Topic: Online marketing
It may be the new car syndrome –you know the phenomenon that happens when you buy a new car and suddenly you seem to spot the same model at every intersection on the road- but every where I look in the Canadian marketing communications space these days seems to underscore the need for the kind of media and forum that we’re aiming to create with In:fluencia Digital.
As I say, I may be simply finding what I’m looking for, but the constant subtexts at the two significant Toronto conferences I attended in the past two weeks were the pressing need for more common language and for more leadership on the digital marketing front.
I’m speaking of the first Canadian edition of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit at the start of April and the Canadian Media Director’s Council’s annual daylong conference on the 8th, this year themed “What a wonderful world: The Digital Reality.” You could say that these are events came at the question from almost opposite ends of the interactive divide.
CMDC conference co-chair, and Cossette media director, Cathy Collier crystallized things for me in her opening comments on Tuesday when she described the digital marketing world as being populated by “natives” and “immigrants.” The “natives” are mostly the under 25 set who barely remember a time before the World Wide Web, video gaming as a dominant entertainment form and a cell phone in every back pack. They are fluent in all things digital and are frighteningly adept at multitasking at lightning speeds through the environment. The “immigrants” are generally the over 25 set who are coming later to the party, are slower to figure it out and no matter how hard their try will inevitably speak the lingo with a thick accent, especially the older ones. They know interactive is the future and want to learn the ways of this new world. And most importantly they are in positions that make the decisions and control spending priorities at marketers, agencies and media companies, and will be for some time.
(While it’s easy to think of Collier speaking primarily about the Boomer set at the very top ranks of business these days, a lot of Gen X folks in their late, mid, and early 30s can also be considered digital “immigrants.” These are people who entered the workforce just before or as e-mail was only coming on stream, and have been steeped in traditional marcom tools and tactics with only a passing involvement with the Web.)
The natives and the immigrants are going to have to come to terms with each other, speak in the same language and work in harmony if the opportunities of the interactive marketing era are to be exploited fully.
The morning CMDC keynote speaker, David Kenny, chair and CEO of Publicis’s interactive agency network Digitas carried that theme forward. He likened learning the digital marketing world to learning French-something he had to do in order to better communicate with his Paris-based bosses. His advice to learning French: start by reading childrens’ books. Don’t be afraid to go to the basics and learn from the ground up. (Of course, he acknowledged learning a new language –either French or digital- is a lot easier said when you’re 14 rather than a successful executive at the top of your game in mid-career.)
Kenny predicted that the question of which kind of agency should be leading interactive marketing efforts will soon be moot. The distinction between digital and traditional agencies will disappear, and it will again simply be agencies. That said, he argued that the disciplines that underpin media agencies position them to take the lead in the interactive space and urged them to do so.
Digital marketing is all about “media creativity, media distribution and media optimization,” Kenny said. “It’s not that complex if you let the consumer be your guide. And she will … if you listen.”
The freewheeling afternoon CMDC panel of client and agency (including media, creative, and several flavours of digital) stakeholders led by Taxi Canada’s Rob Guenette also dealt with a lot of the same questions of how to bring digital fully into the marketing mix-and who should be taking the lead in doing that.
Of course, -after the unanimous lip service that the consumer is the one calling the shots-, there was no big answer on the later question. There probably won’t ever be. But for sure everyone agrees the silos have to come down, both within companies and between their agency partners.
The primary constituency at the eMetrics event, of course, was the pure lain “natives” of the interactive world: the metrics and analytics people who are the front lines of making online work. Many of them take pride in being called geeks and nerds.
A surprising –to me anyway- number of the presentations and conversations at eMetrics dealt with how to better communicate the complex and often confusing –not to mention voluminous- data that Web sites and all e-initiatives can generate to the “immigrant” bosses and clients in terms and forms that they can understand. And that they can act upon.
Interestingly enough, the question of who gets to “lead” the whole enchilada of marketing communications in the digital era didn’t come up that much at the eMetrics sessions. That might be because there were proportionately more client people and proportionally fewer agencies of any flavor attending. It also seemed like the eMetrics natives are more preoccupied at this stage with just making sure they are at the table and understood.
Or it may be that they’re just quietly confident that their discipline will inevitably conquer the rest of the world.
Now that I think of it, eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit founder Jim Sterne made a point of stressing that his conference series is about total “marketing optimization” not just Web site or digital marketing optimization.
Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.
