I think you make great points here and the comments around sensitivity to "bad marketing" resonate for me especially.<p>However, from a consumer standpoint, I find myself becoming more and more aggravated by badly done "click bait" content that employs techniques you describe above so poorly that the sender would of been better off just spamming my inbox.
This blog post is a bit of an apology note.<p>When I first graduated from college, I thought of marketing as a tool for people whose work wasn’t good enough to stand on its own.<p>Years down the road, I realize that many of the engineers at Google whose work I knew best… well, I knew about them because they were excellent marketers of their work too. Knowing the first 10% of marketing was a lot more likely to move the needle on my impact than learning another 1% of engineering, which was in fact a lot more difficult anyway.