March 2009 

By Ken Schmaltz, Marketing Director, Twist Marketing

Back in my days as Director of Marketing Communications at a software company, every now and then the CEO would decide to run a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to make an important announcement. One time, it was to let the market know about our new pricing for one of our products. Google had entered the enterprise search market of which were the leader by revenue if not product superiority, and we were going to start giving away for free our low end enterprise search software in an effort to seed the market for upgrades to our higher-end, pricier product (more about this strategy in a future article).

The cost for this single ad was more than my entire print advertising budget for the quarter. Everybody in the Marketing department knew that the average reader of the WSJ was not who we needed to target in order to make the new program successful. With the money we spent on that one ad, we could have executed a lead generation program that resulted in significant uptake of our free software offer. But the CEO wouldn’t listen. He wanted his ad in the Journal, and in the end we gave it to him.

Why? Because to him and many of his CEO colleagues, marketing equated to advertising, and running an ad in the Wall Street Journal was the sign of success. Ipso facto, advertising in the Journal would make the new program successful.

Since then, I’ve come across this scenario countless times. All that changes is the name of the publication. A client will come to us because they need an ad to run in the newspaper, an industry magazine or Canadian Business. Without fail, further investigation reveals that what they really want is to fill their sales pipeline, launch a new product, enter a new market or increase their revenue in some other way. And without fail, running a single ad in a single publication would be a singular waste of time and money.

What all of these clients have in common is they started at the end of the process. Instead of beginning with their objective (what they wanted to accomplish) and working through the problem (in order to accomplish my goal, I have to communicate with this set of people, who are best reached in this way), they jumped to the end: advertising.

The Twist: Marketing is a process. Like most processes, you can take short cuts, but they usually end up taking longer, costing more money and generating poorer results in the long run. Start with what it is you want your marketing to achieve, who you need to target and how to reach them. The answer you come up with may be advertising, but in nine times out of 10 I’ll bet there’s a more effective way to achieve your objective.


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