If you had the chance to teach paid marketing to a captive audience (think university course, not youtube video) how would you do it?

This is something that's been going through my mind, and I have some naive thoughts below, but keen to hear others (1/n)

There's this concept of pyramid-building that comes up in sport science, where the more base training you do (the bigger the base of your pyramid) the faster you can go (taller you can build your pyramid). Think this applies very readily to marketing too (2/n)

If you watch any youtube marketing course, or even one that you pay for, it's very top-of-the-pyramid stuff. Small 'tricks' to boost your ROI on a certain channel. I think this comes about largely because the audience is non-captive (3/n)

If you have someone's indefinite attention, it's much easier to drill into the fundamentals (bottom-of-pyramid) and to build a much more complete conceptual foundation, which can make them far more knowledgeable in the long term (4/n)

A great example of this is auction mechanics. Nobody's going to pay for a course on auction mechanics, but understanding it well is vital to being able to answer more complex questions about ads (how to model campaign scaling, why are volume & cpa non-linearly related, etc) (5/n)

I also think that more paid marketing material should focus on limited mathematical education, e.g. being able to understand basic calculus. Doesn't come up everyday, but when it does it's such a clear value add ("how much would it cost to get 1 more conversion?") (6/n)

Last main thing that seems under-prioritised is technical education. Firstly high-level technical stuff: UTMs, HTML basics, cookies etc. It seems like most people are expected to magically pick this up on the job at some point. (7/n)

And then lower-level stuff, like coding. Almost no marketer is going to sit down and ask "should I build that campaign that needs to go out today, or should I learn python?" yet having even some appreciation of coding is hugely advantageous. (8/n)

Being able to pull non-standard reports, access parts of platforms only available through an API (hello facebook) or build stuff in bulk are all huge skill differentiators, but whether you have them or not seems to just comes down to chance (9/n)