Category Archives: Digital Marketing

3 September, 2019 · 1:55 pm

Alexa, What’s My Marketing Strategy For Voice?

Image result for voice activated[As appeared in Media Post’s Marketing Insider]

The architect Louis Sullivan coined the maxim that “form follows function.” In the case of marketing channels, you could reverse that to say function follows form. How you use an axe differs from how you use a shovel because of what the form allows you to do. Similarly, the best use of a billboard is different from the best use of a banner ad because of what the form allows you to do. In order for brands to find success with voice, they have to consider the strengths and constraints of the form.

It may disappoint some marketers to learn that “receive promotions and special offers” is not a popular use case for people interacting with voice-enabled tech. In fact, according to Nielsen’s “Total Audience Report: Q1 2019,” top responses for how smart speaker owners use their devices include searching for real-time information, getting the latest news, making calls and sending messages. If you observe how most people interact with voice channels, it’s initiated as a request or command. This form leads away from using voice for marketing-as-promotion and toward marketing-as-a-service. It’s a medium better built for informing, supporting and responding rather than advertising. With that strategic perspective, brand leaders should look past their advertising teams for inspiration and instead tap into the insights gleaned from service-centric programs like customer service and customer loyalty groups. 

Tapping into the service aspects of marketing will suggest the most likely opportunities to shape positive experiences via voice. There’s a lot of information there that can point to effective brand applications for voice. For example:

  • Does my product/service require set-up?  Can voice instructions walk customers through it?
  • What are my most frequent complaints/issues?  Can voice provide an easier way to resolve them?
  • How, where and when are people using the product/service?  Does that context suggest ways voice could enhance/extend those use situations?

Once you find where voice can add value, it’s imperative that customers know what’s available to them. Brands can enable access to voice-enabled devices through existing communication methods. Product packaging, owner’s manuals, brand apps, and welcome emails are all channels through which companies can promote that they are “voice-friendly.” If done effectively, it should be apparent to consumers where to go and what to say to take advantage of a brand’s voice features.

The new reality is that brand-driven monologues are quickly being replaced by customer-initiated dialogues. Voice can best drive brand value by expanding ways to serve and enhance the customer experience. Those who try to shoehorn this technology into an existing promotional strategy might find silence on the other end.

Leave a comment

Filed under Artificial Intelligence, Channel Strategy, Digital Marketing, Market Strategy, media

Tagged as ,

21 July, 2017 · 12:36 pm

The Fall of the Titans: Why GAFA is Not Here to Stay

Article originally appeared in Advertising Week

Fall of the TitansIt’s beyond ironic that the companies most celebrated for dethroning the former titans of business are now themselves considered indestructible. There’s a belief that GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) are now so dominant, that they’ll never be unseated.  It’s hard to picture a world where they’re not dominant, but it was once hard to picture the same of AT&T, GM, IBM and Microsoft. The tides that swept GAFA into their positions of leadership have not ebbed. There are several scenarios and trends that could erode what seems like their unassailable position.

New Technologies

The Silicon Valley credo is Disruption, so why should any of its denizens be exempt? As Clayton Christensen famously explained, established companies don’t get disrupted because they’re stupid, near-sighted and unimaginative. They get disrupted because the business demands of a successful established company don’t permit them “to focus resources on proposals that customers reject, that offer lower profit, that underperform existing technologies and can only be sold in insignificant markets.” GAFA is clearly now among the established ranks, and there are several technologies that offer the potential to disrupt them:

Ad Blocking

People are increasingly rebelling against the interruptive nature of online advertising. If a significant amount of the population employs the means to opt out of advertising, that undermines a cornerstone of the Google and Facebook business model. The initial scare seems to have abated for now, but the storm has far from passed. In the nuisance scenario, it’s easy to see an escalating arms race of blocking and anti-blocking technology. At the more severe scenario, ad blocking could significantly reduce the eyeballs that are critical to their financial models.

