DISCLAIMER: These are my observations and thoughts about the online marketing space and professionals in India. I have no clue what happens elsewhere.

For those of you who don’t know what I do for a living, I help businesses get more visible on the interwebs.

As part of my job, I need to hire at least half a dozen young recruits to do online marketing for me every six months or so. Needless to say, I have to sift through a few hundred resumes and multiple interviews before it finally gets to a point where I’m finally ready to make an offer.

But, I’m seeing a very discouraging trend:

Almost 90% of the folks whom I interview have no clue about how online advertising works (think, difference between indexing, caching and crawling or what is the difference between a metric and a dimension)
Most of the folks took up a career in digital marketing simply because they got no other job
Most of them are neither passionate and are open to shifting industries if it means they get paid marginally more

This is sad..

Not just because it makes it harder to get talent – but, because this is happening in one of the most fulfilling and profitable professions I’m aware of.

It appears like online marketing is not sexy anymore and the smart kids just want to do something else.

This needs to change, fast. And, they *could* change if we try to implement some of these ideas.

Let’s Influence

There exist a lot of smart kids who could end up being kickass marketeers, they just don’t know it yet.

As marketers ourselves, we need to help them understand how fulfilling and interesting this space is. No other profession really allows you to grow as fast as you would in this space and makes it this easy for you to become an entrepreneur if you want to.

Do you know a smart kid that hates flipping switches in a dead-pool job? Educate them about our industry.

Talk to everyone you know about how this is a great career option and possibly a better option than most others.

We Need Schools That Train

You’d be surprised how many MBAs with their major in marketing have no clue about how there is a paradigm shift happening to digital when it comes to advertising and marketing.

Digital isn’t getting as much mind-share as traditional advertising. Though awareness is increasing, it’s not happening as quickly as we’d like.

There are a couple of very good finishing schools for digital like Web Marketing Academy and IAMAI and IMRI, but there are no big universities covering this as a subject in their curriculum.

We need the folks in the IIMs, IITs and XLRIs to take notice and start offering digital marketing as part of their coursework.

Heck, it might help if IIM-Bs director’s contact email got a couple of hundred people asking him why they don’t cover digital marketing as part of their curriculum.

It is also a completely different matter that there are not as many finishing schools out there as one would like. I can’t find one in Chennai, for instance.

We Need Better Trainers

The interesting thing about what we do is that, a lot of this information cannot be crammed by reading a book. I’m more of an expert at Search Engine Optimization, and I think it’s more of an art, and there are different practitioners with different schools of thought.

All of us practitioners are so busy making moolah, or gyrating over campaign success that we don’t really go out there and teach people. Yes, I’m talking about going to a University meetup and talking to students, not tweeting your 160 characters of thoughts.

If we could share with students, budding entrepreneurs and folks who are genuinely interested in what we’re doing, there’s going to be so much more talent that becomes available.

I know of at least ten different people in my social circle who could become great mentors / trainers / teachers, but just aren’t doing it yet!

We Need Consensus

The software industry has NASCOMM. What do we have?

Some folks say SEMPO or IAMAI is the alternative, but it is my personal opinion that neither is really reaching out to students and enthusiasts who want to get into the industry, or evangelizing internet advertising as much as they should be.

We need a pan-India body who’s sole purpose is to get more people into the fold.

Let’s Make Online Marketing Interesting Again

A question that’s been running in my mind constantly is that “Are we getting too process oriented at the risk of converting something very interesting into something super boring?”

Being a marketer isn’t similar to being a software engineer – most companies that do online marketing (myself, included) seem to be process heavy at the risk of making the process dull and drab.

We need to operate more like PR Agencies and Advertising Agencies; we need to foster creativity and make this job interesting again.

We Need To Pay Better Money

At the place I work, we pay approximately $600 to a kid fresh out of college – but, to my surprise, I find that a lot of people with three or four years of experience in the industry, don’t even make half of that.

This is BAD – a guy sitting in the bench in any Indian IT mega-corporation probably makes closer to $500/mo. Considering the fact that it is super easy to land a job in any of the SWITCH companies, why would any recent graduate want to waste their time on a $100 – $200/mo job in the internet industry?

We pay way too less as an industry to expect folks to take us seriously – we need to up the bar and quick.

If a fresher software engineer can be paid $500 – $1000/mo, our industry needs to catch up!

We Need BRAND

A lot of our decisions as Indians is influenced by brands, our parents, our neighbors and the random person we meet in a family gathering. In the 60s and 70s, everyone wanted to work for the Government. In the 2000s, everyone wants their kids to work in a software company.

2013 and beyond, we need to get kids and their parents to WANT to look at us as a serious career prospect.

The first step in doing that is to brand ourselves – what NASSCOM is currently doing for the Indian software, or what one of the larger Indian IT companies are doing for themselves.

