Last week’s Marketing Automation Blog caught my eye. No, not for the scare quotes (bless their little hearts). It was about brand maven David Ogilvy’s iconic, “If you love advertising, get on the handle of an account manager.”

As with Ogilvy’s advice, I’m often content to take pleasure in examples of how marketers haven’t gotten on the handle of selling enough. Lots of proof in this post by marketer Philippe Bouchard who offers one example.

This employee information super-bank pulled in $18.0 million in revenue last year from 110 employees. An example of what not to do in creating a “bellwether” company.

First, needless to say, it’s too small to gain access to marketing automation. Good work if you can get it.

Second, It treats customers like data. Not my customers – my company’s customers. This statement would almost certainly make at least a few your customers uncomfortable. Your customers know you. It’s natural to have some connection to their behaviors as you try to sell them.

Third, when the subject becomes clear, it treats it as marketing inputs which it is. Not as data, not as insight that informs it. Again, I feel buyer horror. It doesn’t separate the two. Is anybody going to tell that company to do something useful or useful with the data that comes in? Don’t count on it. A research project of one could develop into a marketing department of thousands and yet have as much impact.

So I appreciate this company’s willingness to speak of making it a big deal but no matter how that happens, it will be waste of money or it will just be making folks feel bad about themselves and it does no good at all.

Either way, no proof, no satisfaction.

As you get marketer’s smarter, it’s good to be able to offer questions to try to answer for your own marketing department and clients. Does your relationship work because I want to talk to somebody? A non-answer would make people wonder what’s going on.

And there’s a brand multiplier that’s hard to articulate but which I’ve used it in the past (e.g. “Do you know how many other people share your area of expertise?” or “Can you imagine a brand where our expertise is prominent and everybody knows it?” or “How important is CMR for your product’s success?”). Brand multiplier: a term I coined myself. You can skip me if you want, but don’t let my name be forgotten.

On a related subject, I recently was perplexed as to why does my super-bank’s payroll department show up on my bank statement at all. It probably helped them convert several thousand on-premise human resources modules into an employee resource tool. In reality, they probably had to do it on the fly. I was concerned because it was costing me money in the form of reduced processing fees as I transferred money.

When I entered the super-bank’s bank information on the credit statement, all three activities indicated were on in the same transaction.

You may assume I hadn’t dealt with super-banks before, so let me clear up that fact. Here’s another example of marketing that uses mistakes as proof.

One time, when I went to an interoffice grocery store, I made the mistake of failing to purchase the company newsletter. While everyone thought it was a food guide, it turned out it was a company newsletter. It missed “read now” on almost every item. I was carrying the few items it did cover in my shopping cart to the checkstand when an employee came out and said, “Hey, could you write this check?” And there was the evidence.