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Spoken like a true engineer. But that analysis only holds for a nearly saturated market where everyone has all of the information they need to make a decent de

Spoken like a true engineer. But that analysis only holds for a nearly saturated market where everyone has all of the information they need to make a decent decision (think Coke and Pepsi). For almost everything else marketing is just a type of information flow -- a semi-directed broadcast. This task, getting information where it needs to be, is extremely valuable. Therefore marketing, as inefficient and difficult to measure as it is, creates value. I think your distaste might come from how inefficient it is, kind of like turning on every light in a neighborhood because one person wants to read at night, but the person selling the book and the person reading the book find enough value in the transaction to more than cover the electricity.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
(EDIT: I believe that most of the markets we have are mostly saturated) But marketing is not "getting information where it needs to be" anymore. If you let everyone know about your product and this didn't lead to at least some people buying it who otherwise wouldn't, you failed at marketing. This is where you enter the zero-sum game, because you don't want to just inform about your product, you want to influence choice - and so do your competitors. "The person selling the book and the person reading the book find enough value in the transaction" is a nice theoretical sentiment but I doubt it actually holds in practice. I'm yet to find a single person (except marketers themselves) who appreciates the amount of ads being thrown at them. > I think your distaste might come from how inefficient it is, kind of like turning on every light in a neighborhood Yes, this is where part of my distaste comes from - ads are broadcast messages today. This can be limited with e.g. targeted advertising, but it doesn't solve my main issue - that they're zero-sum game, so the inefficiency can increase up to infinity. And to circle back to the discussion about automation - I suspect that, as people will get automated away from their jobs, you'll see a huge growth of advertising sector - because it's one of the few places that can accomodate unlimited amount of low-skill workers (it doesn't take much of training to make a junior social media marketer; I know from experience - my company's PR department is basically a machine for turning interns into people doing content marketing on Facebook).

TeMPOraL 12y ago

(EDIT: I believe that most of the markets we have are mostly saturated) But marketing is not "getting information where it needs to be" anymore. If you let everyone know about your product and this didn't lead to at least some people buying it who otherwise wouldn't, you failed at marketing. This is where you enter the zero-sum game, because you don't want to just inform about your product, you want to influence choice - and so do your competitors. "The person selling the book and the person reading the book find enough value in the transaction" is a nice theoretical sentiment but I doubt it actually holds in practice. I'm yet to find a single person (except marketers themselves) who appreciates the amount of ads being thrown at them. > I think your distaste might come from how inefficient it is, kind of like turning on every light in a neighborhood Yes, this is where part of my distaste comes from - ads are broadcast messages today. This can be limited with e.g. targeted advertising, but it doesn't solve my main issue - that they're zero-sum game, so the inefficiency can increase up to infinity. And to circle back to the discussion about automation - I suspect that, as people will get automated away from their jobs, you'll see a huge growth of advertising sector - because it's one of the few places that can accomodate unlimited amount of low-skill workers (it doesn't take much of training to make a junior social media marketer; I know from experience - my company's PR department is basically a machine for turning interns into people doing content marketing on Facebook).