[brosirmandude]

Yeah that's gonna be a no from me dog...

As a marketer I've been fortunate enough to avoid most of the AMP fallout because of the specific makeup of my clientele. However, my colleagues who have to deal with AMP want Google to kill it forever and never bring it back.

[Kalium]

Having worked with trackers, and used the sorts of pages your colleagues prefer, I have arrived at a slightly different conclusion.

Your colleagues are the problem that AMP is unfortunately necessary to solve. There are too many bloated, slow, design-forward and tracker-infested pages that take ten times as much memory and time as is required for the core content to be loaded and presented. This means the core of the user experience in AMP-land is generally much, much better.

It didn't have to be this way. AMP is necessary because the web user experience has become atrocious. There have been many years, flush and bountiful with opportunities to improve this. Most websites remain blessed with this wondrous panoply.

[puranjay]

As a user, I hate AMP as well. I have plenty of data. Show me the whole page by default

AMP seems to be solving for a problem that doesn't seem to exist anymore. Data is absurdly cheap now. And wi-fi is never hard to find

[JimDabell]

As somebody with fast Internet at home and at work, I still want to see far smaller page weights because I spend a lot of time working on trains or browsing the web on my phone. Internet connections in those situations can be fast, but they are often very inconsistent, both in terms of speed and latency.

I've lost count of the number of times a page has unnecessarily been rendered unusable because although it had loaded all of the important stuff, it was waiting around for a web font or JavaScript to finish loading and I was going through an area with poor signal.

That's in a developed country with solid, ubiquitous telecoms infrastructure. Most of the world – and most of the people in the world – don't have it as good, so it matters even more for them.

[hoschicz]

You live in a little bubble: the developed world, where data and wi-fi are plentiful.

[puranjay]

I live in India. 4G is dirt cheap here. I pay less than $6 for 3 months of data capped at 2GB/day.

[majewsky]

WTF. I pay €8 per month for 1.5 GB / month, and that's pretty cheap by German standards.

[puranjay]

A big Indian conglomerate, Reliance, recently launched a service called 'Jio' that basically disrupted the entire mobile internet landscape.

Broadband access has improved drastically as well in the last one year. I've gone from paying $40/month for a 16mbps connection with a data cap of 80GB to $12/month for a 50mbps connection with no data cap.

It's come to a point where I don't think at all about data usage or my phone bill.

Which is why I say that AMP is a solution in the wrong direction. If India can make data so cheap, it's only a matter of time before other markets follow suit. AMP is a solution to a dying problem, not an emerging one.

[def_true_false]

The German telecom and ISP markets are a joke. Paying a fee just to be connected, most people being locked in for 2 years, garbage speeds and FUPs, the lack of local wireless ISPs, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the average consumer was worse off that in the US, even though the country is mostly flat and relatively small so presumably easy to cover.

Hard to imagine how it could get this bad.

[puranjay]

If a low income country like India could do it, I think it's mostly because of regulatory, not technical reasons.

[sabas_ge]

In Italy now I pay €5.99 / month with 30 GB of traffic (plus unlimited calls). free.fr came in Italy (branded as Iliad) and changed the market.

[geezerjay]

That sounds like quite a deal. I pay about 3€ a month for 1GB of data though a 4G connection.

[Aaargh20318]

Then only serve AMP pages to people from the developing world, why do I need to deal with a crippled version of the web because some other people have crap internet ?

[rjmunro]

Data may be absurdly cheap and free wifi might be easy to find where you live, but it certainly isn't everywhere.

Even if you do find wifi, it's often slow or totally broken. It usually requires you to log in and be tracked. Often the wifi network operator knows every place you visit when they have a network located there, even if you don't deliberately log in at those locations.

[kiriakasis]

I need to ration about 40MB of data a day, which means i appreciate the effort

[squirrelicus]

I was going to tank the downvotes and just post a root comment saying nothing but "no", because it's the correct response. But you did a better job than I would have :P

[s17n]

The fact that marketers hate it can only be taken as evidence that it's a good thing.

[ignostic]

I know this is a bit cheeky, but HN sometimes has this comically simplistic view of other professions. It's as bad as the older C_Os who refer to all of dev and IT as "computer people." As someone who is both a developer and a marketer I can tell you both fields have depth and value, and neither is easy to do well.

