Considering a Career in Shopper Marketing? I Wasn't Either!
When I started ad
school in 2009, I thought advertising was an elaborate conspiracy to get 1950s
housewives to worship soap commercials. I was a recent English major.
The thing they don’t teach in most
of the ‘creative’ ad schools is that clients are actually selling very simple
products and services. And far from, for example, creating a whimsical TV
campaign shot in Buenos Aires, most of the projects marketers do are numbingly
dull and mired in logistical concerns that require tactical thought, not raw creativity.
I
still remember my first day on the job at what was then called G2, being
scolded for not knowing what a copydeck was. Nobody in school had mentioned it.
We were young idea people with carefully manicured egos. Work hard, have ideas.
Who needs organization? Who needs structure?
After
two years at a reputable ad school, I landed in a pile of my own socks and
underwear in Brooklyn with only a few months’ savings and the vaguest
possibility of a paid job in advertising. Unpaid internships were the rage at
the time. And I had already done three as part of the school program.
My
portfolio, I knew, was too cerebral, too complicated. I was bad at presenting
my ideas. I went to a few recruiting sessions over-confident and
under-prepared.
I
had done ad school all wrong. I fought the curriculum. I fought the art
directors. I read about propaganda during the First and Second World Wars. I
made friends with the clients and dismissed the instructors. I freelanced for
production companies and directed little student films.
A recruiter asked me if I was serious or making a big joke about what advertising had become. Of course, I didn’t know.
In the next four years, I’d get the practical education I’d been seeking all-along. I’d learn what advertising is about, from the point-of-view of clients, not creative educators.
During
those dark years closely following the worst years of the Great Recession, the
economy slowly rebounded and the slashed corporate advertising budgets regained
some of their former size, but little of their former structure or sense of
purpose.
In
the context of increasingly transparent marketing budgets, money moved away
from creative advertising – the kind that makes great, heart-wrenching TV
commercials that can run for years – to the sort of programmatic, tactically
focused, cost-managed marketing that clients can understand better, control
better and, most importantly, explicitly tie to sales or “conversions,” as they
are known in the parlance of Direct Marketing. (What most people used to call
“junk mail.”)
Agencies that had been quietly plugging away at Direct Marketing and CRM (consumer relationship management) marketing for decades suddenly became known as cost effective: targeted, measureable and activational. So they amped up their digital capabilities. Massive packaged goods companies wanted to emerge from recession with tighter belts and simpler, cleaner messages for a rapidly fragmenting, digital consumer economy.
Thus, Shopper Marketing evolved: ad agencies focused on advertising to a consumer who is in the process of buying something. That’s where I landed. The recruiter I talked to in July 2011 thought I was funny. He thought my student work was weird but salvageable. Who knows – maybe he even understood the direction of the marketing sector, away from big ideas and big budgets and into a segmented galaxy of competing internal client objectives?
As
for my classmates who landed at those big, reputable agencies by making friends
with everyone during ad school? They’re now in less adaptable position. They’ve
been living the high life at jobs where their clients have money and time to
spend on big ideas. I hope that lasts for them – but if it doesn’t, there will
be plenty of jobs in shopper marketing, waiting for people with the ability to
solve the creative problems that stem from shoestring budgets, impossible
timelines and lost trust in the old system of mass TV marketing.
There’s
nothing easy about Shopper Marketing, but it’s never going away as long as
people buy things, in-store or online. That’s the kind job security that makes
a job into a career.
