Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Art and Science in Internet Marketing
Is Internet marketing an art or a science?
I was a theatre major in college. And because I had a focus in theatre lighting, design and scenic construction, I took a lot of classes that were art related and a lot of classes that were science related (optics and physics and the like to understand how to make all those marvelous and magical scenic miracles happen onstage).
It always amused me how the professor in every science class would start the semester with a lengthy explanation about how physics was actually more of an art than a science—that it required creativity and original thinking. Meanwhile the professor of every art class would start the semester with a lengthy explanation about how rooted that discipline was in science—that it relied on predictible physical laws.
Aside from what I saw as a certain paranoia that each area had that they were being pigeon-holed as either cold, emotionless automatons or flighty, unreliable kooks, I learned something from their passionate defenses of their academic disciplines: the dividing line between art and science is very thin and very poorly defined.
Is Internet marketing an art or a science? I say yes—to both. Or, more specifically, I believe that the argument is purely semantic. I see art and science as arbitrary terms that define two parts of an indivisible whole in life.
EVERYTHING we do in life requires understanding of basic, predictable laws. And EVERYTHING that we do in applying those laws to whatever we're doing, requires creativity and original thought.
And that applies to Internet marketing as much as to anything else in life. There are certain things laws we follow—laws that relate to the way that human beings are wired to respond to needs that lead them to seek out solutions. But applying those laws to the countless variables we encounter requires creativity of the highest order.
Any effort to boil Internet marketing down to one or the other is sure to fail. It takes both, working together, to succeed.
Jeff
Is Internet marketing an art or a science?
I was a theatre major in college. And because I had a focus in theatre lighting, design and scenic construction, I took a lot of classes that were art related and a lot of classes that were science related (optics and physics and the like to understand how to make all those marvelous and magical scenic miracles happen onstage).
It always amused me how the professor in every science class would start the semester with a lengthy explanation about how physics was actually more of an art than a science—that it required creativity and original thinking. Meanwhile the professor of every art class would start the semester with a lengthy explanation about how rooted that discipline was in science—that it relied on predictible physical laws.
Aside from what I saw as a certain paranoia that each area had that they were being pigeon-holed as either cold, emotionless automatons or flighty, unreliable kooks, I learned something from their passionate defenses of their academic disciplines: the dividing line between art and science is very thin and very poorly defined.
Is Internet marketing an art or a science? I say yes—to both. Or, more specifically, I believe that the argument is purely semantic. I see art and science as arbitrary terms that define two parts of an indivisible whole in life.
EVERYTHING we do in life requires understanding of basic, predictable laws. And EVERYTHING that we do in applying those laws to whatever we're doing, requires creativity and original thought.
And that applies to Internet marketing as much as to anything else in life. There are certain things laws we follow—laws that relate to the way that human beings are wired to respond to needs that lead them to seek out solutions. But applying those laws to the countless variables we encounter requires creativity of the highest order.
Any effort to boil Internet marketing down to one or the other is sure to fail. It takes both, working together, to succeed.
Jeff
Comments:
Post a Comment
© 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Jeff Baas, One Stop Web Support
