Are we better at marketing today than we were in the past? Binet, Wieser and more weigh in
At Cannes, The Media Leader talked a wide range of media professionals and the conversation often came back to the stark contrast between the thoughtful debates happening in the Palais and the adtech dominance on the beaches, yachts, and in the hotels.
Adtech has brought no shortage of “innovation” and ideas about how marketing should be done. But it raises the question: Has all this tech actually made us better marketers?
We put that question to media owners, clients, agencies, and even the world-famous Les Binet. With all the data, targeting capabilities, consumer insights, research tools, and an ever-expanding media ecosystem at our disposal… are we truly better at marketing today than we were in the past?
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As you might expect, responses were highly varied.
“It’s very hard to give a very definitive yes or no”, said Binet. “There is some great marketing going on and there is some not-quite-so-good marketing going on.”
“What does strike me is that we’ve been studying and measuring the effectiveness of advertising for a very long time,” Binet continued. “It’s surprising how little we’ve learned and it’s surprising that of what we learned, how little of it is actually known and understood by marketers, and of what they know, how little they put into practice”.
Madison and Wall analyst Brian Wieser gave a similarly nuanced answer, arguing that marketing is not necessarily better or worse because of innovation in adtech, just different.
“In the long arc of history, are we better at marketing now versus 2000 years ago?” Wieser asked. “Probably”.
UM UK CEO Kara Osborne Gladwell noted that technological advancements in marketing have led to improved ability for brands to respond to cultural moments quickly, but on the flipside, “it’s become very difficult for brands to have tolerance and give time” for long-term impact to be felt and understood.
On the other hand, Allwyn head of global media Ross Sergeant, industry analyst Ian Whittaker, and ITV MD of commercial Kelly Williams all felt marketers have gotten worse at their jobs due to an overconfidence in data and quantification fallacies.
“People are missing the wood for the trees”, Whittaker argued.
But Amazon VP of global ad sales Alan Moss disagreed, telling The Media Leader: “We’ve brought science and math to the art, and the combination of the two has been what we’ve been missing”.