A few years ago I wrote an article about how our industry often descends into binary ‘thinking’ like digital versus traditional or performance versus brand. It’s been on display again this year with NFTs and the Metaverse. Look at any comments section below an article about either and it’s clear that they’re either the best thing ever invented or a ridiculous waste of time.
Looking back over the last decade, we’ve seen an unhealthy obsession with (and a ridicule of) the likes of performance marketing, attribution modelling, e-commerce, agile, failing fast, mobile first and growth focus to name a few.
Recently, I listened to a couple of lectures by two non-marketers that, in combination, might help explain why this happens so often in marketing and why both sides of such arguments can be simultaneously right, and wrong.
The first non-marketer was NYU Stern Business Professor Aswath Domodoran. He was speaking about how every business, just like every human, has a limited life span (something we tend to forget). He used
