Why Marketing Directors are always angry.

THE UNFAIR TRUTH:

If a product does well, it’s because of the Sales Director. If a product doesn’t do well, it’s because of the Marketing Director. The packaging was all wrong. The demographic was way off. We should have spent less on outdoor and more online. We should have spent less online and more outdoor. We should have gone with that bold font and not italicised. Etcetera.

THAT is why Marketing Directors are always angry.

That’s also why Marketing Directors get furious when marketing agencies pretend to operate in 'The Same Space’.

If you look at a senior Marketing Director’s LinkedIn page you’ll probably see a few ‘likes’ per week or month, the odd “well done team” post, and lots of recruitment stuff.

If you look at any marketing agency boss’ LinkedIn page you’ll see them variously sharing photos of the latest word they’ve been paid thousands to change the font of, or - if you’re really lucky - find some click-desperate imbecile doing push-ups, singing or recreating his favourite movie scenes in a galling attempt to get as many ‘likes’ and ‘love’ from similarly spare-time-rich agency owners.

To quote a colleague: LinkedIn has become an agency circle-jerk.

I was once told by a junior colleague that she never sent emails to marketing directors after 4:15pm on a Friday because “they’ve probably gone home”. I slapped her (I didn’t). If you think that the more senior you are, the more you can skive off and get away with doing nothing, you’re wrong.

The more senior you are, the longer the hours you work, the more conference calls with Australia or America you’re on (neither of which give a shit whether it’s 6am or 6pm for you) and the more pressure and responsibility falls on your shoulders as your knees buckle and the bags form under your eyes.

These days it’s way easier to take conference calls remotely, but back in the day you were trapped in your office, huddled around some primitive speaker phone, watching as the office emptied while you calculated just how late you’d be home for that revered lamb bhuna and two bottles of red.

When some 42-year old man-child with a backward baseball cap turns up at your office, flamboyantly parks his electric scooter and then moon-walks into your office to tell you why “Monttocks Script Font is going to be huge this year”, all you can think about is repeatedly punching his corpse while you take beasting from the Americans because THEY know how you SHOULD have launched that product in Italy last month (but, strangely, didn’t mention anything until it failed).

So, apart from the personal therapeutic value in venting my spleen, what’s the point of this?

The point - you ass clowns - is that if you want to appeal to the Marketing Directors you want to hire you, act like they do, not how your peers do. If creative agency #317 are doing ‘hilarious’ videos on LinkedIn and racking up tens of comments, take a look at how many ‘buyers’ are in that list of likes. Any Heads of Marketing in there? Any Marketing Directors looking for a new agency (and making the decision based on some middle-aged prat in an overly-patterned shirt juggling cabbages)? No. Don’t be fucking stupid. Professionals want to work with professionals. Otherwise they’d be teachers.

When you’re a proper Marketing Director your life mostly sucks. They try to compensate by paying you lots of money and letting you fly Premium Economy, but ultimately that’s not enough. Pity the Marketing Director, empathise with the Marketing Director and - for god’s sake - don’t breakdance during a pitch to a Marketing Director; we WILL kill you.

One final thought: “Monttocks”.

If you're going to be wrong, at least be consistent

When I was a young man, I worked for Xerox Copy Centre. This was back before most companies had all their own office equipment, so I worked in an industry supplying the services of photocopying, report binding and ruining original works of art by chewing them up in ADHs (automatic document handlers, abbreviation fans).

As a result of my many years working in the industry I was able to tell you the GSM (grams per square meter (wow - you abbreviation fans must be having a field day!)) of any piece of paper simply by giving it a gentle twiddle between my fingers. No restaurant menu, business card or waiting room magazine was safe when I was around. My friends and family LOVED it (I’d say “you can ask them if you don’t believe me” but mostly they don’t talk to me now).

A similarly absorbed ‘skill’ came after many years as a writer/editor, specifically that of being able to read any document and spot inconsistencies without even looking for them. Obvious issues include people simply not understanding how to use the basics such as commas, apostrophes and semi-colons, but a more tricky issue to spot (and one I’d urge you to check for when creating any copy to accompany your new business efforts - see, there WAS a point to this!) is simple inconsistencies in ‘rules’ that exist in your writing.

One simple example is referring to a company as a “they”. Companies are an “it” so you have to structure sentences saying thing like “Sponge was key to our success” rather than “Sponge were key to our success”.

You could say “THE TEAM at Sponge were key to our success” but by rights a company is always a singular entity.

HOWEVER… people don’t like this rule as they think it makes their company feel ‘spikey’ and ‘cold’ as an “it”. If you want to refer to your company as if it’s a team rather than an entity, fill your boots, but please make sure you then ALWAYS refer to it this way.

Back in my Marketing Director days (yes, I’m aware I’ve had lots of jobs) I would sometimes weed out agencies based on the thinnest of criteria. Not sticking to your own rules when writing was one of them.

Things you need before deploying New Business support (Pt1)

Many of the companies that enlist our help have either never done real cold-channel business before or think they have (but on closer inspection realise that there was always some old connection or ‘good reason’ for the contact lurking just beneath the slightly warm surface).

It’s not a criticism incidentally; understandably, everyone prefers developing existing leads and working old connections rather than cold-calling prospects off a huge wish list. What it does mean, however, is that most companies coming to us looking to gain more business from cold-channel prospecting aren’t entirely equipped to do so.

The 30-page presentation they’re used to nonchalantly auto-piloting through in front of semi-interested parties is no longer much use. Someone barely interested in switching agencies might swipe through nine tight and mobile-optimised pages on the tube home, but to expect them to care about the history of your building, your copyrighted methodology and the beauty of your carefully-waxed moustache is probably hoping for too much from a cold prospect.

So… imagine a key prospect was only going to look at the first three pages. What would you include? Still want a “hello” page? Still want a gallery of your staff’s mug shots? No, of course not. You want your best case studies that had the most impact. Ok – now imagine you have six pages, what more might you show? Perhaps all the companies that trusted you with their brands? Further case studies showing more disciplines you’re good at? Good – now you’re getting the idea.

Cold-channel prospecting is about respecting the time and (likely) attention of your prospect. If you come at them in a sensible way, they’ll give you the time of day (or at least 30 seconds of it).

NEXT TIME: More stuff. (Such a tease!)