AI

While the GAFA are all racing to embrace AI, at least part of that embrace is driven by fear. The shopping feature of Alexa is naturally tied to Amazon, but that same technology can be applied to direct you to whoever had the best price, was the closest for pick up, and who most aligned with your social values. AI has the potential to bypass the aggregator function played by Amazon in commerce, Google in Search, and Facebook in social content. For example, I could ask my personal assistant “what are my friends up to?” and it could scan their social feeds, blog posts, and give me a synopsis. I wouldn’t have to go to central site, nor would I care where it came from. Facebook could block access, but one you start battling human behavior instead of feeding it, the gig is up. Apple is even more susceptible to being depositioned by AI. Amazon, Google and Facebook all have vast sources of native data that could drive proprietary AI applications. Apple has far less. What has made them champions for some privacy advocates makes them especially vulnerable in a data-driven world.

The Immersion

In the long-term, a loose connected thread in the growth of AI, blockchains, IoT, and the Cloud Is the expansion and de-centralization of computing activity. As the ubiquity of computing grows, everything becomes a computer – clothes, appliances, cars, even body parts. The shift from desktop to mobile led to the rise and fall of many companies. What happens when the world shifts from mobile to…everything? When everything is a computer, nothing is. That is, when we’re immersed in an ever-present layer of computing, there is no single thing, database or place that channels our interaction with cyberspace. This would lead to new behaviors that eschew having a few personal objects for connecting (Apple), a preferred source for searching (Google), a primary marketplace for buying (Amazon), and a common arena for interacting (Facebook).

Financial Pressure

While none of these companies are hurting for cash flow, each has potential financial vulnerabilities. Apple, Google and Facebook share a dependence on a fairly specific revenue source. Gary Bourgeault does a nice analysis of this dilemma. The most dependent is Apple, who’s current growth is almost entirely tied to the iPhone. Most companies dream about a similar asset, but it’s deep and narrow. The Apple watch has seen steady but slow growth, many of its services have ceded prominence to other competitors (e.g., Apple Music to Spotify), and they’re late to the AI assistant world. So as new sources of penetration dry up for iPhones, Apple requires another huge hit that’s not clearly lurking in their current portfolio.

For all its range of wonderful products, Google is subsidized almost entirely by its search and display advertising revenue. While the Search business made the deft switch from desktop to mobile, the broader vulnerability of the business model remains. As discussed above, AI has the potential to disrupt the Search model. Facebook made a more impressive switch to mobile which preserved their business model and their growth. They’ve also been quick to identify future competitors and co-opt or acquire them. For all that foresight, their business model still depends mostly on the interruptive ad model of traditional media – forcing people to see ads on their way to what they really want to see. While their targeting provides the promise of more relevant commercial messages, the same behavioral and cultural changes that threaten the efficacy of the traditional ad model threaten Facebook as well.

Amazon doesn’t suffer from a narrow revenue source. Amazon has grown an impressively diverse revenue base, but it’s been involved in a confidence game for its entire existence. The company has consistently been valued on how it’s positioned itself for the long term. That’s made it an aggressive pioneer in logistics, cloud services, and AI to name just an impressive few. But Amazon has been valued on their future payoff for over 20 years. At what point will investors want to see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? It seems investors continue to be satisfied as long as they see revenue growth. And it may be that when revenues start to level out, it’ll be able to turn on the earnings lever. But it seems equally likely that it will find itself living in the low-margin world it created and forced to compete among the mortals whose valuations are based on measurable profit growth.

Regulatory Action

Google’s recent EU fine wakes a dormant vulnerability for all of GAFA. At some point, governments may decide each of them has just grown too big. Historical cases against IBM and Microsoft showed the halting effect of government litigation even without a technical legal victory. IBM and Microsoft were hamstrung by the drawn-out multi-year anti-trust litigation that forced them to pull back on their most aggressive initiatives while the action was ongoing to avoid providing additional fodder for the regulators case.

