Marketing - my introduction

I’m a software engineer but started in tech industry as a marketing analyst. Yes! After graduate school & Lux Research, I became a Growth Marketer at LiveOps, which handled about 80% of the informercial calls on TV. I had a great group of colleagues and we built some amazing product/tech, and there’s nothing like having a split test that winds up making you millions of incremental profit per year. Definitely has some of those wonderful behavioural economics insights / gaming feedback loops

At its best, digital marketing combined storytelling with practical economics and ability to see what resonated with an audience. What got me to change careers is the fun of being a creative got bogged down by robotic tasks! I got more interested in the automation to alleviate my pain, and now here we are over a decade later.

Looking at Marketing through Engineering eyes

While it’s been on the backburner, I still advise some clients (& some of my seed investments) on growth marketing. It’s still surprising to me that marketers, particularly content marketers, are still saddled with so many manual processes and a patchwork of mismatched tools that are held together with Zapier-duct tape.

Looking back on this world with my software engineering toolset, the pattern repeats all over and there’s a playbook that can be applied. A few examples:

• Systems Administration -> DevOps
• Information Security (which arguable still is in this position… there are a lot more tools but you need even more people to run them)
• Financial Service (like with Addepar and Opto)

I’ll pull out Addepar as an example here. You have lots of Oxford-shirt wearing humans scurrying around to glue together spreadsheets and powerpoints, effectively “humans as middleware” - when what you really need is a orchestrator to ensure that humans do the sophisticated, creative tasks they’re good at, and machines do the grunt work they are spectacularly good at. We called it a man:machine symbiosis

This seems like exactly the sort of model we need to deliver on in the marketing space!