Marketing makes change happen to a person or a group of people.

Sometimes that change can be small or big.

However, as marketers we have to be clear about exactly what the change is.

We may think that the change we need to make is to stop people from driving their car drunk, when in reality its more effective to change their friends around them (as seen in the “Friends don’t let other friends drive drunk” campaign).

We need to always remember what change we seek to make but we must also think through the change we should to be making.

I thought to be successful in marketing that I had to be rigid. That I had to follow a schedule, that I had to learn how to say no.

I was dead wrong.

I realized that this idea of a work lifestyle that is idealized by most business gurus, is at exact odds with what marketing really is about. Marketing is about empathy and experience. Not experience in the professional sense but life experiences. Life experiences that connect with human culture. That to connect with people, you actually have to learn to be the farthest away from the “marketing rule book” as possible. That comes from just living life. Not living life “flouting through it” or being a hippy. But, living life through a child like curiosity and energy. Now it’s a difficult job. If you are too free flowing you lose focus but if you have just enough, it allows you to open up insights in marketing that you never thought could happen.

Insights come from being a student of life – not from being a student of the marketing doctrine.

Is advertising doomed to keep becoming more and more less effective?

It seems with the continue rise of ad blocker, monthly paid subscriptions and people watching what they want when they want, it leaves advertisers with a situation that is not what it used to be.

Advertising will have to become something different.