Calls for digital marketing to drop its prefix and simply be defined as ‘marketing’ have caused many an argument, especially among different client departments – let alone marketing agencies – battling to protect their patch.
But the move raises two crucial questions: is marketing still to be defined by the tactical approaches (mobile, offline, online etc) in today’s dynamic environment and, if not, is the UK really ready to integrate these siloed disciplines to create cross-channel campaigns already used by many international companies?
There is little doubt that digital marketing needs to be integrated into marketing as the line between digital and non-digital is blurred. We see in everyday campaigns how these marketing channels interact all the time: for example a person is buying in-store, but had previously searched the product on Google and reviewed it on different websites, was influenced by display ads and had been exposed to a variety of print ads too.
Digital is part of the customer journey and marketing campaigns need to incorporate both digital and non-digital elements to offer a holistic customer reach.
Digital is embedded in marketing, which means that everyone in the organisation needs to have the necessary skills to understand and leverage it. Companies such as Citibank have already started to recognise this: head of consumer marketing Vanessa Colella decided to eliminate the digital marketing department on the bases that the skills and expertise should not be limited to a select few, but are essential to everyone in the marketing and sales departments to orchestrate successful digital strategies.
This approach, followed by intense training, should elevate marketing performance. The same practice has also been adopted by Chanel global digital programme director Phillipe Baumlin, who recognised that, “digital is now part of Chanel’s DNA and cannot be a separate department in your company. It’s too deep, too important, the whole company has to become digital”.
This organisational change should be further empowered by adopting a holistic analytics approach to accurately understand digital and its interactions. Why? Because taking a siloed approach to time-honoured measurement techniques –consumer surveys, focus groups, media-mix models, and last-click attribution – is not a true reflection of marketing performance.
Some marketers mistakenly think they have a handle on how their advertising actually affects behaviour and drives revenue. But that approach largely treats advertising touchpoints –in-store and online display ads, TV, radio, direct mail, and so on – as if each works in isolation.
It is the role of the chief marketing officer to help educate the board about the shifting dynamics of consumer behaviour and how marketing has to change with it.
The report by Forrester, ‘Trends for the B2C CMO to watch in 2013’, which kicked off the debate, is correct in stating that customers are interacting with brands in a variety of ways at any one time, sometimes all at once.
Marketing is vital to company growth, given its direct relationship with the consumer; however, if CMOs continue to let marketers take a ‘swim-lane’ approach to channels, driving innovation and growth will be counter-intuitive.
This still-common practice of, what we call swim-lane measurement, explains why marketers often misattribute specific outcomes to their marketing activities and why finance tends to doubt the value of marketing. As one finance chief of a Fortune 200 company told us: “When I add up the ROIs from each of our silos, the company appears twice as big as it actually is.”
Ultimately deploying the right analytics tools, which are able to chew through terabytes of data and hundreds of variables in realtime, companies can understand how advertising touchpoints interact dynamically and tailor their marketing activities accordingly.
It allows companies to create a high definition picture of their marketing performance, run scenarios and change strategies in realtime. This fosters transparency and communication between stakeholders and can lead to up to 30% improvements in marketing performance, and that is an outcome few would argue against.
Heath Podvesker is EMEA executive vice president of MarketShare
I agree with you, Heath. One of the first things I did when I joined Mason Zimbler was re-position our Head of Digital as Deputy Creative Director. We needed to ensure our ‘ideas first, channels second’ ethos was evident on the outside as well as the inside of the business.
Audiences don’t act in a neat, vertical way – they are using their smart devices while watching television and sharing social content while reading newspapers on the bus.
Chief Marketing Officers may have appointed rosters for each channel to gain from specialist experience. Therefore, they need to encourage those roster agencies to work together by embracing divergent thinking, then converge the best ideas so that audiences benefit from a consistently strong experience.
It follows that analytics also needs to be joined-up, for all the reasons you’ve given. Inter-agency collaboration is vital here. More of us need to embrace a ‘results first, channels second’ attitude to analytics, instead of trying to claim sole responsibility for all the good stuff. It makes it much easier to achieve the virtuous circle of ongoing improvement that is the hallmark of great marketing.