Preface / The Valley of the Shadow of Death
Originally written in 2018, this serialized book (sadly) still rings true for marketing, advertising, and product development.
I think I finally understand my dad.
He was an art director in the advertising business in the waning light of the “Mad Men” era. In those days, many large organizations staffed their own in-house creative departments. Minneapolis advertising professionals were just as likely to work at corporate giants General Mills or 3M as they were ad industry stalwarts Campbell Mithun or Fallon McElligott. He spent his first years out of the Marine Corps in the advertising department at Dayton’s—the parent of today’s Target Corporation and one of the foremost retailers of its day.
That’s where he met José, a recent Cuban immigrant forced out of the now-Castro-led island nation, who was trying to make ends meet cleaning floors at the same downtown Dayton’s department store. My dad was the friendly type, and the two became fast friends. It wasn’t long before José introduced my dad to his eighteen-year old daughter (my mom), and the two married soon thereafter.
From all accounts, I grew up in a traditional nuclear family in 1970s and 1980s Minnesota. I went to good schools and got good grades. It was about that same time the advertising industry went through tremendous upheaval. Gone were the days of in-house advertising departments, replaced by innovations both business (outsourcing) and technical (software layout programs). Advertising always was “commercial art,” but this transition meant much more “commercial” and much less “art.” For the early part of the 1980s, my father ping-ponged from agency to agency, never spending more than a handful of months in any one place.
I remember the day when he gave up.
He loaded his leather advertising portfolio into the car. This humorously wide yet unexpectedly skinny briefcase was a fixture of my dad’s professional life. Naively, I asked where he was going (out for a drive) and if I could come along (I could). I always liked car rides with my dad. We drove for forty-five minutes across town to the edge of Lake Minnetonka. He removed the leather case from the car, looked at it one last time, and threw it as far as he could into the lake.
He never worked in advertising again.
Over the balance of my childhood, my father worked odd jobs—usually cleaning buildings or nursing homes—and our standard of living took a precipitous dive. My parents shielded me from the worst of it, but I remember picking up groceries at the food shelf and seeing gifts from the local church under the Christmas tree. As you might guess, the financial and emotional stress took a toll on my parent’s marriage. They divorced when I was a junior in high school.
At the time, I was frustrated and angry with both parents, but especially my dad. Why did he do it? The only way to describe his talent was transcendent. He understood how people thought in a way few others could. He could transform that instinct into art that touched people at a level they couldn’t comprehend. I’m not just speaking as an adoring son; my father was in demand. Despite that talent, he left it all. Because of that, we suffered.
I tried to talk with him about it, and I suppose I listened as well as any angry teenager could.
He explained to me that the economic transition in marketing and advertising struck at the core of his identity. He was an artist, not a salesman. He simply didn’t recognize himself any longer. Perhaps other business professionals could reconcile that fact, but he couldn’t.
When he was feeling nostalgic, he would tell me stories about creating marketing campaigns. Art directors and copywriters would invite real customers into the agency. If it was laundry detergent, they would set up some washing machines and do laundry with their customers. If it was a beer ad, they drank together. If it was a new movie promo, the stars of the picture would make an appearance. (My dad loved meeting Magnum P.I. star Tom Selleck, but it made my mom jealous.)
However, as marketing became more sophisticated and cost pressures mounted, those meetings simply didn’t happen anymore.
“People weren’t people,” he sighed. “They were statistics. We didn’t know them, but we knew precisely what we tricked them into doing.”
Despite what you might think, my dad wasn’t against data.
Today, we like to think that all marketing of that era took place in smoky back rooms filled with slick-haired men. Not true. They may not have had instant access to Google Trends, but they poured over Nielsen results and government surveys to glean insights and sharpen creative execution. What bothered him was that the data had become the result, not the means to that end. As it did, marketing wasn’t changing the public conversation, it simply magnified and manipulated what was there. Marketing lacked vision, and without that leap of faith, it could see no further than next quarter’s sales results.
In that description, it’s difficult not to see a curmudgeon bemoaning what it was like “in his day,” terrified to yield the floor to a new group of professionals smarter, faster, and better than he was. I certainly thought so.
But after more than two decades of my own reflection and experience, I can’t help but see the same dynamic at play today.
