In this latest series, we dig deeper into the stories of our expert contributors. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Tim Parkin is a marketing consultant and advisor. He brings a fresh perspective to marketing from his days in technology and game development. Drawing on this experience, he has coached marketing executives at global organizations and contributed a big selection of pieces for MarTech touching on video, in-game promoting, customer journeys, attribution and lots of other topics.
We spoke to him about his journey.
Q: How did you get into marketing? Was that an early interest for you?
A: It’s so funny because I don’t have any experience traditionally in marketing. I didn’t intend to find yourself here. As a child, I assumed I’d be an expert magician. My dad got me into magic, and so I pursued that. Then I spotted, you find yourself working nights and weekends. That’s when people have parties and dinners. So I said, “That’s not for me.” So I ended up in technology — software development and programming. And from that I helped out quite a lot of corporations. But then I spotted, we’d construct all these really cool things and nobody would use it or see it. And that’s when it hit me, they didn’t have a product problem, they’d a marketing problem. And in order that got me all for marketing. And I discovered in that journey that magic and marketing are almost similar. Magic is about telling a story, getting people’s attention, controlling that focus — having them not take a look at the stuff you don’t want them to take a look at, and focus on the stuff you want them to take a look at.
Q: What type of magic did you do? Cards? Levitation? Cutting your assistant in two with a saw?
A: Cards! I at all times carry a deck of cards with me. In highschool and college, I discovered it hard to satisfy people and put myself on the market. But with magic, you enter this latest persona or character, this alter-ego. And I can have a crowd of individuals around me, all watching me, and amaze and entertain them for a temporary time. It helped me survive college, as an introvert, and now it’s a terrific networking tool at conferences or in client meetings.
Q: Do you may have a favourite trick?
A: I do! It’s funny, I’ve been married for 13 years and dated my wife 4 years before that, so she’s seen this trick, called “twisting the aces.” She’s seen it so over and over that as soon as I begin to say the words, she walks away because she knows what’s coming.
Q: What type of technology and software did you’re employed on?
A: I actually have an education in game design and development. So I used to be constructing video games and was in the video game industry for a temporary time. From there, I moved into government work, constructing military simulation — which is largely video games which are 20 years in the past. It was interesting but type of boring. Then, web 2.0 type of took off and web apps became an enormous deal, so I built quite a lot of web apps and mobile apps.
Q: Without disclosing any classified information, why were the military projects you worked on so behind the times?
A: When I worked on military simulation, they were doing things like exercise planning for various branches of the military. And that stuff was just so rudimentary. You’d be surprised. I hope it’s improved in the 15 years since I worked on it. You’d have a simulation of walking through a ship in the Navy and it looked like “Doom” from years and years ago. Plenty of it was built on legacy systems, so that they’d need to redo every little thing as a way to update it. Obviously, it was all very precise, but I don’t think that’s an excuse for not being modern and pushing the limits visually.
Q: What was it wish to go into consulting with none formal marketing experience?
A: I’ve learned all of it on the job with my clients. But that’s thing because I’ve often said, “I’m hired for my ignorance, not for my experience.” And I feel it’s true that clients actually need a fresh perspective. They actually need any person to ask the questions nobody else is asking and someone who can see things from the consumer side and from the team side. It hasn’t been a detriment to not have a proper marketing background. And frankly, I feel a proper marketing background is outdated and antiquated, especially with how briskly things change.
Q: From your perspective in game design, how big a change did you see in marketing from mobile?
A: As , every little thing modified. But even today it’s shocking to see what number of corporations aren’t up-to-date or on par with how their mobile experience needs to be and understanding how people actually use technology and eat their marketing. We design marketing experiences often on giant monitors and we predict that is how people will see it. We don’t realize, they’re on their phone taking a look at a tiny screen, scrolling through really fast. We don’t take into consideration the situation during which people experience it. Mobile has modified every little thing, and I feel it’s still changing every little thing. I see with my clients that the percentage of mobile users keeps increasing. And it’s weird to think that there may very well be a world in the near future where desktop is taboo and doesn’t really matter and exist as much.
Q: Are there any common problems you see once you meet with marketers?
A: One is operations, and it is a massive problem. I work with quite a lot of marketing teams and so they’re just running around like a chicken with their head cut off. They don’t know what their roles are, their responsibilities for the team, their goals and methods to align. How can we communicate and the way can we manage a project? Things that sound fundamental. I feel in what I call “marketing inside-out.” We take into consideration the customer and the message, but we forget to look inside at how we actually do the marketing. The biggest problem I see is that we’re so disorganized with too many “priorities,” we’re all overwhelmed and that affects the marketing, that affects the message and communication with customers. We need to fix that first, inside, before we will go outside.
Q: Any marketing channels which are interesting to you personally?
A: Yes, YouTube is the place where I spend most of my time and get content from. I won’t let you know how much time I spend on YouTube since it’s an embarrassing amount. But I also launched on YouTube this 12 months and I’m telling all my clients to get on there. I feel TikTok goes to fade away and YouTube goes to turn out to be more dominant, especially as Google loses a few of its search engine optimisation position with generative AI, I feel YouTube is the place to be. Businesses must have their people there, their brand there and making as much content as they will.
Dig deeper: Why video is the marketing channel you’ll be able to’t afford to miss
Read the full article here