Success often hinges on making something people want. Marketing done well is hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product development with marketing analytics and other user data. I don't think I'd ever have been successful without a marketing background.

To take it back to the original point, I will never move to AMP. I spend a lot of time speeding up my pages through simplification, caching, and any other trick that makes sense (deferment, lazy loading, minification, combining, etc.) But there are a lot of reasons to not want your link to start with amp.google.com when someone shares my page.

* Any links to that URL rely on the good graces of the search engines to "count" for rankings and continue sending traffic. This is especially worrying if I decide to change standards. Will my rankings tank? Will the crawlers get totally confused and think I have a bunch of 404s? Both have been reported. These are not risks I'm willing to take with my sites that took so much work to build and promote.

* When someone shares my page I want my URL to be clear - not some google.com URL. That's both confusing for the user and bad for building a brand. Even if it was a cname to my own subdomain I'd feel better, e.g. amp.mysite.com

* Aside from the reason above, the lock-in is philosophically problematic. I intentionally use cross-platform apps on my phone because I don't want to be locked into an ecosystem. I don't foresee switching to Apple, but I didn't foresee switching to Android either. The point is that I could. This freedom is important to me.

* I don't trust that Google is committed to me and my content. Just look at the YouTubers getting screwed over by Google's lazy copyright policy. What makes you think they're going to suddenly staff up and/or care more on web content?

Anyway, as a writer, marketer, business owner, and web developer: fuck AMP.

[nojvek]

> I don't trust that Google is committed to me and my content.

This * million. The only thing I can reliably trust google is that when I type a search query, results will be meaningful.

Regarding them keeping my data secure, not selling out to NSA, dropping support for things on a whim, kicking users out of their platform, I can’t really trust them.

Google or anyone else.

It’s just not their core business. They don’t really make much money from AMP. It feels like some VP’s pet project to get a big fat stock bonus.

If you run a serious business. Stay the hell away from AMP.

[endgame]

> This * million. The only thing I can reliably trust google is that when I type a search query, results will be meaningful.

Even that is pretty dicey these days. Search for `keyword1 keyword2 obscure_but_important_keyword3` and `obscure_but_important_keyword3` will just get dropped from your query.

[tomxor]

Yes! wtf is it with this these days? double quotes in google search used to have meaning... now you just get spammed with completely irrelevant crap and only a few instances of results with that word hidden after the first 20. It's like they are trying to hide from you that there are only a few _real_ hits.

[some1else]

Repeat `keyword3` to increase it's weight: `keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 keyword3`

[nannal]

Quotes make keyword3 a requirement

[JimDabell]

You can work around this by putting the dropped keyword into double quotes.

[TeMPOraL]

Except double-quotes work only as suggestion, they haven't been enforcing a verbatim search for quite a while now (AFAIR there is/was a "verbatim" switch hidden somewhere in Search Tools).

[reitanqild]

> You can work around this by putting the dropped keyword into double quotes.

Often. It seems sometimes I get selected for an A/B test where they just ignore parts of my query even if I use doublequotes and verbatim option.

Also this becoming standard means Google have taken a(nother) step backwards since 2009.

Which might be a good thing in the long run. It means competition has even better chances. :-)

[mehrdadn]

> The only thing I can reliably trust google is that when I type a search query, results will be meaningful.

> Regarding them keeping my data secure [...] I can’t really trust them.

Really? I trust Google more than pretty much any other company to keep my emails secure, for example. Very curious what companies you would consider trustworthy from a security standpoint, unless by security you misspoke and really meant privacy.

[Lio]

I trust Fastmail because I pay Fastmail to provide a secure mail service.

I also have a gmail account. Google is upfront about stating they read my email through gmail. Many times I’ve seen Google use dark UI patterns to hide their tracking and snooping. E.g. location tracking on Android or the way they ignore thr Do Not Track header.

Even though they might not sell data directly, they are insistent on gathering it for their own hidden interests.

I don’t trust Google.

[garmaine]

I wonder what distinction you draw between privacy and security.

[mehrdadn]

It's the difference between bodyguards and curtains.

[bryanrasmussen]

non-private data is often insecure data.

[whywhywhywhy]

> The only thing I can reliably trust google is that when I type a search query, results will be meaningful

Even this is getting less reliable, image search at least.

