I was sent a job specification recently for a VP of Marketing role paying €168,000. The candidate profile required experience with MMM, DDA, personalisation and long-term vision and strategy. It also required them to have graduated top of their class.
I have been in digital marketing for thirty years. I can count on one hand the number of commercially transformative marketing operators I have met whose academic ranking had any bearing on their effectiveness. The organisations still using academic credentials as a signal for commercial capability in a discipline that has entirely reinvented itself three times in a decade are selecting for the wrong thing with great confidence.
The right signal is not where someone graduated. It is whether they can read a commercial system, name what is wrong with it, and fix the things in the right order. That capability does not come from class rank. It comes from thirty years of getting it wrong in enough different ways to know where to look.
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