You know that feeling when you accidentally eat a moldy Dorito, one that has been left out for a few weeks, licked by the dog whose residue of saliva attracted the most exotic of bacteria to copulate wildly on the Southern Californian corn chip. And of course you eat it before seeing at and so your body is alerted to the fecund snack through sensitive taste buds who sound the alarm as if a dead rats, enlarged sack has entered your opening.
Well that’s kind of feeling thar being in internet marketing is for me. And it’s not because it’s full of venal, money crabbing, cynical hounds who love to manipulate the fears and loves of the masses to get a few Tweets. No, I actually find those types refreshingly honest. It’s the ones who do it badly, and my god are there a lot of them.
As entry is open to anyone who can drag their rank smelling fingers over a nicotine and Guinness stained keyboard, it attracts those who figure out you don’t have to be good, you just have to be there. This is of course changing. The agencies that I sometimes deal with are full of good people, but there are more than a few, “just do as much as we need to”, types scumming up the surface of the pond.
And maybe this exists in all industries, and especially an immature industry such as internet marketing (or as some call it “inbound marketing”, no I don’t get it either). It certainly is changing, as a new breed of worker who has grown up on the teat of Facebook, swarms into the agencies with their hipster glasses and fixie bikes.
You still find the warmed, soured milk types in the crevicies and fleshly folds of the Internet though, places where the cyber-flesh has moistened and stuck together, creating a mold that beats any three week old Dorito. I sometimes even work for them, presenting them with copy I gave birth to and nurtured, rather than writing. They ruin it of course by putting it on their cruddy blog, stacked to the gills with soulless churn from achingly dull copywriters who are paid in the nails of their artistic coffin.
But’s it’s cash. And the thing about cash is that it does not care where it came from, it has no memory. It can be used to buy a Mars bar or a bottle of Paracetamol that is chugged down with a bottle of vodka.
So you take it and do the work, always feeling grimy, but knowing you can buy your kids some new shoes.
But then it happens, someone you know gets a book deal, and suddenly Angelina and Brad Pitt are starring in their movie and Nelson Mandela is asking them to write a speech that unites Arabs and Jews and frees North Korea to be able to download Angry Birds from iTunes.
So you decide to leave Internet Marketing and trade options and futures, sitting in a houseboat in Sausalito, whilst putting the finishing touches to your Zombie-Vampire-Alien-Invasion, RomCOm, which will be the next big Kindle hit.
But the reality is that Minecraft cave complex wont build itself, so back to reality you go.