Over time it is natural for any marketing department and development team/s to drift apart. I suspect it is often due to differing personality types amongst the decision makers - in development you often have ex-developers in management positions, in marketing you have a wide array of PR professionals and the more dangerous variety, marketing degree graduates ignoring everything they learnt in their marketing degree.

Many web developers have some marketing experience in their past - many web roles are about executing on marketing strategies - many more are multi-skilling producer/marketer/developer type roles (I’ve had experience in both).

Developers work well as marketers for certain tasks - particularly the measurable ones. Internet PR, SEO, SEM these are all tasks often undertaken by developers when there is no other implementers available. We also do some tasks terribly. Sometimes over-estimating clients and prospects. Sometimes under - we forget that they are not us.

A good marketer has been trained in all the tools and techniques to find out who the target market is. I often get frustrated when marketing lose sight of this and spend too much time engaged in PR activities (but maybe that will be the topic of a future post).

What is often overlooked is that the worst situation for a company is for communication breakdown between tech and marketing. Take the new site that one of the big 4 australian banks, ANZ, launched - designmycard.com.au. It went live with a TVC campaign - the purpose of which was to drive consumers to their website. The website is no doubt the hard work of some creative individuals as are the TVCs. The key point of connection is the URL. The ads use the more modern looking URL sans the www. So why the hell hasn’t anyone configured the webserver to resolve said domain??

As someone with a web development background I spotted the gaffe straight away and adjusted the URL I typed in the URL with the www added (after checking my internet connectivity and a host of other common issues that cause a site not to load…). But I can guarantee that the majority of people who saw the ads tonite and tried the URL did not. As Seth Godin says, ‘no one cares about you’ (that’s you ANZ).

The implementation fault is obviously on the technical side - its webserver configuration most likely. But the real fault is that a TVC campaign was launched directing people to a non-existant address. This sort of oversight I’d wager sits on the other side of the fence.

But the point of this post is not to gloat. I say wander down to your marketing manager’s pod or office and get reacquainted.

Stumble it!