New privacy rules would also significantly affect all their business models, though those of Apple to a lesser extent. The US has allowed a relatively free rein, but actions in the rest of the world point to stricter requirements on how personal data is collected, stored and used. If that data became less available or costlier to use, that would significantly affect the existing business models which generally rely on the free use of personal data. Google and Facebook are especially dependent on ad revenue that’s tied to their targeting ability. If that targeting is hampered by privacy regulations, their inventory could become less attractive or more expensive.

Still other regulatory pressures are surfacing in the increased scrutiny of Facebook and other social media companies. Their long-standing argument that they should be treated as aggregators rather than publishers is losing sway as negative publicity piles up around online bullying, hate speech and fake news. A new law in Germany requires all social media companies to remove illegal content within 24 hours of notification. The cost of compliance would be felt in various ways, from operations to partnerships.

The legal threats in all these areas are closely tied to the political, and that does not bode well for the current titans. Changes in regulations follow changes in popular sentiment, and that is shifting as the former Davids have become the new Goliaths. Marketers dislike the duopoly of Google and Facebook who together represent 60% of US digital spend. When Facebook was found to have misreported engagement times on video ads, they essentially shrugged it off. Marketers have little of the leverage they’re used to having over media owners. Similarly, Amazon is now seen as a competitor to most every retailer. The popular culture that used to celebrate these companies as champions of the people are now as likely to paint them as stiflers of innovation and corporate bullies. So there is a steady accumulation of parties actively rooting against them.

It’s difficult to predict a single factor that would prove their Achilles heel. Yet the GAFA gang would have to defy economic history to maintain their current market position. That’s not to say they’ll go away. Many of their predecessors remain as successful businesses despite no longer being the undisputed dominator of their industries. That continued success is even more likely when you consider how brilliant current leadership has proved in anticipating new opportunities and threats. But to continue in their current positions would require an unprecedented combination of reduced level competition, a slower pace of technological innovation, and relaxed government intervention. None of this is likely.

Leave a comment

Filed under Digital Marketing, Market Strategy, trends

Tagged as , , , , , ,

29 May, 2015 · 4:06 pm

The Two Most Important Words in Marketing

if-then*The most dramatic advances in human development over the past century can be summed up in two words: “if then.” That phrase sums up all the power unleashed by the age of computing. Fueled by Moore’s law, the path from the Babbage Machine curiosity of 1822 to IBM’s Watson is an exponential acceleration in the if/then processes we can manipulate in a given time. The algorithm, or the ability to perform complex tasks with a cascade of simpler If/Then actions, has yielded stunning advances in machinery, medicine, communications and artificial intelligence that are redefining our lives on several levels.

It may seem a stretch to tie those lofty heights to the earthier world of marketing. Yet it’s as true for marketing as it is for any human endeavor that future advances lie in more fully harnessing the force of If/Then. We see the early effects in the rise of programmatic media. Programmatic advertising allows marketers to perform instantaneous if/then decisions across millions of potential customers and thousands of destinations. It is now a question of when, not if, all media will be programmatic. As significant as that is, media purchase and delivery is not the full extent of its impact.

With only a small degree of oversimplification, all marketing can be translated into the If/Then processes. In fact, it harnesses the two areas that are currently most at the tip of every CMO’s tongue: Data and Content. That’s because Data feeds the If, and Content provides the Then. Data signals the people and the context around them that spur an adept marketer to act. Content is the action the marketer takes to react to that signal. So if Home Depot sees a suburban homeowner within a mile of their store on a warm April day, then it forwards Spring planting tips and an offer from their Gardening Center. The response generates data that sets up the follow-on If/Then. If the Spring planting tips led to a purchase, then gauge their interest in a Loyalty program for the summer ahead. The effectiveness of the marketing correlates with the depth and breadth of If/Then branches the marketer can meaningfully define.

