> Marketing is made unnecessarily complex these days.
I have a cynical theory for that too!
The reason marketing is made complex is because it's not just marketers pushing products to the rest of the world, but also marketers pushing marketing tools to each other. Just like a marketer may exploit my fear for health of my kids, or desire for social status, they can exploit other marketer's fear of low campaign success or a desire for being a premium brand. Etc. So the industry gets increasingly opaque and full of voodoo, because the more complexity can be built in, the more people can make money without delivering any value that could be reliably attributed to them. Everyone buys each other's bullshit, money changes hands, everyone is happy, little actual value is created.
I agree with you again. I have come to the same conclusion as you have. Many of the tools that are used by marketers are absolutely pointless. I suspect it is used to beef up their presentations to prospective clients. How else would they differentiate themselves from the 100 other ad agencies that are doing the same thing? Show metrics from an obscure tool hyped up by an "industry expert" and show where the client lacks compared to competitors. The most prolific of these tools is keyword analysis tools. You just have to trust the data that is generated by these tools and then reports are created based on these approximations. No one knows for sure if the numbers are accurate or not.
I have a cynical theory for that too!
The reason marketing is made complex is because it's not just marketers pushing products to the rest of the world, but also marketers pushing marketing tools to each other. Just like a marketer may exploit my fear for health of my kids, or desire for social status, they can exploit other marketer's fear of low campaign success or a desire for being a premium brand. Etc. So the industry gets increasingly opaque and full of voodoo, because the more complexity can be built in, the more people can make money without delivering any value that could be reliably attributed to them. Everyone buys each other's bullshit, money changes hands, everyone is happy, little actual value is created.