1. March ’09 Newsletter
1 © experts@experts-visions.com
‘Nous nous engageons sur des résultats opérationnels’
HOW TECHNOLOGY KILLED MARKETING
Time was that marketing was glamorous. The heyday of marketing can be
viewed every week in the television show Mad
Men. In that world, marketing was seen as the
engine that drove sales. Clever ideas and
memorable brands, expressed through pricey
advertising, created business success.
Marketing “created demand” and the sales
group was simply a means to fulfill that
demand.
But now technology has killed Mad Men marketing… by making demand
creation measurable. You may have read the stories about newspapers going
bankrupt. It’s been positioned as part of the meltdown, but in fact such
bankruptcies were inevitable, because advertising sales for print
publications have been declining for years.
TTHHEE RREEAASSOONN?? TTHHEE IINNTTEERRNNEETT..
When you run a print ad, you have no idea whether or not it has any impact
on anyone. While that impact was taken for granted in the Mad Men era,
the truth is that almost nobody reads newspaper advertisements.
And here’s another dirty little secret. Ever since the invention of the remote
control, nobody has watched television ads unless they were background
noise.
By contrast, when you run an Internet ad, you know exactly how many
people click on it and then you know exactly what they do afterwards. If
your ad generates a lead, you can track that lead, in detail, all the way
through to the closing.
For years, marketing groups were only corporate organizations allowed to
measure themselves. The Mad Men myth was so pervasive that most firms
automatically funded marketing, simply because it was assumed to be
crucial to success.
But with the Internet, marketing is now completely measurable….

2. March ’09 Newsletter
2 © experts@experts-visions.com
‘Nous nous engageons sur des résultats opérationnels’
No longer can a marketing group pretend that revising a logo, running an ad,
or spouting “brand strategy” has automatic value. No longer can they
pretend that they’re “driving sales” by spending 2 percent of a company’s
revenue.
Ironically, back in the days of the Mad Men, there was one kind of
marketing that WAS measurable: direct mail. And direct mail was the
armpit of the marketing group, the sad sacks about whom the masters of the
universe made disparaging jokes.
But now that marketing is measurable, ALL marketing is like direct mail.
The marketeer of the future will be a quant, a scientist, a functionary who
actually does what the Mad Man was supposed to be doing — generate
leads.
welcome to the new world….