Reverse image search (from what I can gather from using it) used to try and match the image to existing images it knew, then tried to tell you where it came from and what it was based on data it gathered from the page it came from.

Today it appears to use a machine learning to decide what the image is, then show similar images of the same object with the same visual appearance.

The difference to the end user is before if you searched using a still of a film it would almost always successfully identify it and provide links related to the film and the location of the still in particular.

Today if you do the same then Google will identify the picture has a woman in it using ML and return a search for the word "woman" with just random stock photos of women in similar images then the search listings will just be links to Pintrest boards containing the searched image.

[briandear]

I honestly don’t care about the NSA; nothing I am doing would even be remotely interesting to them. I am more concerned about my privacy being exploited by advertisers, banks, credit bureaus, political campaigns, and over-zealous local governments.

[jjeaff]

But do you trust the NSA to store all your private data forever and keep it safe from hackers, other governments and even their own employees?

[majewsky]

You also need to assert that you will never care about the NSA. If, in the future, you decide to take up a public role of any sort, the NSA already has decades worth of dirt on you.

[dagss]

...assuming there is dirt to be found, I interpreted the parent as saying there would not be any dirt of interest to NSA

[alrs]

Do intelligence agencies exist to "keep us safe", or to advance the state's economic interests?

[Lio]

I guess one could think of that as a false dichotomy. I’m not sure you can necessarily cleanly separate these two things.

[manigandham]

Those two things are more similar than they are different.

[geezerjay]

> I honestly don’t care about the NSA; nothing I am doing would even be remotely interesting to them.

If that's true then why are they dedicated to harvesting and processing all your data?

[vidarh]

They're not really. They just don't care enough about the privacy of all the people that don't matter to them. It's still troubling, because there is every reason to expect that people that have done nothing wrong will have someone poke around in their data for the wrong reasons, but I don't have a problem understanding why people are prepared to disregard them - most people will be noise to the NSA. Meanwhile most people are potential revenue to a marketer.

[TeMPOraL]

> I know this is a bit cheeky, but HN sometimes has this comically simplistic view of other professions. It's as bad as the older C_Os who refer to all of dev and IT as "computer people." As someone who is both a developer and a marketer I can tell you both fields have depth and value, and neither is easy to do well.

I don't think this is the real root issue you're thinking of. I don't believe HN has a simplistic view of marketers (to contrast, I'd say it seems to have a simplistic view of management). Many people here, myself included, would never deny that the job of marketer is difficult, challenging, and has a lot of depth. The issue we have is with the job itself.

> Success often hinges on making something people want. Marketing done well is hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product development with marketing analytics and other user data. I don't think I'd ever have been successful without a marketing background.

This is perfect. This is exactly what marketing should be! Problem is, it's rarely it.

The marketing as we usually encounter it, on the receiving end, isn't about "making something people want". It's about "making people want something". This simple transposition of words is the point at which marketing turns from objectively valuable into malicious and exploitative, and ultimately the source of hate against the whole field.

You wrote that marketing done well "is hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product development with marketing analytics and other user data". Yeah, sure. Except it's motte-and-bailey again, because we all know that's not what's going on. The data isn't used to optimize the product to deliver better value, it's used to optimize the product to trick the buyer into purchase. And analytics aren't just guiding product development (in either direction), they're also resold on the side, so that someone else can better trick the buyer into purchasing something else they don't need.

The social contract between the individual and the firm is: the individual gives the firm money, in exchange for the firm delivering value. Marketing, as implemented in practice, is the art of maximizing the money received while minimizing the value given back (because value costs money to make). Hence the hate.

[manigandham]

Desire is not a bad thing, and the reason why someone wants something doesn't matter after the point at which they want it. I'd much rather people have agency over their decisions than complain about an entire business concept.

Also products are definitely getting better all the time. Feedback is a part of marketing and personalization to predict consumer needs is the next wave. Tricking users is not a viable business model for any legitimate company.

[majewsky]

Then a lot a profitable companies aren't legitimate.

Just yesterday I saw a documentary (in German TV) about magazine ads for overprized health products with little to no actual health benefit (like a shoe insert which, literal quote, "instantly cures 100s of chronic ailments"). These ads always have testimonials from doctors, but when the journalists tried to find those doctors, they always turned out to be stock photo models.

