[jpzeni]

Everything seemed to be flowing logically until I got to this statement "No traditional marketer would have figured this out" (referring to integrating a Craigslist post into Airbnb). To that statement my question is why couldn't a traditional marketer imagine that functionality? They probably wouldn't have been able to create the actual implementation themselves but that would be a job for an engineer regardless of who came up with the idea. If the marketer happened to be an engineer great, if not, it seems like something that would just be delegated to a technical member of the team.

From what I understand Airbnb did a fair bit of spamming to craigslist prior to the very slick layout you see there so the idea of marketing via craigslist was already baked into their strategy regardless of it's implementation.

[malandrew]

I wouldn't say that they couldn't figure it out, but it wouldn't be an intuitive solution for someone who doesn't hack. We want marketers that can code for the same reason that we want designers that can code. We want that because some of the most important design decisions happen in code. A corollary to this would be that some of the most important marketing decisions happen in code.

The most obvious of this would be recognizing how you can programmatically hook your application with 0 users to another system with thousands to millions of users. An obvious solution that a regular marketer may recognize is simple address book integration. A less obvious solution that a hacker with API experience would recognize is how to hook into the Twitter search API, programmatically recognize hashtags and generate responses that appear legit from a real user.

Any sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content. It often takes a hacker to make the decisions that further advance field of spam to the level of content.

[dean]

I agree. In fact, I would go even further and say that a non-technical person could come up with even better ideas because they are not constrained by what is technically possible. They think you can do absolutely anything with software. Whereas an engineer might (even subconsciously) be discouraged because they know it would take a lot of hard work to do the thing.

[chrissanz]

that could be true in some instances, in my experience (and the majority of the time), traditional marketers are not always thinking about the more technical opportunities (and more often than not, they are coming up with awful+old school initiatives). hackers on the other hand are always trying to figure out how to hack something for their own benefit... looking at packets to see if something can be reversed engineered or scanning services that are relevant + popular and could help grow your company. I've been in situation (multiple times) when the marketing person is not even aware of such places. This is why someone who has the technical chops and is dedicated to growth could be very interesting. I would not hire a marketing guy without tech experience