The Art vs. Science group might argue that applying the If/Then paradigm to its logical extreme overlooks the human factor that underlies the best marketing. In that view, the most successful brands, the ones that inspire deep-seated passion and loyalty like Harley Davidson and Nike, exist in an emotional territory above the mechanical abilities of If/Then algorithms. And of course, they’d be wrong. If/Then unleashes creativity rather than constrains it. It’s true that you’ll get mechanical transactional marketing if all you feed into the If is mechanical transactional data. But if you feed individual interests and passions into the Ifs, you uncover ways to forge even more meaningful human connections. Imagine how much more value a marketer could deliver to a runner who just had a child, or who’s on a business trip away from their regular running route, then it could to just a runner who is due for a new pair of shoes. The If/Then approach allows marketers to deliver on that kind of potential at a scale and sophistication that evades today’s most intimate marketer.

* this topic was inspired by a discussion with Baba Shetty, a brilliant thinker on various topics including commercial media

1 Comment

Filed under 21st Century Marketing, Digital Marketing, Innovation

Tagged as , , ,

6 March, 2015 · 11:08 am

The Treasure of 3D Data

People As DataThe promise of digital marketing keeps crawling closer in tantalizing steps. The ability to market to individuals at scale still has obstacles, and the best of the current digital case studies tend to major in being one or the other – a truly personal idea delivered to a narrow audience or the mass delivery of a rich homogeneous idea. Nonetheless, problems that once seemed insurmountable in marrying the two together now seem merely expensive and difficult. The future is clear to even the least imaginative people in the field.

In that future, the winners will be those who can deliver on the oft-cited ideal of the “segment of one.” It doesn’t take the most brilliant of minds to understand that in a world of individualized marketing, the primary asset of a marketer will be individuals. As obvious as that sounds, it’s not the current state of affairs. Most marketers borrow or rent their individuals. Whether it’s the subsciptions of YouTube, the social graph of Facebook, or the databases of Acxiom, the asset of individuals is largely in the hands of others.

In some ways, this has been the premise of CRM systems for a while. But CRM has usually been restricted to current customers, loyalty programs, and first party data sources. As a result, these internal systems don’t describe three-dimensional individuals as much as shadows of them projected on a wall. The other panacea of punditry is to say this is all about Big Data. But that’s not really true. There’s a lot of noise in data.  A good deal of what we generate is not meaningful. We may know people’s demographics and shopping history in great detail. Those may hint at their motivations. Yet knowing their actual interests is many times more useful to both the marketer and the marketed. Knowing where someone lives is far less important than knowing what they love. Any marketer of worth should be willing to trade every demographic detail they have on a potential customer – age, address, income, zip code, education, family status – for their music playlist.  3D Data shapes an individual in real dimensions.

The marketer who can connect first party information with the type of 3D Data that gives shape to a person can unlock value for both themselves and their customers. True individual data assets contain deep value for marketers to mine in the marketplace that’s fast arriving. It’s too valuable to cede to third parties. Prudent marketers will work to take ownership of that asset for themselves.

Leave a comment

Filed under Digital Marketing, Innovation

Tagged as , ,

5 May, 2014 · 8:56 am

The Dumbing Down of Online Video Advertising

dumb-and-dumber1In the past week’s NewFront gathering in NYC, AOL, Hulu, YouTube and Yahoo all bragged on their new measurement offerings with some combination of comScore and Nielsen. The common message is that advertisers can now evaluate online and offline video in an apples-to-apples comparison. There is a decades long history of buying TV based on ratings. So the online video giants who want to tap into those enormous TV budgets are giving those buyers what they need to switch offline dollars to online.

The only problem is that it takes the industry backwards.  TV ratings are the vestige of 1950’s technology. It measures that the TV was on a certain channel at a certain time. There’s no measure of whether the ads were watched, let alone engaged with in some fashion.  As Baba Shetty puts it, we need HPAs (Humans Paying Attention) more than GRPs (Gross Rating Points). The recent New York Times article about how few online video ads are even visible aptly reinforces the point. Whether an ad runs alongside some content is at best a rough measure and at worst a deceit. Advertisers should push traditional TV networks to smarten their measures rather than reward online networks for dumbing theirs down.