That's marketing at its worst. But also the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of marketing.

Maybe marketing is similar to infrastructure. When it's good, it's invisible; so you only notice it when it fails.

[manigandham]

Yes, clearly a health product with no health benefit and marketed falsely is not legitimate, and in many places there are rules against false advertising.

I'm not sure if you're trying to disagree with my comment or making a different point...

[TeMPOraL]

> Desire is not a bad thing, and the reason why someone wants something doesn't matter after the point at which they want it.

It matters if they didn't want the product before your marketing campaign, and started to want it after. Desire itself is not a bad thing. Inducing desire in people is a completely different topic.

> I'd much rather people have agency over their decisions

Sure. And marketing as an industry mostly works to override people's agency. That's what all the tricks from Cialdini's book do. That's why the industry is so keenly weaponizing research from psychology and cognitive sciences.

> Also products are definitely getting better all the time.

That's a tangential topic (and a big one), but I very much question the thing those products are getting better at. It somehow never is about maximizing value to the buyer. Quite the opposite, actually - everything from white goods through tools, clothing, cars, to software, is getting less useful, more disposable, less repariable, of worse quality, and locked behind DRMs and service-instead-of-product schemes.

[manigandham]

Why does it matter? You haven't answered that, other than seemingly stating that you don't like it.

No, agency is not overridden. That's a crazy stretch. The most advertising can do is create desire, but a person still has to make the decision to act. Otherwise you're talking about mind control and if we had that then the world look very different.

Re: product quality, you're just making quite a lot of subjective statements so I'll skip it.

[throwaway0255]

What value do marketers add to people’s lives? Can you give me an example?

Follow-up question: Do you think the impact of marketers on people’s lives globally is net positive, or net negative?

[tobltobs]

They enable you to sell the stuff you produce.

[TeMPOraL]

How, though?

Do you need them to just announce to the world that your product exists and solves a particular set of problems? Or do you need them to break through the noise caused by all the other marketers? ;).

It's a self-sustaining industry. If you squint, it's basically rent-seeking.

[george_morgan]

Everyone hates advertising, until they lose their dog.

[tobltobs]

Don't know how you would avoid this. Maybe with a kind of five-year plans for the national economy [1]. But this concept wasn't really successful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_for_the_nation...

[geezerjay]

> How, though?

You can't buy a product/service you don't know exists.

[pertymcpert]

No less so than the people who make the products they help sell.

[binomialxenon]

I get that this is a joke, but I also can't wait for AMP in its current form to die. Relatively lightweight pages = good… centralizing the web under Google's control = bad.

[philliphaydon]

Yeah and the fact it doesn’t always work well. Trying to navigate and it isn’t working cos I need to break out of amp first.

[stochastic_monk]

It breaks most sites I use, unfairly promotes sites buying in toward the top, and I spend more data, time, and frustration than I would otherwise because I need to proceed to the actual page to get what I need.

It’s a pure negative.

[Angostura]

Waiting for Apple to introduce a 'show originals rather than AMP' default into iOS Safari.

[millstone]

This feels inevitable, culminating in "Default Reader Mode." It makes one wonder why Google didn't bury some option to disable AMP to head this off.

[14]

This exactly...So frustrating clicking a web page and then inside the webpage parts of it are broken because you are actually at the amp site not the actual site. I haven't looked at how I can just avoid amp sites all together but if I had the choice I would.

[wolco]

Marketers are the group who initially welcomed this. A shift is happening.

[puranjay]

It wouldn't be a HN comment section without unnecessary hate on marketers.

Not all marketers sell snakeoil and used cars, you know

[geezerjay]

> It wouldn't be a HN comment section without unnecessary hate on marketers.

Marketers are the single most destructive force impacting the lives of anyone using the internet nowadays, whether from attacks on privacy to manipulating democratic elections.

[puranjay]

Of course, the blame is on marketers using Facebok to manipulate elections. The programmers who make Facebook's entire marketing platform possible are completely blameless in this, aren't they?

I really expect more nuanced comments than this on HN.

[Existenceblinks]

Tech hype on k8s could also be seen as marketing. CTOs couldn't resist eh!

