This might ruffle a few feathers...
 

This was sent to us... you may agree, you may disagree, but it's definitely worth the read IMO.

Opinion: You?re No Good at Marketing --

You can?t major in ?porn economics? at Harvard or study ?adult website marketing? at Oxford. Even local state colleges don?t offer anything that can directly prepare you for this unique industry. The people who try their hand at making money in this business arrive here by all sorts of different avenues, but few are well trained and capable when they get started. That?s just the simple truth of it.

MORE: YNOT - Opinion: You?re No Good at Marketing

:2 cents:

GREAT article.
I agree - people who think they are brilliant rarely are.

Hey it was good finally meeting you at the EU shows dude...

You too - and great job as Emcee at the Awards!! :)

We all make mistakes in business, but the one mistake that gets repeated more than any other is failure to keep it up. And no, nobody is talking about your dick. We’re talking about marketing here, you sick fuck.

where i stopped

Like DamianJ

Haha... thanks. Glad you enjoyed it. :thumbsup

I don't have a clue but I heard this song that explains everything. I think its kinda like saying a drug dealer needs to have marketing skills. The shit sells itself.

You don't need marketing to sell pussy to horny dudes... :2 cents:

Did you hit this?

http://www.payoutmagazine.com/galler...images/006.jpg
http://www.payoutmagazine.com/galler...images/008.jpg
shame about the ass (on the right)

Nice read, thank you! :thumbsup

Let's see...some of the greatest "marketers" of all time didn't have any "training" either.

Fact is, some people are just damn good at it.

Neither Don King nor P.T. Barnum had degrees in "marketing". Barnum would have laughed that anybody could be conned into paying for a degree in "marketing" and probably would have opened a college for it himself to take even more money from the "marks".

Just sayin', knowledge is great. Education is great.

Some things can't be taught. If they could...then I guess we would have thousands of brand new "marketing" geniuses every year coming out of college blowing everybody away.

Nope, that doesn't happen.

Only a few have the select instinct and natural ability to present a product to other people and sell it.
Not talking about porn by the way...it was an easy sell (before it was free).

But I have seen guys who could literally "Sell ice cream to an eskimo" as the old saying goes.
They aren't common. And they didn't "learn" it in college.

I have no idea who the top "marketers" in the world are. You know the ones who are making millions of dollars off of successfully marketing products.
But I'd bet that the majority of them didn't go to school for "marketing".

Schools turn out little clones, all with the same exact idea and approach. True innovation doesn't come from that. And I'd say history bears that out.

There are some truths in the article, yes. But a couple of other points:

The best paid, best educated are not necessarily the best marketers. That's like saying McDonald's is the best food, because they sell the most.

Also, it has been argued elsewhere that the adult industry has some of the most clever marketers, since the business changes so rapidly and there's very little lag time on response. If you look at the brief history of online adult, the number of guerilla marketing plans that have blossomed overnight and become the norm within a year is astounding.

Can you imagine the devastating effect to their respective industries if, say, Google decided for whatever reason not to crawl for online auction items anymore, or if TV & cable networks decided to stop running ads for beer? They simply aren't built to react in a nimble fashion the way adult is. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people would be out of work overnight.

I think that the larger mistake than not sticking it out is sticking to the same plan for too long. When I hear people complaining that, ten or fifteen years ago, it was all free money, I think of the year I spent in a tiny town in Ohio. Night after night, the locals would sit on their barstools, collecting unemployment, waiting for the day the steel mill would open back up...

That was an appallingly industry-disparaging article to run. Lots of people in online adult are (a) successful, (b) educated, (c) excellent marketers, and/or (d) noticeably "really brilliant". In addition, most successful businesses fit into neither of those rudely dismal scenarios.

They don't teach the nuts and bolts of the oil business or banking or "mainstream" in school either. Quality education teaches mostly how to learn and how to think, not industry specifics.

No offense, but it sounds like that guy's job is not running sites, but rooking non-industry people out of supposed "marketing" budget. And it pisses him off that his clients care about ROI. If Dennis Taylor were able to provide that much value, I'm guessing fewer people would be wondering who he is.

Seriously, Jay, you know I love you, but did you all just run that as outrageous clickbait or what?

ROMI is the correct acronym for marketing - Return on Marketing Investment. A lot of people waste a lot of time and money on decade(s) old marketing schemas that get them nowhere.

Cleverness and persistence are the words I think we're looking for when it comes to the online adult business. No matter the budget.

Who the fuck told you that there was an education for anything, where you could just step out of college and know everything?

You learn a set of tools and processes to help you understand whatever niche of the trade you enter, when you leave college.

... Oh shit, there is no fish or agricolture tradespecific education either... but looks like they do allright anyway.

I agree AND disagree.

There is nothing under the sun that is "new" in marketing.

Just like George Lucas once said that "Star Wars" is really just a "Western" (cowboy) movie dressed up differently.

Selling stuff to people has the centuries old basics that will never change.
Some folks are good at finding the newest way to tweak it with different details. But the actual way of selling it is timeless.

And I'm not talking about finding new media ways to deliver (like when the internet first started and some ad companies were late to the game). That is a whole other discussion.

I'm talking about the actual ability to sell something. Not drive blind traffic. Or like Pornhub just have so much traffic that you can throw shit on the wall and see what sticks.

I'm talking about developing something. Carefully crafting an image for it. Focusing like an arrow. And then always keeping your eyes open to what popular culture is doing so you can tweak out different ways of marketing.

Obviously with the internet and social media...the art of marketing has never been better.
And conversely, there have never been more people failing at it at the same time. lol

Absolutely.

And I'd bet it would be difficult to point out even one marketing guy at the top of the game in the world who actually majored in "marketing" in college.

The truly creative types don't always waste their time in college being taught that what they do is "wrong".

Kinda reminds me of "GIT" (Guitar Institute Of Technology)

I first heard about them back in the early 1980's when I was in college. I wanted to go because it was in Los Angeles (and I was in Florida) and they had all these guys that could teach you to play all the coolest fastest sweeping techniques so you could play note for note like Yngwie Malmsteen and Frank Gambale (Gambale even taught there).

Funny thing is...guys like Van Halen, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, etc., etc. NEVER went to any of those kinds of schools.
And I also NEVER heard any of the graduates of GIT becoming guitar legends.
They all just ended up in crappy hair bands in L.A. during the 1980's lol

You see my point?
Education is great. And I wouldn't discourage anyone from it. But just because you get a fancy degree doesn't make you GOOD at something. Or creative.

Those guitar players from GIT all came out with jaw-dropping technique and virtuosity. But could they write a good song? Could they touch people?

Meanwhile Keith Richards was shooting heroin, banging on an open tuned telecaster with only 5 strings and making history.

I'm quoting the article. I'm the messenger here...

we chuckled too :winkwink:

@ LAJ :thumbsup