absolutely vital.
2. Also learn everything in the “new marketing” playbook. Know how to retarget, create lookalike audiences, understand the power of retail media, understand attribution, creative optimization, programmatic audience buying, and play around with marketing dashboards.
3. Establish your personal criteria for success. Realistically, are you just trying to keep your job by utilizing bullshit data and helpful lies? Or is it important for you to grow your business via branding over the long term? Are you trying to be proud, flog a company, get a promotion to a tech startup, or know what you actually want to do?
4. Based on all of this, figure out what to take from the new and the old. Quite a lot of the new marketing playbook, and the stuff that people drone on about, is absolute nonsense. Most companies really don’t need that much data to target people well.
Most performance data is actually incredibly unhelpful. CTRs are irrelevant, ROAS is a lie, and attribution is the art of finding people who were going to buy, not creating success. Provably, most forms of advertising personalization are entirely ineffective. They waste money on data and technology and, at best, perform about the same. Almost all of advertising’s impacts take a really long time to happen, but they are lost a really long time.
The new marketing playbook was based on a complete lack of understanding about how advertising works. Advertising generally works on consistency. The new advertising playbook that wants to change copy 25 times, and see what works best.
Advertising generally works on a shared understanding, brands become cultural elements by being known by a large group of people, far beyond the target audience. Expensive advertising is far more effective; it conveys trust, confidence, and creates appeal.
Almost everything that companies are striving to do, from constant measurement to real-time agility, microtargeting, buying efficiency, and AI optimization, is the antithesis of what is successful for most brands that we work with.
At the very best, they do a fantastic job of taking credit for existing interest, converting efficiently and immediately from a tiny pool of people, while doing nothing to expand the brand appeal over geography or time.
5. Work around the incredible opportunities that new devices and new technology allow. We have the best screens we’ve ever had, we have the best contexts for marketing that we have ever had, we have the most sophisticated canvas of opportunity that we could imagine, and we have tended to replicate most easily things we’ve done before. Now is the time to re-imagine what marketing could actually be around the change parameters of this era.
6. Persuade your board to trust you. This is the hard part. The great tragedy of this moment in time is that the boards have been lied to and told that marketing is a science and can be measured precisely. We have an arithmetic culture, where data is valued more than experience and instinct.
If you are to do your job well, and to be proud of what you accomplished, you have to be prepared to go into the board and say trust me this will work, it will work for a really long time, it will work in a large number of ways, and its impact will not be easy to measure, and nor will it happen immediately, or directly.
Because that’s how advertising, most of the time, for most brands, and most situations, works.
So do we want to hide behind spreadsheets and point to precise ratios in a dashboard, or do we want to make work that we feel proud of.
Do we want to make a difference, call out bullshit, and make advertising feel great again?
Do we want to feel good about what we do? Do we want to trust our instincts?
Do we want to fight for what we know to be true?
Watch the full episode here.
Feature image credit: Adobe Stock
By Tom Goodwin
Tom Goodwin is a globally recognized expert in marketing trends, AI, and digital transformation. He is the founder of All We Have Is Now, author of Digital Darwinism, and a keynote speaker at events all over the world. His work emphasizes “nowism,” a pragmatic approach to futurism that advocates using existing technology to drive meaningful change.
Get in touch with Tom on LinkedIn.