[majewsky]

I see what you're getting at, but in my experience at my own company, the hype around k8s didn't come from the CTOs, it came from the actual users and cluster operators. Our team adopted k8s in 2015, not because any manager told us to, but because our lead architect pushed it inside the team. Other teams started using it themselves and it became so popular that we built not one, but two Kubernetes-as-a-Service solutions in different parts of the company (in a sort of accidental grassroots situation).

[Existenceblinks]

That's what I mean. CTOs have more management mindset or awareness than operators. And they love and trust their engineers. That's why they couldn't resist what their team embraces. They are willing to take technical debt risk because they think their team can handle it.

There are categories of company. Yours has a dedicated team taking care of cluster, even has enough resource to make it k8s-as-a-service. Whatever hype rarely affects companies that have resources (money, human, time etc.)

But hype doesn't choose companies, it spreads and kills approaches that are more proper than k8s to a lot of companies. I'd love to see how many SMEs even need servers clustering.

[chris_wot]

It's not just marketers who hate it.

[pjc50]

Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy, because he's just an asshole.

[diminoten]

I can't take criticisms of AMP seriously when they (so frequently) pretend like there are no upsides.

[da02]

What does a marketer do on a daily basis?

Edit: Removed "Is it different than advertising?"

[Gustomaximus]

Its very diverse. Most people dont realise and I often see people say 'I want to work in marketing'' which is about as specific as saying 'I want to work in IT'.

Even with advertising alone there is 1) buying it, 2) concepting the brand message 3) writing the specific content 4) creating how it looks 5) creating the material and 6) Placing it 7) project managing the process 8) analysing the results - all as separate fields.

And within above people can specialise in specific categories like online, above the line (e.g. billboards), below the line offline (e.g. snail mail), TV, sponsorship etc

And that's just getting ads live....

I googled 'types of marketing jobs' and read about 5 articles and they all have different guides about what makes marketing roles and none seems to cover it.... One article put sales in marketing which is a common misunderstanding of what marketing is, and several times I've seen companies put top sales management in charge of marketing because 'they can sell' which does not work as its a surprising different skill set.

But here's a couple of articles to cover the common areas;

https://www.localwise.com/a/313-21-types-of-marketing-jobs-t...

https://marketingwit.com/types-of-marketing-jobs

Or you could go with the sometimes tech view... the guys that play with crayons and waste money :)

[thaumasiotes]

> above the line (e.g. billboards), below the line offline (e.g. snail mail)

What is "the line"?

[thaunatos]

> What are ATL and BTL activities? They seem simple enough. Above The Line (ATL) advertising is where mass media is used to promote brands and reach out to the target consumers. These include conventional media as we know it, television and radio advertising, print as well as internet. This is communication that is targeted to a wider spread of audience, and is not specific to individual consumers. ATL advertising tries to reach out to the mass as consumer audience.

> Below the line (BTL) advertising is more one to one, and involves the distribution of pamphlets, handbills, stickers, promotions, brochures placed at point of sale, on the roads through banners and placards. It could also involve product demos and samplings at busy places like malls and market places or residential complexes.

http://www.theadvertisingclub.net/index.php/features/editori...

[throwawayndhks]

The line is the eyeline. If you’ve looking up - like a highway billboard, it’s ATL. If you’re looking down - at a brochure- it’s BTL.

Of course this definition is not exactly correct or exhaustive anymore, this is just the origin. Now it’s understood as defined by the other commentators.

[donavanm]

Interesting, ut I didnt catch what “the line” is. is the terminology related to “above the fold” and “below the fold” from the print industry?

As a terminology aside online retail sales still uses “hard lines” and “soft lines” as product & organization categories!

[thaumasiotes]

I'm intrigued that a billboard is above the line, but banners and placards on the roads are below the line.

[bduerst]

It has to do with reach - billboards are typically high-volume, low-specificity impressions while placards and banners are typically event-specific and have a lower, more targeted audiences. There's gray area, obviously, like billboards in airports.

[Gustomaximus]

> but banners and placards on the roads are below the line

I would include that as above the line. My understanding is ATL is for mass viewing. While BTL directly or reasonably targeted to the individual. I say 'reasonably' as often EDM/DM (emails and mailers) have broad targeting cohorts & elements but are considered BTL.

[rrdharan]

This is a good post, but OT I had not heard “concepting” before...

https://muddlesintomaxims.com/2016/02/27/verbing-weirds-lang...

