Daily Archives: February 3, 2015

Wazzup with the state of selling.

0

The democratization of selling has befallen marketing. That, and search engine marketing. Was a time when outside of belly-to-belly selling, companies large and small needed agents to help them sell: ad agencies, PR firms, media companies. All made a nice livings creating and placing ads and messages paid for with money from a line on the expense ledger. Then technology introduced us to the interwebs and that expense line sprung a leak. Crazy money was sent to Google and its SEO/SEM minions as companies found the mother of all yellow pages and decided they could do it themselves.

Bad creative, good data analysis and the algorithm moved billions from Madison Avenue onto the web. Into wireframes and searchables. Pretending it didn’t hurt the business, ad agency CFO’s moved executives to long family style desks in old cheap buildings with uneven floors. Cool. And the Googleplexes multiplied.

budweiser puppy

There once was an ad agency axiom “Pictures of a puppies and babies get great readership.” Well, guess which ad won the Super Bowl people’s choice awards? Yep. The Budweiser puppy rescue. Oy.

The democratization of selling is shit-ifying selling. It’s killing innovation. With everyone owning tools to make videos, podcasts, newsletters and PDF ads (to save a buck) there’s a virus of poor selling going on. Search and DIY (do it yourself) are not helping the vision. Puppies anyone? Peace.