Evidence-Based Marketing Experiencing A Wave of Growth?
Apr 27, 2010 Industry News
While news stories abound about the gradual and imperceptible movement of the U.S. economy toward recovery, it is apparent to me that there is one niche which is taking off ahead of the general recovery: services related to evidence-based marketing.
What is evidence-based marketing? It is an approach to marketing that attempts to make marketing decisions and manage marketing activities – as much as possible – based on evidence: measurements, information, facts, data. This is being fueled, I think, by two factors:
1. The data-rich experience that advertisers have had as they have immersed themselves in the world of digital marketing
2. The tremendous pressure that a down economy has placed on marketers to provide evidence that the money they spend is well-spent
As an evidence-based marketer myself, I would not have arrived at this conclusion without… well, evidence. As someone who does independent consulting between “real jobs”, I try to stay close to the job market for marketing analysts and digital marketers, in what I would call a perpetual passive job search. The number of hiring inquiries I have gotten from recruiters in the past three weeks has been amazing and is significantly greater than I observed earlier in the year – 3 to 5 contacts per week (versus 3 to 5 per month in January).
Let’s hope this leading indicator is followed by some serious actual growth!
Some other interesting facts:
– I took a look at the Google Trends data for the keyphrase “marketing analytics” and it showed a strong uptick between the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010. This came substantially ahead of my anecdotal increased job inquiries, but maybe it is a leading indicator. It would seem that prospective clients might research vendors and taxonomy within the field prior to actually meeting with agencies about it, and I would imagine that, as people began planning their hiring for the year and contacting recruiters, there were more searches for this phrase because recruiters want to understand the fields they are hiring for so they can market them effectively.
– Prior to this year, I have only once ever been contacted about a job at an ad agency. This was in 2005, and the agency was one known for direct marketing. Otherwise, almost all the jobs people have reached out to me about prior to this year were with either companies doing a lot of online marketing, marketing services firms, consultancies, or firms selling marketing data and market research. In the last two months, however, I have been contacted about more than eight positions with ad agencies. Most have been digital agencies, but I have had two interviews with full-service agencies known for their creative. Neither resulted in a job, but I went more out of curiosity than out of a realistic sense that they would know how to integrate someone like me into their organizations. In any case, it seemed like it would be fun to try to bring ideas from the world of analytics and measurement into a strongly creative-centric group. Who knows, maybe I’ll get another chance.
Anyway, I would love to know if any other marketing analytics practitioners out there have been experiencing anything similar. Leave a comment. Let’s discuss.
Tags: Ad Agencies, Ad Agency Analytic Services, Digital Ad Agencies, Evidence-Based Marketing, Marketing Analytics, Marketing Services Firms
April 27th, 2010 at 6:26 pm
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April 27th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
Thanks for posting the article, was certainly a great read!
April 27th, 2010 at 10:47 pm
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April 28th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
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April 29th, 2010 at 4:47 am
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May 1st, 2010 at 1:26 pm
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May 28th, 2010 at 5:32 am
Thanks for posting the article, was certainly a great read!
June 18th, 2010 at 4:21 am
Bill, Thank you for this post, which I came to via your Linked In page.
My own anecdotal evidence is similar so your logic resonated with me. It seems as I am earlier in my career, I started seeing an uptick in recruiting calls in June 2010. The N’s are too small to be significant or meaningful.
I track job postings and have a general sense of job counts for analytic related searches. There definitely seems to have been an uptick from new 20-40 job postings per day (usually the lower end) to 50-70 per day in the May timeframe in the Boston area.
Now I am trying to figure out hpw to position myself to get where I want to go!
Thanks again,
Shefali
June 18th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Hi Shefali,
Since I recently accepted a position, the situation has become clearer – there is a big increase in demand for analytic talent, and it now takes much longer to find and hire people for marketing analytics jobs.
What this means for you is that this would be a great time to shift fields or businesses if that is what you want to do – hirers are having to be more flexible, and are casting a wider net. So, for example, if you have always wanted to work in online analytics, but have stayed in direct mail out risk-aversion, you might consider making such a change now.
Bill
December 11th, 2010 at 10:42 am
I think this is very important. Thanks a lot.
December 23rd, 2010 at 2:11 pm
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