Pausing for a bit of self reflection as I consider my profession today.

Face it Skott. You’re a Marketer.

Skott Bennett
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

This wasn’t the plan. This was never the plan. From my earliest days as a graphic designer, to my current incarnation as a creative director, I’ve always liked to think of myself as one layer removed from those marketing types. Especially the ones who blog about marketing because who needs another one of those, right?

Oh. Right. Sorry about that.

Not that there’s anything wrong with marketers. Some of my best friends are marketers. CMO-friendly? Sure. ROI-curious? Hey, we all experiment sometimes.

But I wasn’t one of them.

A big part of my job has always been to enable and empower marketers with great work. The tougher the problem the better. Have a misunderstood product or technology that hasn’t been explained well? Let me at it. I’ve built a modest career on asking dumb questions until I finally understand something enough to explain it simply. But that’s just the product–the what. My best and most fulfilling work has always been about–the who. Whenever I truly understood and cared about the people those marketers were working so hard to reach, that’s where the best stuff would happen. What are they dreaming about? What do they struggle with? Plugging into that mindset and workflow has always been one of the best things about my job.

Make the thing. Pitch the thing. Debate the thing. Then turn the thing over to one of those marketing types.

I made it. Let them measure it.

I was in it for the art. What the marketers did was the science. And frankly, I found a lot of that science boring. I’d nod along/nod off as people threw around acronyms and analytics and I’d pretend to understand whatever spreadsheet they emailed to me. But my ears would always perk up when one of those marketing types would start to talk about audiences and what we could learn about them. How they were responding to our campaigns? When did they stop watching our videos? How are they really using our websites? This is how we could learn what they were dreaming about. This is how we could feel what they were struggling with.

You know who cares about that stuff and how to measure it? Marketers. And me.

Face it Skott. You’re a marketer.

I may dream about the art of understanding human beings, but I struggle with the science of it. That’s why last month I enrolled Udacity’s Digital Marketing Nanodegree. Over the next few months I’ll be running, measuring, and optimizing actual campaigns across multiple channels to finally get the hands-on experience of what happens to all of my ideas after I turn them over to a digital marketer. Dabbling in this stuff is not gonna cut it for me anymore. I want to master it.

You know. Like a real marketer.

#IminDMND

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