MARKETING IN THE DIGITAL AGELOOKING BACKWARDS & FORWARDS

CHRIS BLAND

Agenda

• The state of media• The state of brand marketing• The state of agencies• The waves of change• My career in marketing• How you should get started

PART 1THE STATE OF MEDIA

The Rise Of Programmatic Media• Programmatic buying is the automation of media trading between media owners

& brands• In the US, programmatic ad spend will reach $20.41Bn by 2016 , 63% of digital

display spend, eMarketer• UK programmatic spend in 2016 will be £2Bn with Euro spend growing 25% in

2016, eMarketer• Global will increase to 50% by 2019, Magna Global• First display, then search, soon OOH, Radio and finally TV• So what?

– Changes the rules of the game from buying content that people consume to buying people consuming content

– Media owners are commoditised as data describing people is all powerful– Enables true 1:1 marketing undermining the traditional broadcast paradigm

The Single Customer View

• A unique record holding demographic, behavioural, transactional and commercial information about a single customer

• Enables understanding of full lifetime value rather than channel focussed session value

• Requires a consistent and personal customer experience throughout the funnel• Blurs the distinction between channels & platforms• So what?

– This is a beguilingly simple concept but incredibly hard to service in a siloed world– Requires technical and data mastery, customer empathy and predetermined or predictive

responses

The Google/Facebook Duopoly

• By 2017 Facebook and Google will control 65% to 70% of digital media spend in the US - $160 billion worldwide by 2017

• “The best and most effective media ever is Google search. The second best right now is Facebook. Effectively, they’re must-buys.”

• So what?– It means every other digital media owner is now chasing a slice of the rest –

with non-digital in their sights– Both systems are data “walled gardens” meaning that they do not allow full

user data out which makes consistent user experiences difficult– Encourages users to choose one to manage all their personal data creating a

data food chain with just two apex predators!

Adblocking

• IAB UK’s Ad Blocking Report reveals that 22% of British adults online are currently using ad blocking software – a rise from 18% in October 2015

• The phenomenon grew 41% globally in the last 12 months• Stifling an estimated $22bn globally in lost advertising revenue in 2015• So what?

– People are confirming what we suspected all along: people hate advertising– Mass media, broadcast brand communication will be screened out and perpetrators

reviled– 1:1 communication must take precedence and be generated by or earned by products

that surprise and delight– Public brand comms must be approached with caution, skill and sincerity

Content & Native advertising

• People have much more control over their media consumption• So brands (agencies) are trying to use content to woo consumer

attention (inbound, social, events)• So what?

– Mass adoption of content marketing has minimised its effectiveness– Native advertising (and now programmatic native) is the great new hope– Wait till the adblockers catch up

PART 2THE STATE OF BRAND MARKETING

Advertising vs Marketing

• At its best, advertising can– Enable content to be produced & consumed for free– Make valuable contributions to culture and society– Be a hugely enjoyable public spectacle

• But, as digital media goes mobile it has become much more intimate, personal and productive

• So what?– There is increasingly a tension between these two styles of communication– Digital is more about the product than advertising

Customer experience vs product promotion

• The SCV, media personalisation and programmatic everything puts the customer in the centre of everything

• The product will communicate less through advertising and more through product marketing

• So what?– Brands should prompt conversation with themselves and between

users/consumers– Brand partnerships that deliver enhanced combined functionality will speak

volumes– Brand advertising will become the preserve of mass market products that cannot

be personal eg FMCG when it will still offer questionable value for money

Full-funnel marketing

• We have a SCV, unified content management and personalised media targeting capabilities

• So, as marketers, we should be delivering an end-to-end, personalised experience to people

• So what?– Marketing campaigns should target objectives related to specific areas of the

funnel: Awareness, Engagement, Conversion and Retention– Campaigns effectiveness should be measured against KPIs that represent these

objectives only– Campaigns should consider tactics from all channels to meet objectives

Measurement & data 1st

• Successful campaigns become always on tactics• So campaigns are refined through data-lead optimisation not

rebriefed• So what?

