I hate advertising. My dad sold ad space in bicycle and skiing magazines. Technically, that's sales. He was selling companies real estate for them to hawk their reductive ideas of their products.
I don't hate my dad. I fact, I admire him. His work made me familiar with advertising at a young age. People, or companies, have a product that they want people to purchase. That product requires recognition. Ideally, you'd want a certain person to recognize that product, considering that certain person would be more inclined to purchase the product, rather than the billions of other humans on the planet.
Recognition is a fantastic sales tool. Recognition is the best salesperson imaginable.
It hasn't happened yet, but the salesperson is evolving. They'll be difficult to recognize alongside their contemporary form.
How is a salesperson evolving? Someday, they'll be singular individuals with good tastes on a certain topic that may just HAPPEN to work for a certain company. They'll sell solutions to a buyer's query, like a living search-engine. This is a fantasy, of course. The salesperson will always be at least somewhat compromised by their employment.
This is not the case with a good marketer.
Someday, marketing will just be asking your knowledgable buddy what kind of car you should drive. Wait, no, nobody will own a car. We'll all be traveling in hyperloop tubes in.
Someday, marketing will just be asking the A.I. assistant in your phone where to buy a new phone at a reasonable rate. Your A.I. assistant will cull the internet. It'll point you to a site run by trustworthy people with a friendly opinion on cell phones.
A good marketer is a focused search engine that has the wherewithal to parse good from bad. Beyond even the queries they might answer about their exact industry, product, or company they are salaried (I hope) to promote, they demonstrate their taste in other avenues. Good marketers are weirdos that have interests outside of work. They might explain a lot about the person. They might confound the situation.
A good marketer has opinions without malice. A good marketer is a good tastemaker. A good marketer can describe a good pizza they ate recently, a good movie they watched recently, a good live event they went to recently, and a good customer interaction they experienced recently. While these things might have nothing or little to do with the work they accomplish on a weekday, smart prospective customers in search of inspired taste will recognize the good judgment made.
The openness in the marketer's taste creates common ground with the prospective customer. It's easy to step from a casual conversation about a beautiful canoli the marketer ate in Italy to a beautiful canoli the marketer happens to be selling at that exact moment.
I make this observation as a begin to market my own written work. I have written tens of thousands of words for half a decade about creative endeavors, video games, movies, and books on this site. It was an exercise for me to discover what I love most. It's experience in life that I know others will appreciate. Perhaps prospective customers of mine will see eye to eye with what I'm doing.
I have faith that the right people will get it. Otherwise, I haven't done my job.
-- @Alex_Crumb