Dale Berkebile

If you have been reading any of the Brandwise articles over the last 6 months you have probably heard us talking about and sharing ideas on sales and marketing alignment (Smarketing). Now if you would like to hear what other people are saying check out some of the things Alison Savery of Hubspot has to say in a recent article How to Align Sales and Marketing for Results (Not Just Harmony).

20 years ago I was in school learning how to create advertising. Over the last 18 years I have created a ton of different kinds of advertising for all kinds of clients… industrial ads, b2b ads, b2c ads, you name it and I have pretty much done it. As I look back over the last decade I have to chuckle. Several prospects have come to me excited about their product or company and wanting to get out there and tell the world about it.

This morning I am looking through all my clients data to see how they are all doing. In the last 24 hours I have noticed some interesting things about working the numbers.Let’s take a look at what I have found.

Last year I was working with a client in the flooring business. When I started working with this client I told them to cut all yellow page advertising that wasn’t working. The problem is this client advertised in 3 yellow page directories and didn’t know if one or any was effective.

If you do not know these great man in advertising then you should question how much you really know about advertising. In my opinion these are some of the greats and way before my time. Their ideas however have been the foundation for many great ad people.

Somehow we forgot to mention that we made the Top 50 Up and Coming Branding Blogs by the Best Master of Advertising & Marketing Degrees: Advertising Blog. Although these guys are not well known and who knows maybe trying to push there own agenda it is interesting to see Brandwise on any Top 50 List, especially when we are in the top 10 of the top 50 making the cut. It will be nice when this is the top 10 on inc. magazines list, but we will save that for this year!

Here are a few questions you may be asking yourself about Smarketing:

So I just watched Moneyball and I couldn’t help thinking of how this is very similar to the advertising industry. There are a lot of old school agencies that are not getting on board with inbound marketing, they are telling people this new social media thing is just a fad. In the same breath they will start sharing the number of readers of the magazine or newspaper they are trying to get you to place your ads in. This might work with large budgets, but small businesses do not have the budget to play in this field.