Marketing bullshit… #BigBeer’sStillBuyin’It

“Irritate! Irritate!! Irritate!!!” – is that the key to getting folks to buy your product?

Sixty-seven years ago, just about the time “modern marketing” was getting its wings, and twenty years before the era was dramatized in the Mad Men television series, came the classic movie, The Hucksters.

In one memorable scene, ad-guy Clark Gable got a lesson in marketing b.s. from the legendary Sydney Greenstreet playing Evan Llewellen Evans, head of a fictional soap-manufacturing company. Here’s the three-minute scene, with the b.s. coming near the end.

And don’t think this ad doesn’t reflect a gullible reality populated with legions of today’s marketing execs. Many are every bit as clueless and ready to seize on whatever gimmick spews forth from “the digital world.”

Beer wars degenerate to hashtag skirmishing

Take the buzz-wordy “content marketing,” today’s equivalent of Syndney Greenstreet’s marketing wisdom. Is “Irritate! Irritate!! Irritate!!!” the key to getting folks to buy your product? It may seem laughable marketing advice in the era of the millennials, but in fact, throughout the Mad Men period and beyond, some advertisers embraced it.

Today no big-name marketer would ever spout such nonsense, right? I mean, modern marketers know all about how to sell their products. Sure they know social media is in vogue and all that. But they’re way too smart to “drink the Kool-Aid,” and fall head-over-heels for every crazy new media notion. Aren’t they? This hysterical Adobe commercial suggests otherwise.

Consider how one Anheuser-Busch marketing VP brags to the press about his brewery’s multi-million-dollar effort behind “#UpForWhatever” this summer? He boasts, it’s “content marketing on steroids.”

Has he been marketing without content up to this point? Or does he think his job is the marketing of content? In that event, he needs to be reminded what his marketing is supposed to be! Either way, hold the ‘roids.

Not to be outdone in the hashtag-bragging department, from the erstwhile competiton at MillerCoors comes this bit of PR return-fire: “#ItsMillerTime has received more social media mentions,”… “40 times more than #UpForWhatever.” Orly.

I’m reminded of my favorite market-research quote: “The other side of what is really so, is, “Really? So what.”

All these years later and…

Marketing b.s. is still… #bullshit.

Woo woo.

To read more of Hey Beer Dan’s thoughts please visit his blog: http://www.plzdontletbuddie.com/