Hey Dave! Great piece. Some thoughts below:

You brought up an interesting point about the Drift product having a quick time to value, however also consider there are many digital marketers who also have the pressure to deliver value quickly. In a world where everything can be analyzed, it’s easy to forget how much time it takes to build relationships when giving marketers a leash. This isn’t just a shift in marketer tactics, it also has to be a culture thing so we have the time to deliver “true” value without resorting to short-term tactics.

Although I know there’s still plenty of spammy SEO’s out there, true white hat SEO’s who are solving for long term EV are focusing on user experience, and thus, making a better expreience for the user. So I have to somewhat disagree with the sentiment that marketing/SEO has become short sighted. Maybe I had too much granola this morning ;)

I work on a brand that has a bit slower time to value, and they aren’t as sharp as us marketing geeks (like Drift’s core audience). So forms/LP’s, etc are still an effective tactic and CAN be a way to deliver value as well. Not all do, of course… but let me be clear, I love the Drift tool from what I see so far so we are certainly going to toy with this approach and let the data do the talking.

I guess my long-winded answer is that GOOD marketing is just like morals/ethics/character, quality means doing it right when nobody is looking…. then they look, hopefully ;)