Some marketing programs died years ago. Somehow, they’re still walking the streets.
I was a fan of The Walking Dead, particularly the earlier seasons when the walkers were still the biggest problem and before I needed a family tree and organizational chart to remember which human faction was trying to kill which other human faction.
One thing I always liked about the show was that the zombies weren’t particularly complicated. Individually, most of them weren’t even that formidable. The real danger came when nobody dealt with them.
One walker becomes five. Five become fifty. Eventually, you look out the window and there’s a herd wandering across the landscape. Marketing departments have walkers too.
The trade show you attend every year because you’ve always attended it. The monthly report that takes four hours to create and nobody seems to read. The sponsorship that automatically gets renewed. The email newsletter that goes out because the calendar says it’s supposed to. The social channel somebody started five years ago that still consumes several hours a week despite producing almost no meaningful engagement.
They’re not exactly alive. But somehow, nobody can quite kill them.
I’ve encountered some version of this at almost every company I’ve worked with. Ask why a particular marketing activity exists, and the answer is often surprisingly vague.
“We’ve always done it.”
“Sales likes it.”
“The CEO expects to see it.”
“We already paid for the platform.”
“We went last year.”
“It’s good for awareness.”
That last one has probably kept more dead marketing programs walking than anything short of a zombie virus.
Most of these programs probably made sense when they started. Someone had an objective. A channel looked promising. An event reached the right audience. Technology solved a real problem. Maybe the program even performed well for several years.
Then something changed. The audience moved. Results declined. The company evolved. New channels emerged. Customer behavior shifted. The strategy transformed.
Nobody went back and asked whether the original reason for doing it still existed. So, the program kept walking. That’s how zombie marketing is created.
The problem isn’t simply wasted money. Underperforming programs also consume something most marketing teams have even less of: attention.
Someone has to manage the agency, build the presentation, approve the creative, prepare for the event, pull the report, schedule the posts, sit in the meeting and update the spreadsheet. Individually, none of those tasks look particularly dangerous.
Neither does one walker shambling around at the edge of the woods. It’s the accumulation that gets you.
Eventually leadership introduces a genuinely important new priority. The company wants to build an account-based marketing program. Improve customer retention. Reposition the brand. Get serious about SEO. Enter a new market. Develop a better content strategy. Figure out where AI can help the business.
All perfectly reasonable.
Who’s going to do it? Usually, the same people already spend most of their time keeping the undead alive. This is one reason marketing teams can look incredibly busy while making surprisingly little progress. Everyone is working. Calendars are full. Campaigns are running. Reports are being produced. Money is being spent.
The marketing landscape is teeming with activity. Some of it just happens to be dead.
I’ve learned to ask a simple question when reviewing a marketing organization: If we weren’t already doing this, would we choose to start doing it today? It’s amazing what that question reveals.
You might decide the answer is yes. The annual conference may remain one of the best places to meet customers. The newsletter may produce meaningful engagement. The sponsorship may give you access to an audience that’s difficult to reach elsewhere. The report may actually help leadership make decisions.
If so, keep it. But if the primary argument for continuing something is that you’ve always done it, you probably don’t have a marketing strategy. You have a walker.
There’s another reason these programs are difficult to put down. Somebody usually owns a piece of their history.
The executive who originally championed the event may still love it. The marketing manager who built the program may understandably be attached to it. Sales remembers the enormous deal that came from the conference six years ago. An agency has a contract tied to it. Somebody fought hard to get the budget approved.
Ending the program can therefore feel like admitting the original decision was wrong. It isn’t.
Good strategies change because conditions change. Something could have been exactly the right investment three years ago and the wrong investment today. Marketing leadership requires being comfortable with both ideas.
The same goes for sunk costs. Companies sometimes continue to pay for technology because they spent so much money implementing it. They continue producing content for a channel because they spent years building an audience there. They renew sponsorships because walking away makes the previous investment feel wasted.
But the money you spent yesterday is gone whether you continue the program or not. The useful question is what you should do with tomorrow’s dollar.
I’m also not suggesting marketers barricade the conference room doors, grab the nearest crossbow and start eliminating anything that can’t demonstrate immediate ROI.
Some marketing investments take time.
Brand building matters. Customer engagement matters. Research matters. Partnerships matter. Some channels create influence that’s difficult to connect directly to a single sale. Those programs shouldn’t be judged by the same standard as a paid search campaign.
The objective isn’t to kill anything that can’t produce an immediate lead.
It’s to make sure you still know why it exists.
Every meaningful marketing investment should have a job. It should support an audience, objective or strategic priority. You should have some reasonable way of deciding whether it’s doing that job. And periodically, somebody needs to ask whether there’s now a better use for the money and time.
That last part is where many companies struggle.
Adding something feels like progress.
Stopping something feels like retreat.
So, another campaign gets added. Another platform gets purchased. Another event joins the calendar. Another report gets requested.
Nobody clears out the walkers already roaming around. Eventually the herd gets large enough that the marketing team spends most of its time managing programs inherited from previous strategies rather than executing the current one.
One of the healthiest things a marketing leader can do is create permission to stop.
Stop the campaign that no longer works. Leave the event that stopped producing value. Cancel the software nobody uses. Retire the report nobody reads. Reduce the content nobody engages with.
Then take the money, time and attention you recover and put them behind something that matters now. You may discover you don’t need a larger marketing budget nearly as badly as you thought. You may need fewer things competing for the one you already have.
So, this Halloween, take a walk through your own marketing landscape. Look closely at the campaigns, channels, events, reports, subscriptions, platforms and tactics wandering around out there. Some are alive and well, some may need a little help, and a few have probably been dead for years. If you find one of those, you know what to do.
Just remember what The Walking Dead taught us.
Make sure it stays dead.
