Marketing is dead. Advertising is deader. Long live growth hacking?

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative Director
www.LopezMartiMiami.com/

• Broadly speaking, a “growth hack” is an unorthodox marketing tactic geared at acquiring customers or users via shrewd digital skills &/or lateral thinking.
• Not to be confused with guerrilla marketing which, in most cases, entails experiential &/or grassroots promotional efforts.
• Not to be confused with astroturfing: faux grassroots attempts to manipulate public opinion.
• The boundaries between these definitions are blurry to say the least.
• A total rabbit hole.
• Growth hacks are popular among Silicon Valley types who pride themselves on breaking the rules.
• Move fast & break things, yadi yadi yada.
• “Oh, we don’t do marketing & advertising” (read out loud with geeky nasal voice).
• Yes, you do, only you call it something else.
• There are dozens, if not hundreds, of growth hacking techniques.
• Click bait, such as this article’s headline, is in many ways a growth hack.
• Lame as f*ck but still effective.
• One notorious growth hack was Linkedin’s initial salvo to accelerate membership acquisition: the app surreptitiously hijacked its users’ contact list and sent emails to all the addressees inviting them to sign up on said user’s behalf.
• A grossly unethical breach of best practices, if you ask me.
• Illegal?
• Well, no.
• You unwittingly accepted it when you downloaded the app and clicked YES on the Terms of Service tab.
• Forgive me for stating the obvious but, every time you download an app onto a device, you are relinquishing the keys to your privacy with reckless abandon.
• It is true though that new generations don’t seem to care about privacy.
• They are totally OK with giving it up in exchange for free goods or services.
• In any case, Silicon Valley legal departments seem to be way more lenient, or less risk averse, than your average CPG marketer.
• Facebook’s first growth hack was the pretense that only Harvard grads could sign up.
• Many users believed that it was a Harvard-sanctioned social platform.
• Spoiler alert: it was not.
• To paraphrase Fox Mulder’s poster: people just want to believe.
• Most growth hacks tend to be tech savvy maneuvers to play with human emotions: FOMO, YOLO, MAGA.
• Gmail initially claimed it was “by invitation only”.
• The walled garden approach is useful when an app is launched in beta mode and needs time iron out the kinks.
• AI apps are following this very playbook.
• Reminds me of one of the oldest tricks in the marketing book: when you open a restaurant, reject table reservations for a few weeks with the -false- pretext that it is booked solid, to make potential patrons salivate under the imaginary impression that they are missing out on the hottest ticket in town.
• Nightclub bouncers keep people waiting on the street for a reason.
• To quote PT Barnum: there’s a sucker born every minute.
• Some growth hacks are plenty cool though: the Google Doodle is a home run, IMHO.
• You think the Google Doodle is not technically growth hack?
• Thank you for your opinion but this is my column.
• It is a growth hack if I say so around here.
• When I was in college, they taught me that a company logo should be sacred, immutable, untouchable.
• Had I told my first boss at a Madison Avenue agency that I wanted to go to a client with the creative idea of changing their logo every day to celebrate festivities & commemorations she would’ve fired me on the spot.
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page beg to differ: they frickin’ change their logo every day and it is a massive success.
• Silicon Valley, if you’re reding this, you are full of sh*t
• And yes, I am seething with envy at how y’all get away with murder while raking billions into your bank accounts.