Leave a comment

Filed under 21st Century Marketing, Digital Marketing

Tagged as , , , ,

2 January, 2014 · 11:44 am

Mobile Gaming Crossing the Line

Online-OfflineOne of the benefits of the holidays is having time to observe the full force of the marketing onslaught. While gauging the pulse of retailers pre-Christmas and post-Christmas marketing plans, I was struck by two television ads that I saw aired repeatedly. One was for Supercell’s Clash of Clans and the other for King’s Candy Crush Saga.

These two games represent the hottest properties in mobile gaming, as most any peek over the shoulder of fellow airline passengers could tell you. Candy Crush alone hit over half a billion downloads before the end of 2013. They follow in the line of crazes that extend back to the historical days of Words with Friends and Angry Birds. Yet, I don’t recall seeing any of those franchises using broadcast TV to feed their respective runs. Unlike console games, the rise and fall of previous mobile gaming hits took place almost entirely in the digital/social realms it was designed for.

The use of TV to drive online downloads is consistent with a trend that is increasingly erasing the divide between offline and online marketing approaches. You can also see this in the refined sales pitches coming from Facebook and Twitter. They are increasingly touting the synergistic effects of their platforms. Pitches that used to be be about the unique effectiveness of online marketing now emphasize the ways that online advertising enhances the effectiveness of offline marketing.  Like most marketing trends, it’s a move that shows marketers catching up with human behaviors. As we increasingly jump the line in our real lives, it’s natural that our consumer lives would follow.

Leave a comment

Filed under Digital Marketing, Innovation, Mobile

Tagged as , , , , ,

13 October, 2013 · 10:06 pm

Real-Time Marketing Takes Real Character

Open 24 HoursReal-time Marketing is a catch phrase of the moment. There are arguments as to what it means and how far it will go, but no one can argue with these basic premises:

  • Response times are shrinking for marketers who want to play in the currents of popular culture. The velocity of change in everything from bestseller lists to tourist destinations has accelerated the cycle from up-and-comer to has-been. Marketers have to act more quickly, frequently, and astutely to earn cultural relevance.
  • People expect brands to respond to them in multiple forums of their choosing. Today’s marketers can look with jealously at the ancient world where customer interactions were handled primarily in-store or through 800 numbers. People now assume that companies will respond to them wherever they happen to be – In-store, Facebook, Twitter, website, etc
  • People tap into a wider spectrum of company behaviors in forming their brand perceptions. While advertising still commands considerable power, people are increasingly influenced by a broader range of company activities. Apple suppliers’ working conditions, Chick-A-Fils political views, and Zappo’s sales agents have exhibited powerful affects on their brands.

These trends affect the most primary foundations of successful brand building. More specifically, they shed a new perspective on the concept of brand storytelling.  Any student of marketing knows that great brands are built on great stories. Stories are the means by which we understand, remember, and connect with things that are important to us. When we recall great people or great events, we do so with stories. It’s why American Idol and its variants don’t use their airtime to merely judge the talent. What draws viewers in are the stories they construct about what got them there (the obstacles they overcame, the people who inspired them, the dreams they’re chasing) and the stories that unfold as they progress through the natural drama provided by the multiple rounds of competition.

Traditional advertising rightly celebrates well-crafted stories. From Mean Joe Green and the kid with a Coke to Nike’s Jogger.  successful brands have harnessed stories to conjure the highest level of connection with their audience. Yet these tight, well-contained, highly produced stories don’t mesh easily with the trends we just described. How do you craft stories in the world of tweets, snapchats and user-generated content?

