Adverts – they don’t make them like they used to

One of the effects of losing its film industry was that Britain’s creatives often went into advertising. As a result we’ve enjoyed a golden era of arty and sometimes pretentious adverts.

It was all bankrolled by some poor marketing manager, whose career was being sacrificed on the altar of art. Until now, because these days if any budding Ridley Scotts want to make another Bladerunner, they’ll have to pay for their own education. And it’s all the fault of the philistines in IT marketing!

The new marketing platforms like Marketo and Eloqua are taking the mystery and the romance out of marketing. Or the guesswork, as they would say. You’ll never ask yourself ‘what’s this all about’ as a fat man in gimp outfit watches a convertible driving through a futuristic riot scene. Every conversation is by email now, rather than through the medium of film.

These marketing systems emerged as extensions of CRM and promise – or threaten, depending on your viewpoint – to do for channel marketing what Salesforce did for road warriors.

There are even trade shows for this new sector, where a new breed of channel player, like DemandGen will tell you which half of your marketing isn’t working, then give you the options to change it. A system like Eloqua claims to tell you exactly how many sales leads a campaign has created and helps you grade the quality of the leads. So you know exactly which sales leads are worth pursuing too.

Which renders the plotlines to both Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross redundant.

Mind you, commercially speaking, half of the films about sales didn’t work. Can anyone tell me which?