I’m writing this as an appeal to fellow online marketers, folks who run digital media companies and enthusiasts – let’s try to implement some of these steps and reverse the trend.

Digital Marketing SHOULD NOT be the second choice for someone looking at career options.

Do you have ideas to make being an digital marketer sexy? Please add them as comments and I will include them in this essay.

7 thoughts on “How Do We Make Being An Indian Digital Marketer Sexy”

Personally i feel the industry itself is growing tremendously everyday and its “HOT”
As this post mostly relates to India and youth as far as i know anything that provides more $$ end up looking sexy. To throw some light on this point considering the top 3 career options for students include 1)Medicine 2)Engineering 3)MBA/Business/technology/software UG course which guarantees a job.
The priority of the options listed is not based on the interest/passion that students have in learning,rather because it guarantees them a Job for the rest of their life some $$ to spend. More the $$,job security for a longer time you easily top the list. Anything which pays a decent crowd will trend to be the hottest.And when there is something that is trending at the top,Organisations and associations automatically rise in number and whatever mentioned in the blog(Brand,Consensus,Trainers,Training schools,Better pay) are achieved.But this wont sustain that long as we would start facing a serious drain in the number of passionate digital marketers and end up creating a chaotic crowd which actually brings down the reputation of the industry and obviously create a lot of crap in Google too. So the significant point here is the interest or passion is not triggered by “Education” in India.And moreover online marketing industry itself brags to be more unconventional and does not follow any traditional methods and i feel it should not fall into the Indian Education system lose its charm and create a bad impact globally.The industry is SEXY for those who are in internet, and it will remain the same. For the rest(offline crowd) it never looks so and it never will. So obviously increase in internet penetration and rise of internet businesses in India will actually pave the way making Online Marketing look more sexier than it is right now.And i feel those who are passionate enough to learn will fine the way for it and when they find it so they will be rewarded.

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Ashwin Ramesh on January 6, 2013 at 7:14 am said:

Vijay,

Still doesn’t explain why smart kids don’t take this up as a career option.

Almost everyone I interview enters the industry by accident or because they got no other valid job opportunities.

We need to get those smart kids to become online marketers.

How many students from your PSG batch even know that this exists?

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- Vijay ram kumar on January 6, 2013 at 9:45 am said:
  
  I agree the awareness is too low. I hardly know students aware of Digital marketing. But as you know and follow there are no group as ” Smart kids” if the awareness and the exposure to everyone is same you can easily tend to train those who attend the interview,but the hardest fact is that the digital marketing agencies cant expect a fresher being hired to have the knowledge of digital marketing anytime by now.And I agree institutes like Web Marketing Academy serve the purpose as internet marketing is taught the way it is to be.So i guess encouraging institutions like this can fulfill your needs,And again it depends on who does it and how exceptional they are.I totally agree with the post above. we need to go an extra step to create awareness which would trigger “smart minds”. – In an Unconventional way.
  
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Your observations in the first paragraph of the post is much similar to any sector or industry. This is not an down side or anything. As a part of the majors, there is a shallow but diverse knowledge imparted. And this is to equip a student for any sector coming under the purview of the major. However, the options in the industry is so diverse and every post requires such an unique set of skills, that mostly every candidate is more or less unaware about the job. Since this variety is so high, it makes us harder for the candidate to pin point and tell, this is the job he/she would like to pursue in his life.

Next, with respect to digital marketing or any other sector for that matter, I think it boils down to market forces. The reason the creme-de-le-creme go for the finance sector is simply because the supply-demand play. If digital marketing is not getting good candidates, it is simply because they have a low demand or they are not putting in the required effort. I agree with your point “We NEED brand”. Being from an prestigious university, I can vouch for one thing – the consultancies and finance industry go a long way in creating that brand in institution. And since you guys are in advertising field, I am sure you would know more about this than I.

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You picked a hot issue in digital marketing (Let’s talk Indian at the moment) that needs attention, Ashwin. It was sad to see a couple of employees I terminated for not so good performance and on a exit talk with them, they wanted to do something else but ended up working in SEO without any interest. Either they were misguided that “even a fool can make easy money doing SEO” or they were “just” working until they got the opportunity to do their choice of stuff. You were right, smart kids don’t know about digital marketing yet and what potential it has for them.

I’d so very want to be a part to something like (read better than) nasscom for digital marketing. We need better initiatives, no give up attitude, better trainers and veteran marketers to make it happen.

Ideally, every industry that has money attract the youth and brains. Digital marketing picked up like a jungle fire few years back but it’s in a pathetic state today. It’s only a few of us who KNEW and who brought this to the level by paying low wages and degrading online marketing. Pick up the right people so they know who deserves the money and show them the better $$ so they know there’s an awesome industry to make a first choice, not the last option.

I’d be watching this post and would love to see others’ views.

Cheers!

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