The answer is that today’s brand stories must rely more on characters than on plot. Stories that rely on plots don’t have the malleability to meet the emerging forms of marketing.  One can think of a movie like The Sixth Sense, composed with precision to deliver a steady dose of suspense that ends in a wonderful collision of surprise and inevitability. Compare that to a James Bond movie. Outside of a few twists, we already know how it is going to turn out in the end. Yet we embrace the ride in order to revel in experiencing the character we love. That is the advantage of character-based stories. They lend themselves to endless sequels.  No one is pressing for Sixth Sense II but the James Bond franchise keeps churning on.  Characters allow the stories to pour out in endless variation. They inspire Fan Fiction and fierce loyalties.  The common quality in people’s passionate embrace of Star Trek, Sex in the City, House of Cards, and similar properties is not in the plots, but in the characters.

This is not the “brand character” often listed on a standard marketing brief. Those usually list a short collection of well-worn adjectives. Character needs to be richer than that. We feel genuine attachment for entirely opposite types:  because they are the same as us, because they are different from us, because of their glamour, because of their humanity, because of their goodness, because of their badness.  We are drawn less by type than by depth. A real character is the fuller expression of the drives, instincts and world view that shape how you act in the world.  We want to be in the company of that kind of character, to interact with it, even to add to it. With this character firmly in place, a brand can more easily weave stories across channels, and let people tell stories on its behalf. This is the character that brands require to prosper in today’s real-time marketing environment.

(This topic was inspired by a discussion with Mark Figliulo on the nature of character in stories).

Leave a comment

Filed under 21st Century Marketing, Digital Marketing, Innovation

Tagged as , , , , ,

31 October, 2012 · 1:20 pm

Mobile: Moments that Matter

The rise in mobile communications signals a change in marketing that is more significant than a shift in channels. It represents a profound reconsideration in how to think about effective targeting. The principles that drive the prevailing wisdom on targeting are based on the historical move from mass advertising to direct marketing. Mass advertising provided a low CPM, but for most marketers it involved a good deal of waste. With TV, radio and print, in order to capture the people you really wanted, you had to expose your message to a larger audience of people you didn’t want. You could reduce that somewhat by seeking out narrower audiences in niche programs or titles, but it was still casting a wide net.

The promise of direct marketing was that you could deliver your communications only to the people you really wanted to reach. If you wanted affluent Moms in households with kids under 12, that’s all you had to buy. The higher CPMs that came with this approach were justified by the efficiency and higher response rates. There was a shift from seeking out as many people as possible to seeking out only the people that mattered. It was a shift from focusing on “Places that Matter” to “People That Matter.”

The arrival of digital performance marketing took the principle of “People that Matter” to an even higher degree of precision. You could go beyond demographics and customer data in targeting, and include even finer distinctions revealed by online behavior. Now you could target Moms in affluent households with kids under 12, who seek out photography tips, love Gwen Stefani videos, and visited your website two days ago. At first, Mobile seemed like an opportunity to take that specificity even further. But as the nature of mobile usage evolved, it turns out a difference in degree became a difference in kind.

Mobile shifts targeting from a focus on “People that Matter” to a focus on “Moments that Matter.” Digital media maven Dave Marsey coined that phrase to signal the new challenges and opportunities Mobile provides beyond more precise targeting of individuals. Both the explicit and implicit data around Mobile allows marketers to market to the situation rather than just a person. For many brands, the moment is more important than the person. If you are in the QSR business, for example, would you rather connect with someone in the heart of your demographic target, or with someone stepping out of work for lunch at 11:50am within a walking distance of one of your restaurants? The first choice is a person that matters, the second is a moment that matters. Ideally, you’d want both, but the power of knowing the context of the moment has the potential to trump what you know about the person.

