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Comment by citizenpaul | Hacker News Reader

> amazed that companies haven't figured out that advertisements are far less effective than they claim to be

I was once asked to do some stats on the marketing effectiveness of a company I was at. Not my job but I really hated a couple of the people in the marketing dept so I went at the task anyway. I had long had suspicious that the advertising was mostly smoke and mirrors so I was glad to find out that I was right. There was basically no correlation to sales and marketing spending, campaigns or anything they were doing. Except for a couple of basic common sense ad placements. They were wasting millions a year.

What do you think happened? Surprise happy ending. At the end of the year they shut down the marketing dept and outsourced the basic ad placements for a fixed fee.

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On the other hand a good marketing person is worth gold. In one company I contracted at they had a marketing person who was super proactive and really worked social media , the press and other channels. She pretty much singlehandedly made the company into a known player in their field. Same probably goes for good salespeople. But there aren’t too many people of that caliber. Most just go through the motions.

> On the other hand a good marketing person is worth gold.

I don't deny this, but I think you can say this for any position that ultimately can deliver something. A good PM, a good IT manager, or just the accepted good engineer. People that really want to contribute will work on what matters most and set their egos aside. I say this as someone who has been a PM before and realized it was not the most critical function at the time, so I offered to go back to engineering (I've worked full time as both for years). A good employee will contribute the best they can, and a great employee will be able to identify what matters most and works towards helping (even if they can't do it themselves).

I realize my comment is a tangent, I just feel like it's unnecessary siloing that props up some positions as more important than others. It will depend on the situation. Sometimes you need more engineering talent, sometimes you need more salesmanship, sometimes you need more product direction - it's impossible to know without being at the company. And it's very hard to recognize what matters most outside of your area of expertise.

I think a good salesperson or marketing person can bring way more value than a good PM or IT manager usually can.

Linus Torvalds is evidence that a good PM/IT manager is worth a lot.

There aren't a lot of people that can make or lead a team to make world class products, but the number of marketing mangers who are exceptional enough to have significant impact on your company aren't that many either.

Yeah that idea worked out real well for Theranos.

It did though. That Theranos was at heart a complete scam doesn't take away from the quality of its marketing and promotion. If anything, it shows how exceptional they can be, in elevating even a mostly worthless "product" to media attention until the lies become impossible to hide.

I think this is the wrong takeaway. I understand your point, but ultimately the company failed and there is a possibility Elizabeth Holmes will go to jail. There was no financial payout. Doubling down on bullshit just leads to a worse reckoning (at least in a world with accountability, and sadly that's not always the case).

> But there aren’t too many people of that caliber. Most just go through the motions.

This is true of every field from doctors to lawyers to software developers. Most people are pretty average at their jobs.

I think especially larger companies prefer average but predictable people that execute their role as ordered. Top performers don’t really fit in.

Top performers aren’t needed for most jobs and in many cases just aren’t desireable. There’s nothing wrong with filling seats with perfectly average people to do perfectly average jobs — and I say this as a person who is (at best) quite average.

Really there are two types of work: bounded and unbounded. In bounded work there is some well defined threshold where someone is good enough, or at least some finite risk from someone not being good enough. For example a mediocre mechanic might not be able to fix an issue that a better mechanic could, but the cost of going with a bad mechanic will never exceed the value of the car (at which point you would simply buy a new car), and realistically the cost will almost always be quite a bit less. For bounded tasks, it makes sense to hire average people who show up.

On the other hand there is unbounded work where the skill level necessary is unknown and the costs of going with someone who is insufficiently skilled could be immense. For example odds are there's no way to know if your surgeon isn't up to the task before they've cut you open, which is a terrible time to discover that fact. For unbounded tasks it makes sense to always hire the best you can possibly afford, even for something that seems like it should not require much skill.

Because that’s actual marketing, not just spamming dumb commercials to whatever venue you can find.

At my old shop we had a 'marketing' person for a bit. She was supposed to run the social media profiles, keep the website updated, post ads and stuff.

Pretty sure she did literally actually nothing the entire time she was there until they started having her double up on reception duties on Saturdays.

She ended up leaving because she moved away somewhere. Needless to say, they did not hire another marketing person.

I know it could be tongue in cheek, but if you did the analysis because you hated them you may have been biased in your results.

I have no idea about marketing, but as a consumer I know that I am influenced both positively and negatively at times with regards to products based on my experience with their marketing. I also have a feeling that marketing is more than just correlation between campaign and sales. I.e. what was the competition doing at the same time. Marketing I assume is also about avoiding churn, or making the overall market bigger (e.g. PS5 ads may also help Xbox sales, game sales etc..)

In general it feels a bit creepy to me when someone suggests that people losing their jobs is a happy ending. Therefore I accept I am also replying with bias…

They were probably spending something like 20% of the entire budget on pointless advertising. Commercials, Radio, Billboards, planes, buses, google. In one example they were paying 10's of thousands a month each for some premium listings on several free listing sites where we literally never had a single conversion or even click through to our website. There were targeted ads where the cost of the ads were more than even if we had sold every single item that was advertised. There were long running ad campaigns running on products that had zero sales.

I actually realized my bias and possibly the perception of it to others. I made a dynamic dashboard setup with all the data I could find on sales and marketing and let them mix max slice and dice it themselves. I figured that if I simply delivered a super negative report it would be ignored.

One of my favorite additions to the report were sliders that let them increase or decrease the threshold of which ads counted towards a sale. Say an ad placed today and a spike in sales tomorrow or next month. The stats were still bad with huge gaps in time that counted towards a sale.

In my experience marketing people are very good at marketing themselves. :-)

I am in a similar situation at my work; can you give me some pointers on how I might able to validate the same premise at my company? TIA

The best marketing a company will do is to itself.

This depends very heavily on the product. With some products, for example food, you have to win your customer back every month. Additionally, it is often very difficult to correlate certain kinds of ads to sales...but if you look at the marketing investment over decades in some industries, it is probably the only source of competitive advantage.

That being said, given that most people here work for tech companies, I do suspect there is huge overinvestment into marketing by tech companies. Some companies just don't do any of this, don't have a sales team, don't have a marketing team...and they do fine. But that isn't universal (for example, sales clearly has an important implementation role in some industries, in some industries sales has an organizational role, etc.).

I think sales is essential if you have a B2B product and want to sell to larger enterprises. Most of them will not seek you out, and you need someone who can do a deal tailored to each enterprise's needs and wants, and maintain the relationship going forward.

But otherwise I agree.

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