Marketing’s Future : Integration (and Maybe Robots)

The photo that accompanies this post comes from a talk I recently enjoyed given by a marketing cyborg named Repcor.

Ok, the speaker was actually a real person named Rebecca Corliss, but she said she likes to go by "Repcor," which to me sounds like a robotic supermarketer Hubspot built to save the future or something. I suppose I don’t know for certain she isn’t a replicant, but for now I’ll take her word that she’s actually a human who goes by the same mononym as her Twitter handle (@repcor).

To get back to the photo, Corliss’ talk was entitled “How to Build a World Class Marketing Team like HubSpot.” She started working (or perhaps was created in a lab) at the Boston-based company some eight years ago, and one of the reasons she loved the opportunity was the company’s fresh outlook on marketing. The slide in the photo summarizes old channels to which they believed marketers gave too much consideration:

• Advertising
• Conferences/Events
• Paid Search/PPC
• Email List Rentals
• Cold Calling

And new channels deserving of more attention:

• Blogging
• SEO
• Free Tools
• Social Media
• Opt-In Email Lists

Hubspot is still in business, so they must have hit on something here. Certainly the second list houses much of the creative work my company does. The items on the first list haven’t gone away, however. Companies still spend scads of dollars on TV advertising, often justifiably so. Hubspot itself does conferences and events worldwide, we found out from the humanoid addressing us.

What struck me is how much everything in the first list is complemented by the entries in the second column. If you do a conference, you market it with social media, the email lists you’ve cultivated, and everything else in List #2. And if you’re smart, you feed the content from that conference right back into those channels to generate more engagement.

The same goes for advertising. I would never shoot a spot without doing behind-the-scenes content for social media, and all creative these days must appeal to the user who can self-select what he or she watches.

And if you’re going to have your salespeople cold calling, you can make their jobs loads easier by priming the pump through top of the funnel content that inspires an “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of you” when your AE introduces herself.

As a creative, List B affects the choices I make in language and approach, even when I’m working on a project in List A. For others in the marketing world, I’m sure they consider choices like balancing paid search with organic and whether to buy national-network TV spots or invest in original online content (self-serving note – if you buy into one of my TV projects, you get both).

It’s a big integrated world out there. Old-school marketing can cooperate with modern techniques to the betterment of all. Until, that is, we’re all replaced by machines. Which, um, could be closer than we think.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports and corporate entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports. He is also spearheading various film and television projects.

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