“I’ve somehow found marketers nowadays buying programmatic software are kind of like consumers buying robotic vacuums for the house,” says Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing officer of Mozilla, the owner of the Firefox web browser.
“It promises to clean the house so you turn it on and leave,” he says. “But what happens when you’re gone is it just runs through your chairs, footings, hits the tables, goes over the rugs, then gets stuck underneath the couch until it runs out of batteries.
“The dirty secret is marketers have become very lazy in the last two decades, putting all the responsibility in the software they have bought to find the magic math equation.
“The promise of a vacuum cleaner is big, but in practical use it doesn’t work. Similarly, marketing softwares help you, but they certainly wouldn’t replace all the hard work you have to do.”
The promise of a [robotic vacuum] is big, but in practical use it doesn’t work. Similarly, marketing softwares help you, but they certainly wouldn’t replace all the hard work you have to do.
Drawing references from big CPG companies such as Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola, he reminds marketers not to simply buy CRM, or a programmatic ad buying engine, or a content marketing influencer platform, but equip them with marketing research.
In what he describes as “life-cycle marketing”, he says his team tunes its marketing message at different stages of a customer journey so it makes sense for the user at the time.
“It shouldn’t sound that crazy or new because it’s not. It’s very (basic) in marketing, and the fundamentals are very important.”
“We have to spend time on marketing, and we have to do the hard work on it.”
Read more: Firefox: We're not an advertising machine
This story appeared in the Marketing Magazine Hong Kong July issue as: Firefox not an advertising machine