Marketing. The word itself holds a lot of meaning. It encompasses so much; from advertising, public relations, and event planning to branding and design, and the list goes on. It seems like every day there are new avenues to reach people. Many business owners know they should be doing it, but what exactly is it?

While the practice of marketing is nothing new, today’s world is unlike any we have seen before. Cue the flashback music and journey back with us to the ad man that we advertising types look up to and the inspiration of why many of us got into this business: David Ogilvy. If you don’t know him, you should, and we encourage you to Google away. To us marketing types, he is to advertising what Shakespeare is to literature or Da Vinci is to art. You could say, he’s our Muse.

Back in Ogilvy’s day, in the 1960s, there were “ad men” who seemed to have it all. Two-martini lunches were a real thing. Never-before-seen creative ideas. Gorgeous secretaries. Impressive ad buys in the four-medium world that made reaching your target audience a much more straightforward task than it is today. The advertising world was sexy, exciting, elite and creative. It was, in comparison to today, simple. But it was our foundation.

Fast forward to 2016 and you might have the occasional after-hours two-martini celebration parties for incredible earned media that we worked weeks to achieve. Today’s marketers have even more daring creative ideas and so many media outlets that one almost doesn’t know where to begin, with all clients requesting measurable results. It’s not just branding anymore. And these days, the pretty girls aren’t held to being secretaries. We run the agencies and our ideas are respected. As the now-extinct cigarette ad would proclaim, You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby.

What is remarkable about marketing today is it seems that just about everybody knows a marketing “expert” of some level or another. Your Uncle Al has a Facebook page with hundreds of friends and the picture he posted of his prime steak on the grill earned him 33 “Likes”. That’s 33, people! While that is pretty impressive, would you take social media advice for your business from Uncle Al? His friends and family do seem to love his grilled steak image. But how do you go from dozens of friends and family liking your steak photo to hundreds of fickle fans seeing what your business posted, caring about what you’ve posted, let alone engaging with or sharing your post? What about creating something that goes viral? This is the essence of marketing, or in this case social media marketing. And why you should never take advice from Uncle Al. We hate to break it to you, but Uncle Al is no marketing expert, even if he is one heck of a grill master. We on the other hand… well, we are marketing and social media gurus.

If you think marketing has changed a lot since Ogilvy’s day, the past 10 years have witnessed an increase in the speed of gained knowledge from the previous 40 years combined. From the emergence of social media and the advent of digital radio to the fading out of the mighty newspaper and Nielsen families being a thing of the past, we have stayed right on top of these trends. You could say, we get it.

We get that while homage needs to be paid to the marketers of the past, we can take the ideas of marketers gone by and bring them into today’s complicated marketing world. That’s where we come in. We still enjoy a good martini, we just sip with one hand while we create incredible results for our clients with the other.

And now… back to our Mad Men episode.