THE UNFAIR TRUTH:
If a product does well, it’s because of the Sales Director. If a product doesn’t do well, it’s because of the Marketing Director. The packaging was all wrong. The demographic was way off. We should have spent less on outdoor and more online. We should have spent less online and more outdoor. We should have gone with that bold font and not italicised. Etcetera.
THAT is why Marketing Directors are always angry.
That’s also why Marketing Directors get furious when marketing agencies pretend to operate in 'The Same Space’.
If you look at a senior Marketing Director’s LinkedIn page you’ll probably see a few ‘likes’ per week or month, the odd “well done team” post, and lots of recruitment stuff.
If you look at any marketing agency boss’ LinkedIn page you’ll see them variously sharing photos of the latest word they’ve been paid thousands to change the font of, or - if you’re really lucky - find some click-desperate imbecile doing push-ups, singing or recreating his favourite movie scenes in a galling attempt to get as many ‘likes’ and ‘love’ from similarly spare-time-rich agency owners.
To quote a colleague: LinkedIn has become an agency circle-jerk.
I was once told by a junior colleague that she never sent emails to marketing directors after 4:15pm on a Friday because “they’ve probably gone home”. I slapped her (I didn’t). If you think that the more senior you are, the more you can skive off and get away with doing nothing, you’re wrong.
The more senior you are, the longer the hours you work, the more conference calls with Australia or America you’re on (neither of which give a shit whether it’s 6am or 6pm for you) and the more pressure and responsibility falls on your shoulders as your knees buckle and the bags form under your eyes.
These days it’s way easier to take conference calls remotely, but back in the day you were trapped in your office, huddled around some primitive speaker phone, watching as the office emptied while you calculated just how late you’d be home for that revered lamb bhuna and two bottles of red.
When some 42-year old man-child with a backward baseball cap turns up at your office, flamboyantly parks his electric scooter and then moon-walks into your office to tell you why “Monttocks Script Font is going to be huge this year”, all you can think about is repeatedly punching his corpse while you take beasting from the Americans because THEY know how you SHOULD have launched that product in Italy last month (but, strangely, didn’t mention anything until it failed).
So, apart from the personal therapeutic value in venting my spleen, what’s the point of this?
The point - you ass clowns - is that if you want to appeal to the Marketing Directors you want to hire you, act like they do, not how your peers do. If creative agency #317 are doing ‘hilarious’ videos on LinkedIn and racking up tens of comments, take a look at how many ‘buyers’ are in that list of likes. Any Heads of Marketing in there? Any Marketing Directors looking for a new agency (and making the decision based on some middle-aged prat in an overly-patterned shirt juggling cabbages)? No. Don’t be fucking stupid. Professionals want to work with professionals. Otherwise they’d be teachers.
When you’re a proper Marketing Director your life mostly sucks. They try to compensate by paying you lots of money and letting you fly Premium Economy, but ultimately that’s not enough. Pity the Marketing Director, empathise with the Marketing Director and - for god’s sake - don’t breakdance during a pitch to a Marketing Director; we WILL kill you.
One final thought: “Monttocks”.