Marketoonist: "Sales-Focused Advertising" cartoon

Weekly hand-drawn business cartoon from Marketoonist Tom Fishburne

Author

Tom Fishburne
September 16, 2024

Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

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Sales-Focused Advertising

Peter Drucker wrote this in his 1973 book on management:

“You have to produce results in the short term. But you also have to produce results in the long term. And the long term is not simply the adding up of short terms.”

Business carries a bias toward short-termism in general, but particularly in marketing and advertising. There’s a fundamental tension between the goals of long-term brand building and short-term sales activation.

The age of digital marketing and measurement helped swing the pendulum even further to pressure marketers into making every piece of communication tied to immediate ROI. This approach can actually jeopardize overall effectiveness.

Ehrenberg-Bass professor John Dawes found that only 5% of B2B customers are in the market at any one time, so marketing focused primarily on sales activation misses the bulk of the opportunity.

This echoes the findings of Les Binet and Peter Field in The Long and the Short of It that marketers consider a 60/40 rule in their advertising plans: 60% focused on brand building and 40% on sales activation.

I was struck by this observation from Mark Ritson over the last week:

“You can do both at the same time in an ad but it rarely works well, because you aren’t just trying to satisfy long and short agendas in the same 30 seconds, you are also being both rational and emotional. You are targeting a smaller group and the whole market. You are communicating the overall brand message and a specific product benefit. You are trying to change memory structures and elicit an immediate response. You are aiming for the top of the funnel and the bottom. You are driving your marketing car in fifth gear and reverse at the same time.”

Speaking in Bucharest in a few weeks

I want to give a big shout-out this week to the GPeC Summit on October 8th at the National Theatre in Bucharest. This will be my first-ever visit to Romania and I can’t wait — exploring a new country is one of my favorite things to do and I’ve already heard from a few of you who will be there.

Here are a few other speaking events in the next 2 months. Hope to see some of you on the road!

Please let me know if you’d ever like to talk about bringing levity to any events you’re planning. Or please recommend me to friends or colleagues.

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a related one from 2018.

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.