As a possible topic for a blog I kept note of what happened during one week, day by day working at Technical Marketing Ltd.Not really a good idea as it turned out, or put another way nothing happened that would be of much interest to anyone else. Working days planned to accomplish specific tasks but diverted by new instructions, changed briefs, urgent last minute requests and the steady pinging of arriving emails . Thank goodness spam detection is much better now, so that the stream of offers for fake Rolex watches, impossible medical enhancements and news of untold millions of dollars waiting for me in frozen Nigerian bank accounts, go straight to the junk folder.
What it did reveal is how much time is spent on the detailed implantation of plans on a day to day basis and the challenges of actually completing a project in one session compared to the reality of stopping and starting while missing material is sourced or client approval received. A typical day starts early morning with a goal of actioning the overnight emails and planning tasks for the day and ending late evening clearing the last of the day's email quota. Now everyone works through a desk top computer or mobile device, the telephone is much quieter, but communication channels are open all hours.
Back in the early 1970s the marketing department where I worked was a very different working environment. Computers weren't on desks, they were housed in climate controlled rooms attended to by white coated acolytes who changed tapes and fed in punch cards. Beyond the inner sanctum where the actual machine lived was an open office with around fifty young girls busy punching cards to feed the computer. We ourselves occupied a smart high rise company headquarters in London's West End - the computer was located at a factory site in Leicester where space cost per square foot was much less. On our desk we had a blotter and a telephone. The only other piece of furniture was a steel four drawer filing cabinet. Pretty much the whole marketing team was male, or at least appeared to be, but outside of our offices sat our secretaries who took dictation in short hand and typed up letters, memos, meeting minutes and forms on early IBM golf ball electric typewriters. Few of us arrived in the office before the 9 am start time, took an hour for lunch, often spent in a nearby West End hostelry and left for home at 5.30 pm. By 6 pm the cleaners had finished and the place was locked up for the night. There were clear working hours and nobody - customers or suppliers - expected to telephone outside those prescribed working hours, because they worked much the same hours themselves.
Marketing in the seventies was for us mainly about managing a rip-roaring success. Demand for product effectively meant rationing supply as we built more production capacity, invested in new production lines and tooling - all incidentally UK based. Inflation was a convenient reason for publishing a new price list every three months. We didn't need to sell, we just took orders and examined voluminous sales reports each month on concertinered print-outs delivered from that computer up in Leicester. In retrospect it was something of a golden age. It certainly was for the advertising and design agencies. Nearly every marketing communication was in some form of print and the process of transforming our marketing briefs into a finished piece of print went through many, expensive and 'skilled' stages along the way. The bills for producing, even quite modest printed documents, were eye watering with scope at every stage to ramp up the costs - a particular favourite being "authors corrections". Artwork was actually type and images glued to a board ready for a special photographic plate making process and the risk of a bit falling off during the final review and sign off - yes actual signatures on each page - meant the final printed piece could be missing a letter or two.
But if the graphic design agencies and printers were licensed to charge well for access to the many arcane skills in the brief-to-print game, then the West End advertising agencies were masters of the art of swinging huge fees and expenses. They mostly occupied glitzy offices with elaborate receptions, decorative and arty staff luxuriating in lavishly appointed and smartly furnished offices. They would arrive by cab, often with the metre left running throughout the client meeting, before then departing for an alcohol fueled lunch at a fashionable restaurant with a similar attitude towards exorbitant pricing! But once the computer displaced the blotter on the desk top, productivity tools such as desk top publishing and email arrived, then away went the secretaries, out went the complex print processes and down went the fees. Probably the real winners in the game are the computer manufacturers, the application programmers and ISPs. The marketing people are now doing more as individuals simply because it has become possible.
