Should start-ups worry about hyping their products?

MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, should tech start-ups be worried?

Reading about Elizabeth Holmes’ conviction on four counts of wire fraud in the Theranos trial, I kept coming across suggestions from analysts and legal experts suggesting that the outcome of the case constitutes a warning to Silicon Valley start-ups in general. Stop talking up your product and exaggerating its merits. ”In Silicon Valley, hyping up your product – over-promising – isn’t unusual,” wrote James Clayton.

But is there really no red line between puffery and deception? Puffery, of course, is the term of art in advertising for expressing what is obviously an opinion. “This is the best detergent you’ll ever use” is a claim an advertiser can make without an obligation to provide conclusive data to support it. Does puffery happen in marketing technology sales? I think we all know it does. Are predictions of how software will solve challenges and drive revenue sometimes starry-eyed? You bet.

But a red line is surely crossed when, say, prospective purchasers of an AI-driven personalization solution are shown results that were actually derived from manual personalization using a spreadsheet because the AI actually doesn’t work. I think that’s what we’re looking at here (“…the defendants represented to investors that Theranos conducted its patients’ tests using Theranos-manufactured analyzers; when, in truth, Holmes and Balwani knew that Theranos purchased and used for patient testing third party, commercially-available analyzers).

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

Shorts 

Quote of the day. “Change management is the biggest issue Operations teams face. Period. It’s NOT adopting new tech, NOT creating new campaigns, NOT tracking ROI. Efficiently, and effectively keeping up with change.” Stephen Stouffer, VP Marketing Operations, SaaScend

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.