The best marketers are mad scientists

We’ve come a long way since the Mad Men era of marketing and advertising. The modern marketer is as much mad scientist as inspired creative, thanks to the proliferation of data and tools to access and analyze it. Just as inventor Thomas Edison was able to run 10,000 different experiments, changing a little something here, a little something there, until he found the formula that worked, the best marketers today use their creative side to come up with hypotheses, and can then perform experiments to prove their usefulness. The science of marketing has become increasingly, well, scientific. 

Given the revelation that hyper targeted marketing is more effective marketing, it’s no surprise that almost every marketing department or digital agency out there will tell you they’re “data-driven.” But at this point, “data-driven” marketing is more of a minimum requirement than a differentiator. Without data supporting them, marketing recommendations would be no better than opinions, and analyzing ROI would be imprecise, at best. But if every marketer is incorporating data into his or her campaigns, why is it that most marketing messages, no matter how they’re delivered to consumers, seem to be forgotten within a matter of seconds? And why is it that marketing funds get spent with executives and teams struggling to answer the simple question “What did we get out of that?”  Read more...