110: Are we marketers, or are we journalists? Ads are ruining our lives, how to run marketing experiments, and Facebook's cleanse.
Wowowow it's June!
In this edition (#110) of The World's Best Newsletter:
1. Are we marketers, or are we journalists?
2. 1-on-1 with Marketo Champion, Amy Goldfine Connor
3. Advertising is a major source of human dissatisfaction. Sorry.
4. Facebook's cleanse is not for advertisers
5. How to run marketing experiments
6. Quote of the week - energy
Let's do it.
1. Are we marketers, or are we journalists?
I will not apologize for getting that Killers song stuck in your head this afternoon (you are WELCOME.)
So the age-old (?) debate about whether marketers should think like journalists flared up again last week. I work somewhere in the intersection of PR and content marketing and so this question often hits home and comes up in conversations with clients.
I penned my take on this issue here -- "Should Marketers Think Like Journalists?" where I quote the brilliant Melanie Deziel.
It's critical to distinguish between these two roles in a time where brands are producing more than ever (just this past week Gary V called for B2B brands to post "five to 15 posts per day" on LinkedIn) and the freedom of the press is under threat, along with shrinking staffing thanks to business model challenges.
Let's stop risking the impact of our marketing by conflating our job with that of journalists, and let's stop disrespecting the "only named profession in the U.S. constitution" per TechCrunch by pretending what we do is as important as what journalists do.
I don't want to live in a world where marketing truly is everything. Do you?
2. 1-on-1 with Marketo Champion, Amy Goldfine Connor
What does it take to be a Marketo Champion?
As an Adobe Insider at Summit 2019, I got to sit down with Marketo Champion and Certified Expert Amy Goldfine Connor about the impact Marketo has made in her career, why she doesn't like the term ABM, and the changing nature of marketing operations.
Watch our conversation here on LinkedIn (9 minutes).
3. Advertising is a major source of human dissatisfaction. Sorry.
A new study from economists in Europe of 1M people supports the theory that advertising is a major source of human dissatisfaction.
The researchers admit we do not perfectly understand the link between advertising and individual wellbeing. On one hand, advertising informs, ostensibly allowing people to make better choices about products. On the flip side, ads “stimulate desires that are not feasible.” Other research has noted that keeping up with the joneses (individuals often look at others before deciding how satisfied they feel) leads to feelings of envy, and negative wellbeing.
In this study, over 900,000 European citizens across 27 countries were studied from 1980 - 2011. The greater the rise in advertising within a nation, the lower the life satisfaction. If we doubled ad expenditure, it would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction.
Oops.
4. Facebook's cleanse is not for advertisers
The sage Katie Deighton of The Drum is someone you should be subscribed to if you're not already - here she is on Twitter and here's her column.
Katie quoted me in her recent article on Facebook's move to reveal its content moderation changes. The platform deleted 3.4bn fake accounts and 7.3m hate speech posts between October 2018 and March 2019.
It also vowed to be more transparent about its process in this area, with Zuckerberg noting the amount of their budget that goes towards safety systems being "greater than Twitter's whole revenue this year." Snarky Mark.
From an advertiser POV:
Zuckerberg said he did not believe the report would have a negative impact on the company’s ad business, noting that “if anything I'd expect it to be helpful on the business side”, given the theoretical enhancements to brand safety.
I agreed.
“For now, Facebook and Instagram still have two of the most engaged user bases we have to super-target ads to,” I said. “Measures like this announcement today are attempts to safeguard against the lack of trust and user abandonment tomorrow may bring. But for now, it’s only an issue if audience size and engagement drop.”
Read the full article here.
I also highly recommend her new article on Amazon/Sizmek, and this one about Venezuela's ad industry.
Go girl.
5. How to run marketing experiments
This was a fun project to collaborate on with Marketo - a new eBook on experimentation in an age of marketing accountability. I got to speak with some of the smartest martech, marketing ops, and demand generation professionals working today, and their advice is a helpful look (WITH TONS OF EXAMPLES YOU'RE SO WELCOME) at how to use experiments to collect the right data to optimize your lead gen efforts.
I'm a fan of gut feel but not in this case. Go get smarter, download the eBook here.
6. Quote of the week - energy
From Emily McDowell on IG, "A prayer to the universe for when I'm caught up in my own bullshit:"
May I remember that I am here on an Earth ride-along for what amounts to a fraction of a second in the vastness of time and my life is too short and unprecedented to waste it on anything or anyone that reduces it to a weight on my shoulders or a mistake to correct. There is much that is out of my control, but I get to decide where my energy goes. There is freedom in that.
Amen to that. Thanks for reading, as always!
- Katie
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Katie Martell
Website | LinkedIn | Twitter
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Event calendar:
San Diego, here we come, for ConquerLocal 2019 - an event all about driving digital success for local businesses from Vendasta, June 10-12. Listen to my interview with Vendasta CRO George Leith and don't miss this. I speak just after Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank!
I'm talking truth, trust, and content at this year's Content Marketing World, September 3-6 in Cleveland, OH.
I'm back at INBOUND 2019 that same week in their new startup track - let's talk about the 7 deadly sins of startup marketing, and how to avoid them! My session is on Friday.
The MarketingProfs B2B Forum is October 16-18 just outside of Washington DC. We're so close to the center of American politics that I've decided to bring my take on rabble rousers, and what marketers can learn from history's best. Check out the great lineup here and save $100 with code B2BFriend19.
You can book me to speak, or emcee. Read what others have to say.