Yet the advantage of knowing the moment is only useful if you manage to it. People generally use mobile with more intent than traditional media, and marketers will be successful to the extent that they are seen as relevant to that intent. Relevance used to be defined in terms of what you said. In the mobile ecosystem, relevance is what you provide. In the QSR example, the lunch-seeking office worker is focused on what to eat. So she’s more interested in a new menu item and much less in a concert promotion. The situation would be reversed when that same worker is headed home chilling out with Pandora.  That’s why the argument about the screen size of mobile devices and such miss the point. Mobile marketing is not about how to stand out on a screen, but how to provide people with value in that moment. Value can take many forms:  education, entertainment, shopping, etc. Taking full advantage of Moments that Matters doesn’t require more pixels; it requires more thought.

 

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Digital Marketing, Innovation, Mobile, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , ,

4 May, 2012 · 10:41 am

The Four Tenets of A Digital Mindset

The Digital New Fronts showed another maturing stage in the development of online content. It demonstrated the continued blurring of the offline and online worlds. Television series and web series are increasingly utilizing the same talent, pursuing the same audience, and selling to the same advertisers. This blurring will continue as advances in addressable television, tablets, and over-the-top video make the distinction between digital and broadcast content disappear.

This represents both a victory and a conundrum for proponents of digital marketing. The victory rests in the growing importance of social, mobile, and online marketing in the plans of even the most traditional marketers. Several global brands are being built almost entirely on digital marketing strategies.  So, as far as rising to the ranks of market importance, digital has “won.”  But the conundrum is rooted in this same success for digital practitioners of every stripe.  When everything and everyone is using digital, is there any meaningful distinction left in being a digital marketer?

Digital marketers used to distinguish themselves based on their mastery of channels that most other people didn’t understand. They knew how to design websites, build rich media banners, and bid on search terms. That knowledge is both more widespread and easier to tap into than ever before.  That said, there is still something quite valuable about true digital marketing. It’s not about the toolset; it’s about the mindset. What is still lacking for many marketers and agencies is the mindset that comes from a digital way of looking at that world.  There are four core tenets underlying the digital mindset:

Everything is Connected

The digital imperative is to constantly seek new points of connection. In marketing, digital brands find new ways to connect across multiple levels.  Those connections can be made across time, people, information, and interests.  In that way, it can connect brand building with sales, existing customers with potential customers, R&D with Customer Service, etc. Where traditional marketing tends to separate into channels, digital marketing is always finding new ways to link together.

Actions Trump Impressions

Traditional marketers often measure the effectiveness of their efforts by the impressions they generate. Even experiential efforts like live events are reported in terms of how many equivalent impressions they generated. The digital mindset sees value in actions. An action is a measure of commitment, while an impression is only a measure of exposure.  If you’re looking to make a friend, interacting with someone will get far better results than being seen by someone. Similarly, if you can get someone to post something, share something, or like something then you are far more likely to sell something, either to that person or someone they know.  In that view, getting a thousand people to do something is more valuable than getting a million people to see something.

Always Optimizing

The traditional marketing cycle is like a movie release. The marketers spend months developing a new story, work behind the scenes to perfect the details, and after several months, launch it to the world in a glorious finale. If it succeeds, you make a sequel; it if fails you start over with a new one. The digital mindset embraces the beta view of software development. The launch is seen as more a beginning than an end. By gathering feedback and measuring reactions, the first release gets tweaked and upgraded.  In the digital view, a release does not have the rigidity of a final cut, but the malleability of software code.

Data is Currency

All of these elements are driven by data. To be digital, you need to be know how to harvest, process, and analyze data.  And it’s not just for performance metrics. Performance measurement is vital, but data provides much more than that. Digital marketers are excited by data because it reveals new connections, shows what people are really doing, and points the way to building deeper relationships. The digital mindset not only recognizes the awesome business potential of data, but the amazing creative potential of data as well.

Having the latest digital tools doesn’t make you a digital marketer anymore than owning a chessboard makes you a chess player.  For both qualifications, the proof is in how you play the game.

Leave a comment

Filed under 21st Century Marketing, Digital Marketing, Innovation

Tagged as , , ,