I work in search engine marketing -- writing and managing sponsored search campaigns for car dealerships, specifically. When you see advertisements among the search results on Yahoo! and Google, that's my work.
I use math day in, day out, all day long. Marketing is sometimes perceived as a very emotional discipline, but ultimately it's about learning what does or does not motivate people to buy under given conditions. Using data I collect from my marketing campaigns, I'm able to build models of idealized campaign structures that will return our clients investment in the fastest way possible. Beyond the initial learning curve and time it takes to gather a substantial set of data, everything I do is now based on statistical analysis of advertising performance.
It's interesting and I'm far more comfortable doing things with math than I am following my gut feeling. My gut feeling is that advertising is bad.
