Jo

Most modern marketing is finding a tiny numher of people who may want your product & trying to channel that interest Rather than trying to massively broaden how many people are interested in it.

Let's say 10,000 people see your ad. Perhaps 12 "people" click on it* Why would we obsess over optimizing it so that 16 "people" click Rather than ensuring the 9,988 people who didn't click, get SOMETHING from it.

The biggest change to advertising in the last 100 years is something few people discuss and it explains a lot of confusion. Prior to "the internet", advertising was generally large clients, spending lots of money, reaching large audiences, working with agencies. The internet democratized advertising, we went from 1-10,000 large clients, to 10 million tiny advertisers. The "average" Advertiser in 1990 was like a brand of shoe polish or a chain of sofa stores, a fragrance, or a big mustard brand or a movie studio, spending $1m + The "average" Advertiser in 2018 was a local gym, a single hotel, an Etsy store, a "startup" DTC store, spending $100 per month When anyone, myself included, writes about "best things to do in Marketing", or "Advertising best practice" or how AI will change advertising, we forget we have essentially 3 radically different industries in one. 1) Tiny advertisers we never cared about 2) Medium-large advertisers mainly selling things online 3) Medium-large advertisers like the past. The dumb thing the entire industry did was to expect (3) to follow the playbook from (1), rather than expect each to be run, optimized, measured, structured in the way that works best for them