Call me old-fashioned, but when I first entered the advertising business the goal was fairly simple and straightforward...
Sell people more crap.
Maybe we did it with stunning visuals, maybe with a too-clever-by-half commercial, maybe with a jaunty little jingle or a celebrity spokesman or maybe we just bludgeoned people over the head with an offer they couldn't refuse. Whichever path we chose, the hoped for result was always the same...
Sell people more crap.
I was summoned up to LA yesterday for one of our horrible, terrible, not very good marketing meetings, this one with a potential new client.
The meeting was scheduled for 9am, so of course I left at... 7am.
I was still an hour late.
And that very may well have saved my life because had I actually sat through the entire meeting I probably would've driven my thumbs through my own eardrums.
The meeting went on for many hours (with a break for lunch). There were PowerPoints and four separate whiteboards which by the end of the day were covered with lists and diagrams and indecipherable marketing acronyms. My boss didn't really listen much to the client, but in his defense, the client didn't much listen to him. While one was speaking, you could see the other formulating their next barrage of marketing babble. It was an endless buffet of word salad.
By the end of the day, a consensus had been reached. We would move forward by:
"Reaching out to our core constituencies and engage the relevant communities in a proactive conversation that would leverage brand equity via all media channels to provide for a uplifting user experience that would result in positive outcomes."
In other words, we're going to try and sell people more crap.
How?
We didn't address that.
In fact, the "how" is increasingly seeming beside the point. These marketing meetings are apparently an end all unto themselves. I've yet to see one result in more work. And this one certainly won't either. Dropped halfway through the day as almost a throwaway line, the client offhandedly said "the ad campaign we launched last year has proven very effective so the plan is to carry it through all of 2013."
Oh. OK. Good to know.
Would've been better to know FIVE HOURS AGO.
But there 'ya go. The Magic of Modern Marketing.
We are well and truly fucked. But at least the hours were billable.
