"What Digital Marketers Can Learn From..."

Whilst idly browsing Twitter last Friday, I stumbled across another one of those spurious, lame ass articles entitled "What Digital Marketers Can Learn From Formula 1 Racing".

True to form, the thinly veiled PR pitch from a customer engagement agency made some painfully laboured, long-winded and not startlingly revelatory or relevant comparisons between, er, customer engagement and the world of F1 racing.

Here's a soundbite that might help if you have trouble sleeping. Can't see it helping anybody with their digital marketing though.

The F1 team operates with intense, fluid communication around liberated data. Not pressured, but intense -- focused on the next move to an outcome. Not just integrated, but fluid -- constantly moving and reforming the whole with a sense of past, present and future. Liberated data means it's all collected, harnessed, shared and used by everyone.
For marketing, the F1 ideal means that cross-functional collaboration is required to gather collate, analayze and disseminate date that streams in from every customer interaction so that the right sequence of lightweight interactions can be orchestrated.

You what? 

There's a lot of this sort of lazy journalism polluting the internet. This was in AdAge - hardly tucked away in a remote backwater in the netherworld of writing about advertising.

Quite how much of this nonsense exists may come as a surprise.

Simply type "What Digital Marketers Can Learn From..." into Google and you will be rewarded by over 6,870 results.

There's obviously a quick and easy formula that the giants of thought leadership are tapping into to get their nest-feathering messages out into the big wide world.

Just take any subject whatsoever in the known universe, preferably one that has fuck all to do with the business of marketing, and then proceed to make as many vague and torturous links between said subject and the business of marketing.

Here's a taster of some most excellent examples...

What Digital Marketers Can Learn From A Few Toymakers

What Digital Marketers Can Learn From NASA

What Digital Marketers Can Learn From Frank Lloyd Wright

What Digital Marketers Can Learn From Beyonce

What Digital Marketers Can Learn From Mystery Writers

What Digital Marketers Can Learn From Sir David Attenborough

What Digital Marketers Can Learn From Serial

What Digital Marketers Can Learn From Cooking Fried Chicken

What Digital Marketing Can Learn From The Monasteries

What Digital Marketing Can Learn From The Ebola Crisis


OK, we made the last one up, but in the context of all the other blather it doesn't really seem that ridiculous does it?

Now we're all big fans here of constantly learning, opening our minds and feeding our brains but somewhere along the line this trend of looking outside the business for inspiration seems to have got out of hand. Maybe it's a sign of the times but it speaks volumes that there's so much of this rubbish around.

If there's anything to take out of this phenomenon, it's that Digital Marketers sure have a hell of a lot to learn.

Maybe it's time they learnt that there really isn't that much to learn from reading articles entitled "What Digital Marketing Can Learn From..."

2 comments:

  1. You forgot one: What Digital Marketers Can Learn From Reading The Sell Sell Blog.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd suggest What social media chancers can learn from Hans Christian Andersen; particularly his work "The Emperors New Clothes".

    ReplyDelete

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