Consider today’s reality of easy data. In the past ten years, it has become much easier to test and refine messaging in real time. Market research that used to take days or weeks in my dad’s day is now done with the aid of sophisticated software in hours, or even minutes. The grand idea of modern marketing is that it no longer relies on smoky rooms or slick hair. Marketing has become a science, predictable and knowable. Arithmetic, not alchemy.
When was the last time we gave serious thought to how that theory works in practice? I admit, I never thought about the potential downside. But there is one. An important one.
To refine and improve our messages, we’re running billions of concurrent live experiments on our target audiences. It’s become so cheap to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, there’s no downside to boiling more pasta. For every one thousand tests, we’re happy to see a handful that work. We refine those few and create dozens of new variants. Rinse and repeat. Hundreds of times per day.
Take the perspective of your audience and reread that last paragraph. Much of the messaging they see in an average day—and an even larger portion of the messaging they see on digital media—is an active experiment. By definition, what they see is flawed in some way. Some of it will be purposefully terrible to serve as the corner case in the data set. Would you appreciate being on the receiving end of that? The more we exploit our audience, the more they pull away. The more they pull away, the more we need to exploit our audience. It’s an ever-worsening vicious cycle. It’s gotten so bad being the figurative wall in the spaghetti factory that consumers are—quite literally—buying their way out.
I wish this was only the case in promotional marketing and advertising, but it’s not. We’ve run headlong into an era of surge pricing, omnichannel retail, and perpetual product beta without ever stopping to ask if these strategies make our field meaningfully better for the costs they impose on our audiences.
It may be a different era, run at a faster pace, and spending bigger dollars, but it’s the same issue my dad saw so long ago: Marketing has become dehumanized.
Dehumanization rips at the fabric of our lives in three insidious ways. First, it corrupts our sense of self. Once we lose respect for ourselves, the second step is easy: We see others as somehow less than full human beings, not entitled to the same rights and privileges we enjoy. With no self-respect and no respect for others, the third step on the road to hell seems self-evident: We will commit nearly any atrocity and follow nearly any false leader.
Examples abound of dehumanization in our culture and history, along with cautionary tales of the terrible toll it takes. However, dehumanization needn’t result in genocide to destroy our self-image, poison our relationships with our audiences, and erode confidence in our profession.
It happened to my dad. I was determined not to let it happen to me.
I may not have his raw talent, I told myself, but I have grit. I wouldn’t give up like he did. I started an ad agency with a business partner within two years of graduating college. I married. I started a family. For me, things would be different. Predictably and sadly, as my life took on a life of its own, my dad and I lost touch.
On a cold early spring day in May 2004, I was driving east on Interstate 694, a half mile from the exit that would take me to downtown St. Paul and my office. My cell phone rang. It was a strange number from a 507 area code, which covered the southern region of Minnesota. I was expecting client calls, and I had a few using that area code, so I answered it. It wasn’t a client. A somber nurse at a hospice center in Houston, Minnesota, spoke softly. My dad wouldn’t make it more than a couple of days. If I wanted to see him, I should hurry.
I knew he’d been sick, but it was an easy thing to put out of my mind with two school aged children at home. When you’re twenty-nine, there’s always more time. But if I was being honest with myself, I was still angry with him. I didn’t know what to do.
In the end, it didn’t matter. He didn’t have a couple of days. I didn’t make it.
This book is my attempt to pick up where he left off.
I decided that I would face the devil of dehumanization on his terms. This wouldn’t be easy. Confronting dehumanization forces us to face some of marketing’s most persistent and painful problems—not “How do we optimize pricing?” but “What is our responsibility to the truth in a world where facts don’t seem to matter?”
My mission, like my dad’s, is to Rehumanize Marketing.
I admit it—I was scared.
Rehumanizing Marketing means attacking the three-headed beast of dehumanization: loss of the sense of self, reduction in the status of others, and disillusionment with a purpose larger than yourself. I knew I couldn’t find the answers inside my comfort zone. For decades, marketing has swayed to the siren songs of management experts and swims in more data than we know what to do with. We can’t keep digging in the same hole and expect to find new gold. We simply get a deeper hole.
I needed help.
