The world we live in is colossal. There are millions of companies around the globe we will never see or even hear about in our entire lifetime. However, even a one-person company formed in a kitchen in Indonesia can create a marketing campaign targeting anyone they want across the world and get noticed. The Internet has taken the entire world and reduced it to the size of a smartphone. That means every marketing campaign from any company can be revealed to any person with online access. Consumer or not, they can be targeted. As marketers, we love it, during off-hours; most of us probably hate it. I’m a career marketer and here’s my story.

Marketing-Think Never Ends
If you’re a marketing professional, this blog is not for you. Why? Because you already understand what it’s like to attempt to go through life and continually think about your work around the clock. Some professionals can leave their work in the office and go home and those two rarely crossover. However as a marketer, there is no chance that will ever happen. Why in the world didn’t someone tell me this before I decided to invest my career in marketing?

 

Life and marketing are one and there is no separation.
You can’t run and hide from marketing easily and it
always seems to find us wherever we are. 

 

As a career marketer, I’ve discovered that it’s a lifetime of thinking about creativity and new ideas, customers and content, digital and technology, metrics and analysis. Okay, it’s really about life and how everyone, including myself interacts with it. Yep… Life and marketing is all mixed up like jambalaya stew into what we call our job.

We’re All Consumers Bombarded By Marketers

Because we’re all consumers, yes, even us marketing practitioners, we see, hear and engage with marketing campaigns every day of our life. Here’s the hard part. It’s not that the marketing we see is tempting us to buy products all the time, however, what it does is remind us of how we are doing in our own marketing jobs — Ugh. We instantly critique our marketing against what we see others doing and we compare the marketing methods being used by others based on what we would do ourselves. We rewrite the editorial copy in our heads to make it read and flow better. We redesign the layout in milliseconds to make it “better” or “more creative” in our own minds. This marketing dissection process is similar to a surgeon in a critical operating room procedure. As marketers, the surgeon in us just can’t let it go. We can’t stand to see a marketing initiative and not want to make it better with our own creative seal of approval. Sometimes we even take what we see in a marketing campaign and start to instantly give it a life of its own by creating our own version of what it should do and why it should be done that way. Yes, we are immersed in our profession and we can’t help but critique every other marketing campaign we see. I guess that is the creator in us that always wants to do more. We are clearly bombarded by other marketers and we also self-inflict the dissection process on ourselves without even knowing it sometimes.

The Frenzied Marketing Pace Never Stops
Marketing staffers know that the pace of their job runs relentlessly on high octane thinking and doing. There is never a day when a marketer can rest because our customers just keep coming and they always want more, when they want it and how they want it. Not to mention ongoing product launches, new offerings, expanding into new markets and A/B testing what we are doing to get a better idea of what’s working and what’s not. Naturally, social media just escalates this already frenetic pace and throws it into overdrive because social has all but taken over our life, as we know it. When we’re not working on social for our company, we are immersed in it personally. And dare I say they both crossover even during business hours. Social media has blurred the line between what’s business and what’s personal.

Just When You Thought Your Brain Could Rest
Downtime for me if there is such a thing is when I’m about to go to sleep at night. That is if I haven’t been working tirelessly on a new concept or idea that has taken my brain hostage. If that occurs, sleep just doesn’t happen. In the rare occurrence that my brain actually gets a mental rest… What happens? Well, now that my brain is actually not on overload it has time to think and be even more creative. Yes this can happen believe it or not. Just when you thought rest was coming, wham! Your brain is now flooded with new ideas, things to do that you haven’t done yet and even some exciting and cool things that you saw in another marketing campaign that can work for you. Here’s the deal, if you’re a marketer, your brain just never stops and it doesn’t take a rest. Sorry folks… It’s the reality of being a creative intellectual in the marketing world.

Article originally published on Huffington Post

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