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Comment by SaberTail | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

> Marketers are often most successful at marketing their own marketing.

I've seen this play out at places I've worked. After raising a funding round, marketing sold the leadership on letting them burn the lion's share of it, even though launching new marketing campaigns was never on the list of reasons we initially went out to raise money.

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I think that's a self-preservation tactic for many that often backfires.

Most non-marketing management people want immediate and huge results... which are both hard to quantify and impossible to get without overspending or having an insanely lucky idea that goes viral.

Naturally this leads to asking for a bigger budget and promising bigger results, then KPIs aren't met for X, Y, Z reasons, then they're forced to justify the spend, then they either get more budget or get fired and the cycle repeats. Marketing has too many intangibles, so marketers always feel a need to justify themselves out of fear of being an easy target.

What do marketing management people want?

I mean, immediate huge results are great if they happen.

Really, they want what everyone else wants - ability to test ideas and executions before committing to a budget or unreasonable KPIs.

I'd be nervous to work for a company where one of the co-founders isn't a marketer.

Marketing is usually one of the biggest line items for a business.

When your marketing team has little incentive to actually deliver, they're likely to ask for a ton of money only to add impressive things to their resumez, not really to deliver on their promises to the business.

If a founder is in charge of marketing, s/he's got a lot of reasons to deliver: founder's equity.

> I'd be nervous to work for a company where one of the co-founders isn't a marketer.

I'd be nervous if there were a co-founder who is a marketer (unless it's literally a marketing startup).

Take a look at some of the hottest tech companies right now (recent IPO, FAANG, pre-IPO, YC darlings). Would you be really afraid to work for a FAANG, or hot recent IPOed companies like Zoom or PagerDuty, or pre-IPO companies like Stripe or Flexport because of the (co)founders' non-marketing background?

In most industries it takes one to two years for people interested in your product to notice you and start trying out your product. And another one to two years for them to decide incorporate your product into their future business. And another year or two to generate strong profits.

So 3-6 years.

This feels like a multi-billion dollar industry in which every entity involved has the ability to sink the entire thing, and simply stated, nobody does because they all make money from it.

Marketing departments are burning money like mad. It's google and other brokers that make a ton of money.

I mean most ad-tech firms can be considered successes by Silicon Valley's standards, and why would the marketing departments of corporations blow the whistle? They're making money too, probably twice a week, direct deposited.

There's twitter and facebook ads in the san francisco bart system and I just don't fucking understand who in SF isn't aware of twitter and facebook or what they're about.

Are they just advertising the companies directly? There are cases where advertising even in a "saturated" area makes sense.

If FB feels like features like facebook marketplace or facebook dating are not reaching as big of an audience as they should, advertising to get the word out about those particular products the company offers is logical.

There's a difference between performance and brand marketing. Bart advertising by Twitter/ Facebook is mostly brand marketing (not really tied to anything). A lot of marketing is about reminding you that a company exists.

Despite concentrated effort, I have yet to be able to forget that Facebook exists. Brand awareness marketing for companies as ubiquitous as that seems like lighting money on fire for the sake of it.

Brand advertising doesn't have to be "did you know that Company exists"; it can be "you should like Company more because Reason"

What about Coca-Cola? They spend billions on advertising even though everybody already knows who they are. They want to seem current. No brand wants to be thought of as yesterday's news. Facebook advertises to remind people that they exist and to seem like they're just as hip as Tiktok.

This is an important distinction that the article doesn't cover. The article focuses on a specific subset of advertising. Brand awareness ads are even harder to measure.

You just described most of human endeavor.

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