As it turns out, I needed to remove my head from the hole I was digging. (My dad would’ve used a more direct analogy.) Once I let go of the fact that marketing must be smart enough to discover the answers to its problems, help presented itself. The student was ready. The masters appeared.
They weren’t marketing professionals, or even businesspeople, but they faced the same problems we do. What I learned will change the way you approach the field. I know it changed mine.
Part 1 of this book begins by exploring and confronting our identity as marketing professionals. Because marketing has become core to so many other business fields, and those professionals have even fewer tools to understand it, we have a responsibility to start there. Rehumanizing Marketing begins with rediscovering ourselves.
We’ll learn how standup comedians humanize the research practice, perfecting the art of rapid iteration and agile development. In hindsight, is that so surprising? Comics have been honing their craft on stage in front of live audiences for hundreds of years. Being funny is hard work.
From there, we leave humor behind and enter the courtroom. In marketing, we might (or might not) sell a few more bottles of shampoo, but when an attorney gets jury selection wrong, clients go to jail . . . or worse. We’ll explore the fine line between segmentation and stereotyping during voir dire and learn what they already know: Prejudice isn’t practical.
Finally, we’ll ask why so many aspiring marketing professionals leave the field so quickly—about one in four in the first year. It isn’t weeding out, it’s burning out. We can’t sustain that talent drain. Nursing can’t either, and they face the same attrition at nearly the same rate. They’re doing something about it. They’re training resiliency.
Part 2 leaves the self behind and dives into the mind of our audience. It might seem counterintuitive for a marketing professional to look to the outside second, but until we’re humbled and learn reopen our minds, we won’t be able to accept completely counterintuitive advice.
We’ll meet a twelve-year old boy with autism who will turn our idea of education on its head. Individualized education isn’t only more effective and more human than its mass market counterpart, it’s also shockingly practical.
Next, we’ll walk into the most successful section in the bookstore (hint: It’s not what you think) for a lesson in humanizing relationships with our audience.
Finally, we’ll meet a group of refugees who have discovered what it means to empower a group of people to transform their lives in a way the statistics would never predict.
Ultimately, however, all this is useless without a guiding purpose. Absent a driving force, all professionals too easily fall back into bad habits when the pressures of the moment mount. Part 1 gives us renewed confidence in ourselves. Part 2 shows us how to connect with our audiences at a human to human level. But Part 3 is hard. To complete the process of Rehumanizing Marketing and exorcizing our demons, we need to face our deepest fears and most persistent problems.
Luckily, we have help.
We’ll learn how lessons from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa give us a completely new approach to crisis management—one that works when all others are failing.
We’ll confront the ugliest reality of the information age: the blurring of the line between truth and fiction. It has profound implications for marketing effectiveness in the long run. We need to understand how information distortion works—not at a theoretical level or at an ideological level, but at the ground level. We’re going to China to learn the truth behind the Great Firewall.
At the end of my journey, I thought I would find myself inspired, rejuvenated, and ready with a new set of tools. I wasn’t. I was still terrified.
I learned how to learn faster than other people. I learned how to overcome my own biases. I learned how to be resilient in the face of challenges. I learned how to teach. I learned how to create new audiences. I learned how let go and let them grow on their own. I learned how to help people truly recover after a crisis. I learned how to understand information manipulation as it occurred. That human-centric toolset that gave me an enormous competitive advantage.
What scared me wasn’t what I learned, but rather, how I would use it. I’m not sure I’m a good enough person not to use what I learned for my own gain. The last stop on my journey found me in a suburban synagogue with two understanding and patient rabbis. Like most rabbis I’ve known, they didn’t make me feel better, but they helped me frame the issue of “Why?” so that it would shape the way I saw the “How?”
Rehumanizing Marketing is a worthy goal—perhaps the most important single objective in our field today. But like anything worth doing, it won’t be easy. You shouldn’t go in expecting that. I’m your guide, not your guru. You’re going to need an open mind.
If you’re still up for it, your journey begins with relearning how to learn.
Let’s go.
Rehumanizing Marketing, Preface. Copyright 2018-2024 by Jaywalker Publishing LLC.
Note: This post is part of a serialized publication. Click here to read any sections you missed.