
Ask HN: Is a digital marketer a slave to the developers? - vishnuvvn
Quite often digital marketer relies a lot on the developer to set up a lot of things for him for eg: Events tracking, Landing pages, integrating with other tools etc.<p>This reduces the productivity of digital marketers drastically.<p>What are your thoughts on this?
======
wjossey
No. No team member at a company should ever be a slave to another, regardless
of their role and function.

Teamwork and participation in a group is all about service, not slavery. The
developer acts in service to the marketer, who needs assistance with things
like funnel tweaks, event wiring, analytics add one, and more. The digital
marketer is in service to the developer, as they can add fresh users to a
platform, which can provide insights and illuminate opportunities for
improvement.

If we keep looking throughout an organization, all roles manifest themselves
this way. Whether it be finance, support, operations, design, product, or
legal. If we position our perspective from that as an adversarial one (a la
slavery), the perspective does look like one where productivity is reduced
drastically because we are blocked on one another. If we view it positively (a
la in service of one another), and act accordingly, we find that whatever
slowdowns we perceive at a micro level are made up for in major macro
improvements.

So, to answer your original question, no. Marketers are not slaves to
developers.

~~~
vishnuvvn
Yes, slavery could've framed better. However, I wanted to get the message
across.

------
mindcrash
Pretty weird thing to say, and it signals that your organization design is
incorrect.

What you should have in place is:

1) A department solely dedicated to product design, development and management

2) A department dedicated to offline and online marketing. This includes
people who are able to create marketing assets including web developers,
content designers and even video editors (e.g. for creating content for TV or
YouTube)

Because what you mean with "slave" is that the people running your marketing
department currently seem dependent on the people working on your product who
have ZERO time to put into marketing efforts because their schedules are
filled to the brink with product work, which is not really strange

What is strange however is that you created this dependency which seems to
completely destroy your ability to do digital marketing.

So hire yourself a small team to help your marketing department out with all
things they are incapable to do. Right now I'm thinking about the following
roles: a designer (which hopefully can double as a frontend developer), a
front developer (in case the forementioned designer only can design -- yes
they still exist), a developer with knowledge of the CMS system you are using
and someone who is able to keep your marketing related systems up and running
(this could also be the forementioned developer). Let them report to your head
of marketing, let them work solely on marketing related taks and your problem
is solved.

~~~
vishnuvvn
Sorry, I wasn't talking about our organization. I was talking in general.

End of the day, marketers still need developers to do their day-to-day jobs.

------
e10jc
I would say if they cannot operate third-party services like Google Tag
Manager, then yes. But that's on them. A warning sign of an ineffective
department (marketing, ads, comms, etc) is when they insist that anything
involving a web site gets clumped under "tech".

~~~
vishnuvvn
Unfortunately, we can't have tech in-house in 90% of the businesses worldwide.

------
travem
My thoughts are that invoking slavery to denote a dependency is ridiculous.

~~~
vishnuvvn
Yes, I agree with you. Could've framed that better.

------
throwaway2016a
The way most companies handle this is by giving the marketing team a budget to
have their own dedicated developer or two.

To that extent they are no more a slave to the developer than a person dining
at a restaurant is a slave to their wait staff. Sure the water could take
extra long to deliver the food but that does not mean they are in control.

To be a slave the other person needs to be exercising control over you.

As a developer, ever try to tell marketing that they can't do something for
technical reasons, scheduling, or because it is just a bad idea? Extreme
example, the way I have seen it work mostly:

1\. Marketing wants to make all advertisement autoplay audio

2\. Development says: we are busy until next week working on a major deadline,
and even if we did have the time autoplaying audio ads is a terrible idea
because it has been shows repeatedly to turn off people from your brand

3\. Marketing talks to the CEO

4\. The ad are autoplaying audio that night and now the developers have to
work extra hours because the deadline they were working on still needs to be
done.

If anything it is the other way around... devs are a slave to marketing.
Marketing says "jump" the devs have to say "how high?" regardless of what else
they were working on.

You say:

> This reduces the productivity of digital marketers drastically.

But in reality unless marketing has it's own developers you are in fact
decreasing developers productivity and costing the company a lot of time,
potentially money, and in many cases decreasing the work-life balance of the
developers.

Think about what those developers needed to stop working on to do your task. I
doubt they were sitting on their hands.

Edit: with that said, there doesn't mean it's not a problem that needs to be
fixed. But put yourself in the developers shoe's for a minute. They don't like
the arrangement any more than marketing does.

And it doesn't help when marketing shows no respect for the developers time.
Real world example: a marketing team at one of our clients has been working on
a TV ad campaign for months. They finished the TV campaign and now they need a
landing page for it... they just told us about this landing page Wednesday.
The ad campaign "absolutely has to start Friday"... the amount of disrespect
you need to have for developers to do something like that is incredible. They
new about the need for a landing page for months and gave dev 3 days when they
got months to make their 30 second video...

~~~
vishnuvvn
Agree with every point you said.

On a slightly lighter note, are you a developer?

~~~
throwaway2016a
I am a developer who also has a business background.

For the record I think marketing is a vital job and marketing should be given
the attention, respect, and help they need to succeed.

The question just hit a nerve because there are a certain segment of marketers
who don't show any respect for developers. They think because the thing they
need done isn't done immediately that the developer must be either doing
something wrong or deliberately ignoring their request. Usually it is neither
of those things, they are just really busy and last minute requests throw off
their whole day.

~~~
vishnuvvn
Sure, that's exactly what I wanted to hear. It's just that priorities don't
align with both the teams all the time.

------
quickthrower
Developers experience the same issue with users. Relying on users to.give
feedback, initial requirements.etc.

------
davidivadavid
Most of the things you've listen can be done (and are routinely done) by
marketers. Because they're marketers doesn't mean they can't use a computer.

There are cases where developers may be required (e.g. building a custom tool
for some campaign) but that work can often be outsourced.

------
evadne
No. Marketing / Sales / Support should have its own technology budget to run
systems it needs.

~~~
vishnuvvn
Small and medium sized business cannot have a separate budget. Esp when the
marketing is the cost center, most of the time cannot have a developer full
time assisting them.

~~~
evadne
I would take this point further as evidence why a developer, who does not wish
to spend time on non-product engineering, should not join a small or medium
sized business.

It is fine to have an engineer do both jobs, but my stance is that time spent
on non-product engineering needs to be accounted under the proper accounting
bucket, in order to avoid diffusion of responsibilities.

------
mayank
A number of companies now let you drop an SDK into your app build and let
marketers manage some aspects of the app via a web GUI (push notification
campaigns and a/b testing at least).

Check out www.leanplum.com

------
jenkstom
Time for MarketOps...

