“This is huge,” said Josh Bernoff in last Monday’s AdAge, referring to the Forrester prediction that digital is likely to grow to about 21 percent of total advertising spend in five years. He went on to state, “We are all digital marketers now.” Personally I think it would be best if we just forgot about the spurious divide between digital and traditional and got back to the basics of marketing: identify an idea that will enhance perceptions of your brand and then figure out how best to engage people with it.
In the article titled “Advertising will change forever,” Josh reported that “Six out of ten marketers we surveyed agreed with the statement ‘we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing.’” Yes, consumers are spending more time online to view video, play games, and read the news. Marketers want to follow them. But does this really mean that advertising will change forever?
I think Josh is assuming that technological change will lead to a fundamental change in the way people communicate, and that will just not happen. For every new digital media channel there is a traditional equivalent. For online video it is TV. A Web site is a magazine in a different guise. Search is the Yellow Pages and encyclopedia rolled into one. Social media are the equivalent of chatting over a cup of coffee. New media simply provide different means for meeting basic human needs. The fact that many people have embraced these new media because they fit their 21st century lifestyles does not mean that the new media are better tools for brand builders. Enhanced dissemination of ideas and interactivity simply makes it possible for marketing “duds” to become apparent more quickly. Instead of enduring irrelevant and annoying advertising in silence, consumers can speak out or simply make it disappear. The downside to marketers is that not only is their money wasted, but their brand may well suffer in the process.
The fundamental problem right now is that most digital executions are weaker versions of their counterparts in traditional channels. They rely on intrusive media placement to get noticed, or they offer discounts to incentivize people to buy. Very few of them really engage people. And by “engage,” I mean encourage people to willingly devote time to the content. I willingly give my time to search results because I am actively seeking something of value to me. I do not give my time to pop-ups and similar ad formats because they hinder me from getting to the content I want to see. It is not that digital communication cannot be more effective than traditional media; it is simply that most of it is used as a blatant sales pitch that lacks personal relevance for most of the audience.
Early in his article, Josh stated, “Marketers have learned that interactive marketing is more effective, and advertising less effective, per dollar spent.” Oh yes? And where does that evidence come from? Most marketers still don’t test their digital advertising, so how would they know? One consistent finding from all Millward Brown’s cross-media research is that TV is typically the bedrock on which other media build. Sometimes the next most effective medium is digital. Sometimes it is a traditional channel. The truth is that not all brands benefit from interactivity. Some brands are just so mundane and boring that no one wants to engage with them. Passive media like TV, online video, radio, and outdoor should be the channels of choice for brands like these.
So let’s stop worrying about the digital/traditional divide and start figuring out which communication channels will most successfully engage people with a specific brand idea. If we don’t do that, it won’t matter what happens five years from now because most brands will have gone belly-up for lack of effective support. And I will have learnt to fly.
OK, rant over. Your turn now. Tell me what you believe is really happening.
(10 votes, average: 4.9 out of 5)
Loading ...
Email This Post
July 26th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
I completely agree with you. Digital is just another medium, like TV and print are, to engage with the consumers. There is no such thing as “digital marketing”, there is only marketing.
July 27th, 2009 at 2:20 am
Its not about which media is better…its about which media makes sense given the brand and the context. And marketers would be better off asking themselves such tough questions give the multitude of media available. Earlier it was simpler with TV, Print and maybe outdoor and radio. Now we have media thats more ‘active’ and some of it is so ‘active’ that it lets consumers decide against it (like disabling pop ups) unlike a TV of yesterday where ads had to be sat through. It would be ideal for marketers to understand the power of each media, how relevant it is to their brand and more importantly to their TG, how the TG ‘uses’ these media - do they record favourite programs/ catch them online, how they talk about brands online, how much they blog/ seek blogs and forums before buying…and the list goes on. So understanding of the media and their interactions with each other and with the consumer obviously the critical step before jumping into the ‘digital’ bandwagon.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Possibly Josh has a muddled view of two issues here;
a) Digital is just another channel (I agree)
b) Technology has fundamentally changed commerce and thereby how you use each medium (I agree with this also)
There has been a cultural change that technology has enabled, that being: The ability to trade is neither dependent on location or time of day. This was unthinkable 15 years ago for most commerce.
Technology has also empowered Word of Mouth flashing consumers’ views across borders very quickly - word of mouth is more versatile now than before. This for me certainly affects how you use EACH channel and what you say in them.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Thanks for the comments folks.
Jeremy, do you really believe technology has changed commerce? Humans have been trading stuff around the world for millenia. Sure, I just bought some stuff online from Patagonia and used Livechat to make sure my order went through OK. But speed is really the only difference from a catalogue and phone call. Decoupling time of day and location only works for some businesses not all. Take the example of Zappos. Is Amazon buying technology or a brand based on great customer service? Technology lifts all boats, using it to create an engaging human experience is what separates winners from losers.
July 28th, 2009 at 3:09 am
I wonder if any of your readers are old enough to recall whether there was such fuss in adland when commercial TV launched? Or perhaps the admen of old were more of your mind and saw new channels as extra colours to their palettes?
July 29th, 2009 at 10:23 am
Culled from my book (and I’ll preface this excerpt because it’s taken out of context: read it as slightly tongue-in-cheek):
July 29th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Nigel, agreed that digital channels have rough equivalents. Fortune 500 companies have the luxury of using any or all of those channels. But niche startups, new companies and renegades of all sort never had that luxury. And before the digital tools came about, they had very few channels to cost-effectively promote their brands.
This whole argument of shifting media dollars misses the real point. The change that’s happened is that a million new businesses have sprung up that could never before have existed. Some of these companies will grow and become dominant players (and they may have a bias toward digital media), others will merely give their owners a way to do what they love and not spend their lives in jobs they hate. Either way, it’s a new world out there for employees and employers because we can now create our own job descriptions rather than fitting into someone else’s.
Yes, we all have more freedom now, and with it comes more pressure to do something remarkable. This is what’s going to continue to radically change the landscape of capitalism.
July 31st, 2009 at 6:18 pm
This is exactly what I’ve been trying to get at lately. How people buy things has changed. But not why. People haven’t changed. They just have new tools. Social networking for example, in fact, is not new. People have been networking and building contacts for ages. We just have new tools now. Fundamentally, advertising is the same
September 29th, 2009 at 11:58 am
I think that advertising has to change. Why? Because the new technology doesn’t give us speed only, they give us a new way of interactivity with the brand and a new way to spread not only a message, to spread our point of view also. So the way of how we use to create an advertising message has to change from thinking “what we want our customers hear about our brand” to “what we want our customers think and say about our brand”. The new copy writers won’t be working on an advertising agency, they will be anybody behind a screen with something good to say about a brand. They also will choose the way to spread the message (when, how, how many times, where, etc).