The linked article has a great suggestion to start by hiring marketing ICs instead of marketing managers. Skipping straight to hiring a CMO who intends to build out a full marketing team to get the work done is a recipe for massive spending and long delays before results are seen.

In my experience, the key is to hire someone who understands your market first, not just the art of marketing in general. If their first step after hiring is to do market research to begin to understand the customers, you’re probably too late. You need to get a head start with someone who already knows the industry and the market so they can skip straight to spending marketing budgets where they are known to work well. In parallel they can research additional avenues that could compliment the startup’s unique position.

I can only assume from this post that you are not yourself an experienced marketer.

>"The smallest ad here and there start at 100k each"

This is flat out a false statement. The smallest ad you can run is whatever the minimum spend is in whatever publisher you're buying from which is often a few bucks. You won't get visible returns with this (in a statistical sense at least), but it is doable.

>"lack of (visible) returns"

Any marketer, especially ones doing an ad buy over some period of time approaching the $100k level who doesn't use analytics and/or incrementality tests to prove their results should not be touching that budget.

>"Besides, the more they spend the better for their resume so marketing is really enticed to go big."

I've reviewed many resumes and hired marketers and media professionals of all levels. If someone had big budgets listed on their resume, but couldn't back that up with details around the results and outcomes, and their role in delivering those, it would be a very short conversation. Likewise, I've been very impressed with some of the creative and impactful things people have done with smaller budgets that forced them to be scrappy. So bigger is not always better.

First, you’re talking about advertising, not marketing. Also this all might have been true 15 years ago. But these days you aren’t likely to see a startup with under $50million in funding (so, 99% of startups) do TV ads and OOH and event sponsorships.

Those are “brand” advertising techniques still popular among legacy CPG brands who are stuck in the old world. Those are the campaigns with no exact way to measure returns other than educated guesses.

Any properly run startup today is focusing the majority of ad spend on “direct response,” or direct sales ie. Facebook ads, google AdWords, etc. or actual human sales teams.

This spending is 100% measurable so any company paying more to acquire customers than the customer’s exact LTV is simply dumb or trying some nefarious loss leader strategy.

Facebook and Google sit at the top of S&P 500 right now because their ad networks are so measurable and perfectly targeted.

There is no problem with a lack of visible returns on Facebook or google ad spend.

Marketing (and advertising) revolves around human behavior. Anyone who thinks that's easy is a fool, or not human ;)

Fact #2 that most inside a given (startup) brand find hard to swallow is this:

Nobody cares. About your product, or your brand.

Sure, there's an audience of early adopters, and maybe you're gotten traction there. But once you get past "the cool kids" the dynamic changes. As you venture towards the middle of a market, people like their status quo. A wink, a smile and "try me, I'm new" isn't going to cut it.

Or maybe you're a B2B play. Yeah, (e.g.) banks are great customers. Do you think you're the only one with that in mind? Do you understand how slow they are to evolve? And...They don't care. You need them. They don't need you.

Solving tech problems is _easy_ relative to growth-seeking marketing (and advertising).

Startups may not be running traditional TV ad campaigns, but a lot are running LIVESTREAMING ad campaigns on services such as YT and Twitch. Not just traditional ads either, sponsored streams that the streamer puts up the logo on the overlay for a few hours and plugs the product occasionally. Those are the new TV ads

Anyone who says their minimal incremental unit is 100k of ad spend is ripping you off. I run an agency with major silicon valley clients and we generally can prove roi or not on 10k ad spend on a channel.

> IMO the challenge with marketing is the very high budget and lack of (visible) returns .

Modern digital marketing is focused on measurability and ROI. Even traditional marketing can be measured, it's just a bit harder.

When you hire your first head of marketing, make sure they are ROI and results focused. A quick look at their resume or LinkedIn should tell you everything you need to know... is it full of numbers/data, or is it a list of tasks & buzzword bingo?

Marketing is far more than just ad spend.

The problem is that many marketing managers see it exactly like that. "What's your marketing budget? We can help you spend it!".

That's not what a 'marketing manager' says, that's what an 'agency' says. Very different things.

Part of this misunderstanding derives from what was hinted at in the article in that the valley has basically a complete lack of understanding of what marketing is.

I'm saying that a marketing managers don't say this:

"What's your marketing budget? We can help you spend it!"

That's what agencies say.

Some marketing managers may like to talk about 'budget spend' but that's only one part of what they do, and remember that every 'marketing manager' knows how fickle spend is and is not going to care about 'spend' but rather 'ROI' on that spend.

Exactly that. They want to put a line in their resume showing what sort of measurable growth they delivered with that budget. Having just the budget without the outcomes is not a good thing.

*the challenge with poorly designed and poorly executed marketing.