These days I am doing a lot of recruiting — for marketers, specifically. And I’m here to say that I gleefully discriminate against candidates with bad resumes. Again and again, I see marketers who provide resumes with basic errors of spelling, grammar, or punctuation. Resumes full of jargon or meaninglessly vague words, with non-parallel lists […]
Another fun marketing expression, this time with a business jargon slant: accelerate (v.) In basic physics, when you accelerate, it implies two things: (1) you are already moving with some velocity; and (2) you are moving in a certain direction. Paradoxically, in business, when you say “accelerate,” it implies two things: (1) you are not […]
People foolishly ask me for career advice, just because they find my blog. They say to themselves, “Daniel looks like he’s having fun doing what he does. Maybe he’ll know how I can too.” Well, I do have fun doing marketing — sometimes. There are a lot of boring and annoying bits, too. And the […]
It’s time for yet another misleading term only found in the world of marketing: bicast leather (n.) Bicast leather is to leather what astroturf is to turf, or what white chocolate is to actual chocolate. It is a horrible aberration that you can legally say is leather, even though it is really just plastic with […]
Here’s another amusingly misleading marketing expression: as low as (adv.) Asterisks ahoy! “As low as” is a deliciously ambiguous term that simply means that somebody, somewhere might actually get this price, rate, or deal, though it probably won’t be the actual human who just read the ad. Or maybe it could be you, if you were to accept the worst possible terms […]
Another in my series of amusingly misleading marketing expressions. virtually (adv.) Virtually is the most beautiful word in marketingese because it actually negates whatever it modifies without anybody realizing it. To turn copy into normal-speak, just replace the word “virtually” with “NOT” (yes, in capital letters), and you’ve cracked the code! For example: Marketing copy: […]
Like abused children, members of the Tea Party are Republican voters full of amnesiac anger toward the party that abused their trust and increased our debt.
Friends often ask me, should I get an MBA? Often, this is in response to some article they read claiming that an MBA won’t increase their salary, or knocking down some strawman argument that an MBA is the one and only path to corporate success. These criticisms are partially correct: universities routinely inflate post-graduation MBA […]
Here’s another in my series of amusingly misleading marketing expressions. antibiotic-free (adj.) In the US, “antibiotic-free” means only that an animal did not have antibiotics in its system when you eat it, which only means that it had no exposure to new antibiotics in its last 48 hours of life. Prior to that, its diet […]
I love collecting words and expressions commonly found in marketing copy that seem full of meaning, but that are in reality vacuous and misleading. Here my first in the series: limited edition (adj.) What’s great about “limited edition” is that you can use it on everything, because everything will no longer be made at some point […]
The FTC recently announced a proposal to let consumers opt out of all the tracking that occurs when they browse the Internet, also known as the do-not-track list. As an Internet marketer, I should hate this, but I think it’s a great thing for everybody — including us marketers. Now, I know the Direct Marketing […]
I help a lot of my friends with their resumes, and they often suck. As a marketer, I have one simple tip for them: Stop telling the truth.
Almost every Internet business has at least TWO very different target audiences. To be successful, you need to know who they are and appeal to them both from the start. For some reason, I keep reviewing business plans where entrepreneurs forget to consider one of them, which is a good way to fail out of […]
The 4-Hour Workweek as described by Tim Ferriss is a great idea — IF you’re good at search engine marketing AND you’re very, very lucky.
Harried search engine marketers like myself — and especially those who don’t have the money to pay for agencies or bid management software — love using Google’s Conversion Optimizer to manage their bidding. Conversion Optimizer automatically increases or decreases bids to hit a certain target cost per action (CPA), leaving you free to do other […]