I was speaking a few weeks ago in front of two classes of MBA students at the Anderson School at UCLA (the class was “Marketing and Advertising”), and as I went through various examples of the work that I was doing for clients, it occurred to me yet again how wide the range of disciplines and media types one must be familiar (if not expert) with today in order to lay claim to a working knowledge of the entire marketing landscape.

Old school marketing meant (at a minimum):

• TV (brand and DRTV)
• Radio
• Outdoor
• Direct to Home
• Billboard
• Print

The web came along in the mid-90s and we added:

• Website development and user experience
• Digital marketing - mainly online display advertising (banners, buttons, sponsorships)
• Email marketing and remarketing

Search engine text-link marketing followed with first Goto.com (Overture) and then Google and two new huge disciplines were born:

• SEM
• SEO

Most recently we’ve seen the addition of:

• Online video (original content and UGC)
• Social networks, blogs, and viral/social media marketing
• Mobile apps and mobile marketing

Each one of these items can take years to become an expert in - and there’s an urgency it seems to being able to understand enough about each one to make direct or indirect decisions about utilizing them for specific marketing tasks. However, few (if any) companies or agencies have the time, resources, or budgets to participate effectively in all of these marketing channels.

My personal philosophy has been to learn to have at least a “product manager’s” knowledge of each of them; that is, I can’t code a website in PHP for effective SEO, but I know what a metatag is and how I should make sure some on-web-page copy matches it. I don’t know how to code a mobile web site - but I know that right now I can’t stream flash to the Safari browser on the I-Phone. And I know people with deep expertise in each of these specific fields that I can leverage.

But to manage them effectively, and make optimal choices given budget and other constraints on behalf of my clients, it is incumbent upon me to continue learning as much as possible about the technologies, trends, individual companies, and customer impact that are constantly changing the marketing landscape. Even if it feels like a full-time job in and of itself.