Machines Will Take over Marketing

Harvard Business School professor Jeffrey F. Rayport predicts that technology will soon take over marketing.

"What Salesforce.com did for sales management and NetSuite did for financial management, software-as-a-service providers will do for marketing, by automating much of what marketers do every day," Rayport says.

As ever greater dollars are shifted to digital from other forms of marketing, marketing technology will rise in importance—and spell doom for activities like planning, budgeting and management.

"Instead of setting advertising budgets on quarterly cycles, marketers will launch ad initiatives whenever opportunities emerge, and they will optimize them for efficiency and effectiveness on the fly," Rayport says. 

"Bidding on ad exchanges already happens in real time; enhancements in media placement and creative execution (for example, what image goes with what copy for a given recipient) will occur with similar speed. The 'budget cycle' is already a quaint idea. It will soon be a thing of the past."

White Noise

Too much content is killing content marketing, says William Yates, an executive with the UK-based digital agency Novacom.

Marketers know full well customers are time-starved, but continue nonetheless to spew "protracted blogs, long, drawn out how-to articles, and over-written so-called white papers."

Most of this content is "textual junk," Yates says; and the oversupply threatens to turn marketing communications into "marketing white noise."

In fact, Yates contends, a transition is already afoot: customers are becoming more discerning.

"Discernment is the other side of the transition coin, and as this side of the coin is flipped and hits the sunlight, and discrimination prevails, so this incessant stream of nonsense will be perceived for what it actually is: valueless."

Watch Your Step with "Jive"

I read an e-book recently that, packaging-wise, would earn the envy of any marketer.

But all its polish and pizazz were wasted on me when I collided with an all-too-common blunder business writers make: confusing the words jive and jibe.

The e-book read:

"Influencer marketing jives with content marketing. Influencer marketing doesn't just jive well with with content marketing. It IS content marketing."

The writer meant "jibe."

The verb jibe means to accord with something.

The noun jive means swing music, foolish chatter, or the jargon of hipsters. As a verb, jive means to dance, talk or mislead.

To Spur Innovation, Sponsor Playtime

Do deadlines breed innovative work?

Rarely, say most organizational behaviorists.

That's because creativity results from the playful association of ideas.

Deadlines dampen that play.

While they drive workers to work harder and longer—and even lead them to think they're innovating—deadlines, in fact, kill creativity.

To lessen deadlines' deadening effect, behaviorists suggest bosses:

• Set deadlines that allow for playtime—and build some into every week


• Shield workers under deadline from interruptions


• Help workers understand why particular deadlines are mission-critical

What Planet are You on?

"Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to," Seth Godin says.

The last time I checked, in my world the least effective way to persuade people you were trustworthy was to claim you were trustworthy.

What worldview does Overstock.com think customers have?