I recently posted this rant on Linkedin and received over 400 comments from fellow marketers who mostly resonated with my observations.
“Absolutely relate! I was so frustrated with marketing that I had to shift careers.
Unfortunately, I’m hearing more of this from marketers which is sad.”, was one of them.
Here’s the full-text of that post along with some of the comments I received:
Today’s marketing is broken. There I said it.
You must be wondering why someone like me, who’s built a career around marketing, a 12 year old career at that, spanning some of the best companies, would say something like this. Clickbait much?
No, not quite. I like what marketing does and can do. It’s just that I don’t like marketing jobs and the way they’re treated anymore. Bit of an unfiltered rant coming up, and not all of it is a lived experience, but it’s happening.
Here’s why I think the way marketing is treated today is broken, toxic and needs a re-look.
1) Budget cuts? — First ones to go? Marketing jobs. I recently ended my SEO consulting services with a company I used to work fulltime for citing “letting go of all “non-essential services” and making the company lean. Just because SEO isn’t the flashy star of marketing, it was conveniently labeled non essential.
2) Hiring processes and assignments
I applied to a full stack marketer who knows SEO, PPC, Lead gen, PR and more by doing an assignment on writing ghost posts for its founders in THEIR tone. And you’d be blessed to even hear back from the hirers after possibly getting brain-raped in the name of assignments. Other than Hustler Marketing, the email marketing agency I worked as a director at, no company I’ve ever applied to has paid for the number of hours I’ve spent on doing an assignment.
3) Most expectations from a job? — Marketing. Everyone else in the company can slack. Developers can go months on the bench. Account managers can pull up any BS without any visibility to the higher mgt, HR people can do the same thing 100 times over, but marketers are always supposed to be showing ROI, conversions, going the “next level”.
“Just had this exact discussion with my husband this morning! We are so undervalued. I recently saw a job for a company I USED to greatly admire. They required a master’s degree, 5-7 years of experience, specialized training in flying an airplane (aviation industry), Adobe proficiency, html/css knowledge, and the pay was $60k max! Just ridiculous. — was one of the comments from someone who related with this point.
4) And now the job itself. Marketing’s biggest boon is also the marketers’ biggest curse — its visibility.
Everyone wants your words to create magic, your videos to go viral, and your strategies to turn the company into a unicorn.
How many smaller companies and startups take marketing as one of the jobs that is just a grind like anything else. It cooks slow, produces sustained and long lasting results, if not immediate, and really an unglamorous, behind-the-scenes job that involves coagulation of research, your life’s experiences, understanding of the world, psychology, creative skills and the most important? problem solving skills and patience! Buckets of it. More often than not, it involves working in the trenches, waiting for weeks to hear back from a media site you negotiated for a press coverage, fixing a broken CSS, translating a vision into 10 lines of designer-friendly script for a video, writing a boring 1000+ word article for SEO, and getting stuff executed quietly in the background, more than a viral tweet or a 100x ROAS on the table.
6) Being replaced with your trainees/ interns
And don’t even get me started on being replaced by people YOU taught the job. (not even AI) Because they can do it for cheaper of course. (this is happening to me as we speak.)
Some of the comments I received pinned the issue on a culture in a certain company than an industry wide-phenomenon.
“Working for a big company vs. a small company is night and day. A large company has a big marketing team full of specialists and owners. If an email doesn’t do well or a campaign falls flat nobody gets singled out. Working for a small company I have noticed it turns into a chicken run and full fledged nitpicking on the marketing team if sales are bad for a single day. It’s insanity.”, said a marketer.
So it is. Marketing today is not perfect, but like many other industries, speaking about what’s ailing it will make it a healthier and exciting place again and encourage marketers like me to continue to be invested into the field. But for now, I’m focussing on building my own business, which is about yoga and wellness retreats, events, and spiritual festivals. Because who knows? All of us marketers could do with a mental, physical and emotional detox.
