Is Marketing becoming too easy?

I read a post titled Idiocracy in Action in the SEOBook.com Blog where Aaron Wall made a point about how easy marketing has become to implement and measure that makes everyone thinks that they can be a marketer.

One would argue that be allowing everyone the ability to be a marketer it takes the "art" out of marketing. I have to disagree with that. These are just tools that allow us to do our jobs easier and more efficient. It still takes a skilled marketer to know the best way to break through the noise. It goes back to my post on Reality Mining, with all the noise it's becoming more challenging then ever before to engage our target audience. There are just too many choices. Because of this we need to streamline our process, and that's what these tools do. Also in the corporate environment marketing teams are becoming smaller, but expectations still continue to rise. So we look to these tools to help us do more with less.

I see it like this; just because I have a hammer and some nails doesn't make me a carpenter. In turn just because you have purchased paid ads, and have a google analytics account doesn't make you a marketer. It's what you do with those tools that matter. Are you able to look at the data to determine ways to enhance the user experience, or do you just throw money at it and hopes something stick?

I think one of the main things to take away is that it levels the playing field in some cases. We have the ability now to run more targeted campaigns, which in turn cost less. This allows the smaller fish to compete with a much larger fish and come across as an equal.

Yes there are tools that make marketing easier, but do you have what it takes to use these tools to their full capacity?