How Marketing Got Rewritten by the Ignorant and Why Startups are Paying the Price
Having sat through a few events and cohort launches this past week, I keep hearing people refer to Marketing as Advertising and Promotion. A little history explains how we got into this mess and why advertising and promotion are merely two things you might do when marketing determines that you should and how.
Go back the 1990s. Marketing meant, well, marketing (it’s never changed, that’s what we’re going to get into).
One way that was and remains best understood is the 4Ps:
As in, that’s what Marketing covers. Notice, Product, which is to say: under the Marketing team. And notice, “People,” not “Customers.”
Marketing is the work of the market: all of it.
Around 2001, Digital Marketing emerged as a thing distinct from Marketing, because CMOs at that point had no idea what to do about the internet, and 20-year-olds who did were running circles around them.
This made them look bad.
Imagine, you’re a Marketing Veteran, you’ve won awards and do keynote speeches about Brand, Product Development, Customer Profiles, Market Research, Sales, and everything else that is marketing. And this young Paul O’Brien shows up in the company, all full of youthful gumption, and he runs your online marketing stuff through which, in a matter of weeks, he is pulling in more revenue, at lower cost, and with more data, than anything you’ve been capable of doing.,
How do you cope with not understanding?
You tell the Board, “That’s our digital marketing work and yes, it’s impressive.”
It’s not “Marketing,” it’s something else.
Within a year, online has become the company’s largest budget allocation and you, the Head of Marketing, still don’t understand it. And there is no way you can put this Paul in an executive role… after all, he didn’t come through a well-known Agency, he doesn’t have a Marketing MBA, and hell, he’s too young.
In time, Paul bails because he’s flabbergasted that everyone is still pushing back on this stuff.
As the internet grows, you allocate more of your online budget to Online Marketing Agencies and you’re probably doing this SEO thing you hear about.
And it’s not Paul left that was your death knell, it was when money was moved to agencies that do online, Boards and Executives sort of concluded “Marketing” was dead — “ just spend it online!”
Of course, they were wrong, ignorantly and moronically so, but that’s what they thought.
Fast forward a few years and people tried reframing “Online Marketing” to remove the stain of ignorant people from it. s comes to mind, he framed “Growth Hacking,” and bless him for it, it was the first major step that essentially said to the world, “no dumbasses,” we’re not doing this digital marketing, we have data and more, what we’re doing is kind of like what your Tech team does. Of course, what Growth Hacking entails is effectively online marketing, or more accurately, marketing, and that’s my point.
Now, why does that matter?
Because in the interim, and around the same time which puts us at about 2005 now, Companies were gutting Marketing as other people said they needed seniority to run things while “Marketing” was bringing in all these leads
Follow that? Marketing was increasingly reframed as just getting in the leads and driving email to customers, more or less.
- Product people said, “We need Product leadership to run the Product,” something that used to (and still does) fall under Marketing.
- Salespeople said, “I’m the one closing all the business and talking to customers, we need me to be Chief Revenue Officer,” something that used to be, and technically still is, marketing.
- Customer support teams became Communities, Service, and even in many cases, responsible for up selling, so of course, we needed a Head of Community. Community is your market and audience.
- Business Development which is partnerships and big engagements with customers and other entities in the “market” demanded their place too, so we have Head of Partnerships now.
- Even in some cases, HR was elevated. HR you say?? Yes, “People,” from where do you think companies hire? Why do people value a company at which they might work? From the Market and for the same reasons we value a product: brand, messaging, awareness, and demand — Marketing.
Now, I’m not picking on ANY of those being appropriate executive roles so don’t come at me complaining that I’m picking on your jobs, that’s missing the forest for the trees. We’re talking about WHY marketing was reframed and how to fix everyone’s understanding by reconciling things.
Okay, so, at this point, maybe around 2007, Sean and others, like me, are fed up.
Actually, I don’t know if Sean was fed up, I’ve never talked to him about this so I’m just crafting my story from my perspective.
Point being, Marketers (actual marketers, not lead gen jockeys) at this point are getting frustrated because businesses and startups are struggling.
They aren’t doing Marketing anymore. They’re doing SEM or something and don’t really know how, so an agency is probably doing it. And it’s junk. So, they try email lists. They blog or these days, podcast, and that doesn’t work, because they don’t know what they’re doing.
And the Tech crack in my referring to Growth Hacking comes from the fact that startups made it worse. After all, hacking is a startup-y thing where a hackathon is a bunch of coders building solutions. Startups come along and with their CTO founders, start saying things like…
“We don’t need to do marketing yet, we’re not ready.”
“We need funding for marketing.”
“When our MVP is live, we’ll start marketing.”
What they mean is advertising and promotion, not marketing.
Advertising and promotion by the way is something Marketing does after marketing determines its necessary, how, where, and what to do and expect
Notice I used an upper- and lower-case letter on purpose:
Marketing (the team) does advertising after it has done marketing (the work) to get it right IF it’s necessary.
But by this point in the economy and our story, we have small business owners, CTO founders, and others who have no business doing it, trying it, and don’t even understand it, deciding when and if, because they need leads and customers now.
And they don’t actually even do “marketing” to determine that! They just decide they want to do an email newsletter to their list, and they call that marketing.
Inevitably, they fail.
So many of us came along and, kindly, started saying, “that’s not marketing, you’re not doing marketing.”
And people like Sean came along and sort of did the same by saying, “You don’t want to do digital marketing, you want growth hacking,” to reframe people away from only doing one online thing.
He reframed all the online stuff, which is really just part of marketing, as something relatable to the Tech and Product people who didn’t really understand what we do, but who were now in charge.
Alas, it only helped a little, as we finally got rid of the separation of Digital or Online as a thing, so it’s back to just marketing… but Boards, CEOS, and now an army of Revenue, People, Product, and Tech executives and founders, now still think marketing means advertising or promoting to get customers.
Worse, many agencies and partial marketers (like Affiliate Marketers or Email Marketers) still say that what they’re doing is “Marketing” when they’re really only doing a piece of it, with no actual marketing ongoing to direct a business if it even should do that piece, let alone how.
And these pieces, without doing actual marketing, sort of work but not really.
They inevitably fail or fall short.
Causing what?
Causing Investors and Advisors, other Founders, businesses and companies, to these days proclaim, “Marketing doesn’t work!” or “You’re not ready for Marketing”
All of which is ignorance.
Pure and simple Idiocracy.
In the 1970s, economists pointed out that Marketing is the most important thing a company does. Company budgets for Marketing were often 40% of opex. Most.
Unfortunately, ignorance destroyed all that and most businesses and startups have been struggling ever since.
Originally published at https://seobrien.com on September 29, 2025.
