How the Media, Marketing Lines Keep Blurring

If you’re a sports fan, do you ever watch one of those broadcasters — not the retired professional athletes, but the career broadcasters — who hound players after a game, inject their opinions into their interview questions, and get all palsy with the pros in the process? Ever ask yourself, “Who do they think they are trying to look so in-with-the-in-crowd when they never stepped foot on a field or court or the ice?” Certainly there are some great sportscasters who never played ball earlier in their careers. They’ve accumulated an enormous wealth of knowledge about the sports they cover. Plenty of the players who know them admire them for all their knowledge.

My point is,  I feel like one of them. I’ve spent the majority of my 27 years in the professional workforce following the marketing and advertising field, interviewing executives on such matters as how they calculate their return on investment, why they contact some customers more than others, when the right time is to offer free shipping deals, how they cut costs, even how they go about laying people off, and so forth.

I’ve long since become an expert in the e-commerce/retail/catalog/direct marketing fields — thoroughly knowledgeable on how the trades work. But with a brief exception when I did a little freelance consulting work for a few companies in the field in between jobs in 2005, I never took part in a single “play” on their fields.

I know my stuff, but as I look at some of the want ads for positions like “e-commerce marketing director” or “VP of marketing” and see such requirements as “10 years of marketing experience,” I figure that rules me out.

But does it or should it rule out people like me? Maybe not.  Since I was informed of my impending layoff as the editor-in-chief of All About ROI (formerly Catalog Success) and since I informed all the people I (think) I know in the trade, many have come to me and suggested that that requirement is changing.

Now that it seems like every Tom, Dick & Harry is a journalist today, with the easy ability to do what I’m doing right now on a free service like this one, WordPress, all these marketing companies need people with writing and editing skills. They need to get in their customers’ faces with blogs like this one that subtly pitch their wares. They need to be on Facebook and Twitter and even LinkedIn. But they need people to do all this writing and editing. The people who run retail-related companies have never had to focus on this kind of editorial work before. They need this kind of help.

Although I’ve been pretty depressed over my upcoming layoff, deep in the back of my mind, I get the sense that I’m going to be more marketable than ever once the Great Recession lifts. A writer/editor with marketing knowledge. I still have no hands-on marketing skills of course. But that may no longer matter, as the lines between marketing and us in the media keep blurring.