[zeroego]

As someone who used to work in marketing, this. Anecdotal, but in my experience working in marketing it was often funny to me how little we had to validate the numbers we presented. My boss didn't care how many people actually clicked on the link in our newsletter, as long as we had a lot of subscribers we were good.

[marcosdumay]

> it was often funny to me how little we had to validate the numbers we presented

Yeah, your clients expected you to be the expert, and honestly apply that expertise for their interests. In other words, they expect you to validate those numbers; if they wanted somebody they need to second-guess, they would just take opinions for free from a random web forum.

[zeroego]

We didn't have any clients, it was a marketing department for a CPG company. I was just a peon; I didn't have any say in how things got done. Say all that to say, you would think that at some point VPs of other departments would want to know how all the money that got allocated to marketing was actually benefiting the company. I'm talking a concrete dollars to dollars comparison. I personally didn't get to scratch that itch until I moved into e-commerce.

[marcosdumay]

Well, ok, I misunderstood that part. But the expectation of goal alignment is even stronger for an in-house department.

The people high up expected somebody on your department to validate your numbers and invest on the things that most benefited the company. For an in-house team, it's not rare that this expectation is so strong that nobody ever challenges it. So it's also not very rare that one team or another coast on it and don't deliver much value.

Obviously, none of that is ideal. But that doesn't stop it from being common. Anyway, if your department never checked anything, somebody up from you was doing a bad job, because it's literally their job, not really the random VP (but it is the VP's job to discover if the dept was doing their job) and really not of any other department head.

[jabroni_salad]

to be fair to your boss, you can't actually make me click on your link or read your newsletter. Delivering it is the only thing that you actually have control over, and you're probably delivering to one of those gmail purgatory folders anyways.

[zeroego]

I definitely couldn't "make" anyone click on anything. But delivering it wasn't the only thing we had control over. The format and content of the email we had complete control over. This was years ago, but at the time I suggested trying to record and study which emails lead subscribers to actually click the link so that we could learn to produce content/offers that more people wanted to see. The idea was mostly shrugged off but I did it anyways. When the numbers of people actually following the links went up my boss never wanted to show anybody. My somewhat cynical guess is that he didn't want to introduce real accountability (proof that we were having an effect) into some of the data he was presenting to other departments.

[Cthulhu_]

This is why there's so many subscription services (e.g. streaming, apps, etc) as well; they don't care about viewers or happiness, they (and the stock holders) care about subscribers, because subscribers = fixed and predictable monthly revenue, as well as loyalty (if they don't unsubscribe) and inertia (forgetting to cancel).

[zeroego]

I've often wondered about that. Spotify has never failed to have the music I wanted to listen to. Though their app interface has always been a little painful for me to use.

[olyjohn]

All the streaming services have shitty interfaces. How many times do these fuckers need to poorly re-invent the music player?