[Gustomaximus]

Branding or brand strategy would have been better language/jargon... not that this helps with verbing!

[sharkweek]

Marketing can be super broad - but let's say you run a business that solves a problem for a specific type of customer.

A marketer would find your marketable database of potential customers, work on messaging that appeals to the needs of the different audience types, find ways to target these audiences through channels like email, search marketing, content/SEO, social, etc., allocate budget broadly to test the different channels, and then turn dials accordingly dependent on where marketing budget has the best return.

The daily tasks of this can be anything from producing new marketing collateral, testing new channel tactics, adjusting lead flow and lead distribution to a sales team, managing agency support, cozying up with PMs/engineers to get product features added, calm a sales manager who is pissy about why leads aren't flowing or being properly distributed, etc.

[manigandham]

Advertising is a subset marketing, specifically the communication part. The rest of marketing includes pricing, positioning, customer personas, etc.

[dazc]

I would broadly describe my role as a 'marketer' and, in all honesty, I add nothing of any value to my clients.

It's a kind of wealth distribution, nothing more.

I've had jobs in the past where I've been paid more for doing less. I've also experienced the exact reverse. I think a lot of people are in denial because they haven't had the life experience where they can say the same?

[rchaud]

> It's a kind of wealth distribution, nothing more.

If this is truly how you feel, why not try to add value for your clients instead of just taking the money and not contributing? I work in digital marketing and what I do, among other things involves:

- conducting split testing experiments to evaluate which types of marketing copy or site UX lead to better conversion

- evaluating client's web properties to improve SEO, things like semantic content layout, redirect types (301 v 302 etc), accessibility, logical information architecture

- writing code for custom event tracking, implementing schema-based markup for better search engine discoverability

- creating outreach campaigns via email, social and paid search channels, each of which requires has its own KPIs and require a fair amount of domain knowledge to implement and measure effectively

- analyzing search trend data to figure out if the product copy language is similar to what users are searching for

[jackgolding]

I've worked in client side businesses with marketing teams of 5-30 people, two of those in marketing. A lot of the day to day the marketing teams do is manage outside agencies who do the creative, ad-buying, events and present that up to the stakeholders. There obviously is strategy work which is pre-campaign and is what the more senior marketers do (even though this is the most emphasized part in uni.) There are a few more functions which are more likely to not be subcontracted like CRM (emails), content (blogs etc), analytics, social media management and corporate comms.

For your original question, the difference between this and advertising is an advertiser receives a brief and builds creatives appropriate to whatever channels they and the marketer choose.

This is my experience and a few marketers have disagreed with this - obviously it varies between companies.

[propogandist]

Depends on the type of marketing, at a large corporation this is broken out into various functions as a lot of roles roll up into marketing. Some categories:

Advertising - digital, physical

Analytics - web traffic, roi analysis, data-mining, segmentation etc

Brand marketing - ads, identity / messaging, etc

Content - creating new content for the business around product/service to support promotional activity

Email - "subscribe to my newsletter", but at enterprise scale and managing content for the millions of subscribers you have

Product marketing - often a function in large enterprises, may be involved with things like messaging within a product

Web - website, seo, design, architecture, UX etc all fall under marketing

There's also a lot of functions that support many of these marketing roles, like the tech that powers all this, keeping things working smoothly, including integrations, compliance with stuff like GDPR, CASL etc

[Ensorceled]

That's a little like asking "What does a blacksmith do? Is it different than making horseshoes?"

[da02]

I know it was a "stupid" question. But, sometimes I do that in the hopes that someone will provide a guide to a better understanding of the topic. Plus, HN is a good place for anecdotal stuff and "war stories" that are hard to find on other parts of the WWW.

[ObsoleteNerd]

I think it's a fair question. It's not an industry you hear lots about day to day, so the average person has no idea what's involved other than "they make ads".

I've worked in large companies with 20+ person Marketing/PR departments and I'm not actually sure what their day to day job entails, and would totally be curious to know more. It's a major part of society these days, whether we love it or hate it. We all know IT has phone support roles, application development, system admins, project managers, etc... but I couldn't really tell you what all the different roles are in marketing.

[ladzoppelin]

Marketing is extremely technical these days, IMO. Learning to work with API's and even learning Python seems like it would really help anyone in most fields.