Marketing: The Last Job You'll Ever Have?

Recently, I've been searching around the web to understanding the "advertising" industry. This all began with a conversation I had with a friend regarding the industry his works in. After my conversation, I decided to do a little research into his industry. This is where I hit the wall.

I couldn't find an easy to understand article anywhere it clearly describes the advertising space. While I found numerous articles explaining the 4 or 6 major players, the type of services each player offered sometimes number in the 100 if not more. Additionally, the largest players in the advertising space were holding companies such as WPP Group, which held so many companies that I found the following image on their website amuzing.



If I was a non-marketing executive trying to get my feet into the advertising door, I'd be quickly lost in the information overload.

That's when I stumbled upon the following speech given by Seth Godin. If you haven't ever heard of Seth, as I haven't until this video, you can find general information about him here:link

What made the video great was not necessarily what advertising agencies do or how to go about understanding the advertising agency structure. What Seth did for me was made me realize the power of market and how to best leverage that power.

You see, I was asking the wrong question in my quest to understand advertising. I was asking, what did people do? What I should have been asking is, what do customers (customers of advertising agencies) need? If we find out what customers need, we can then work backwards to determine what people need to do to fulfill those needs.

Anway, why not just watch the video. It's much more interesting than my words.