– Briefing should only be used when there is no existing data available– The gut feel response should never again be the first resort– Measurement strategy is the strategy– Funnel-based measurement framework

• Avinash Kaushik: See, Think, Do

Changes in the marketing department

• Lack of digital resource (particularly at the senior levels) is a problem• But the blurring of data and objectives across channel, platforms and

devices is stretching even the digital specialists• So what?

– Digital and offline departments cause more harm than good– Structuring by funnel objective is better than by channel or platform– All channels platforms have something to contribute when ‘hacking’ a marketing

challenge

PART 3THE STATE OF AGENCIES

Media vs Creative

• Divided by the MadMen in the 1960s• Now being restitched together to meet the integration demands of

digital• So what?

– Clients have to brief media and creative separately with one side often taking precedence

– Predictably, each side responds according to their perspective• Creative agencies prescribe more elaborate creative• Media agencies prescribe more (elaborate) media

– Media owners are taking work from both sides

The role of the big idea in an era of scalable little ideas

• It used to be that the big idea won the day• Post-mass media marketing big ideas are struggling with media

fragmentation• So what?

– Small improvements to effectiveness and efficiency can make big differences– Big ideas can come from product development, tech, business development etc

not just marketing– Digital creative is increasingly being handled media owners familiar with their

custom formats– Dynamic Creative Optimisation offer automated creative iterations using client

data feeds, user behaviour feedback and even automated video product placement

Agencies vs In-house vs Consultancy

• What’s the difference?• Ubiquitous programmatic is creating multi-channel campaign platforms• Automation & self-serve leads to disintermediation• So what?

– Clients have more choice between long-term out-sourcing to agencies or in-housing versus short-term use of specialist consulting skills

– Agencies are preparing to deploy under a variety of remuneration models– Where possible, performance-based remuneration is becoming increasingly

common

PART 4THE WAVES OF CHANGE

The Role Of Data & Automation

• Data has always contributed insight but now it is starting to drive the campaign in flight

• Media planning now includes not just the strategy and the campaign forecast but also the tagging, the collection and the routing of data

• The managing, optimisation and reporting of digital campaigns will increasingly be automated

• Adobe, Google and others are all looking to provide multi-channel marketing platforms

Personal Data Brokers

• People will look for solutions to combat the abuse of personal data and manage communication from brands

• Major digital service providers will offer this service– Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google– “Siren Servers” from Who Owns The Future? By Jaron Lanier

• Adblocking services will also play a role here if they can build out their proposition, possibly in league with mobile network providers

Decentralisation through P2P

• P2P (Peer to Peer) is network technology that is robust, trustless, decentralised, virtually free and extremely disrupting

• The internet is the purest form of P2P tech liberating personal communications with web doing the same for public information

• Cryptography and compression technology disrupted the media publishing industries

• The blockchain took things one step further by enabling the decentralisation of money through Bitcoin

• The next wave will be the deployment of decentralised law through smart contracts and DAOs

The Democratisation Of Work

• Decentralised technologies are now starting to have a radical effect on work

• High quality freelance skills are available globally 24/7 (Upwork)• Work hubs and Nomad working is creating cultures of migrant and

remote but highly-skilled and highly-paid workers• Automated corporate services such as payroll, expenses, contracts,

escrow and payment will fuel an increasingly fluid economy• Networking and collaboration tools are making remote teams

function as smoothly as office-bound teams

PART 5MY CAREER IN MARKETING

Getting Started

• Hang out with people cleverer than yourself• Sell yourself (but not too low)• Come across as both hard-working and fun• Say yes to everything• Read everything• Ride the waves of change

My career waves

• Wave 1 - Digital & the DotCom bubble• Wave 2 - Following a passion for travel• Wave 3 - Search and digital performance• Wave 4 - Integrated, full-marketing

marketing• Wave 5 - Looking beyond media

PART 6HOW YOU SHOULD GET STARTED

Don't look for a job, look for a meaningful challenge

• A job won't be relevant for long– 50% of the most sought after job titles now didn’t exist 10 years ago

• Solving a meaningful challenge has longevity• What are the meaningful challenges and who is tackling them?

– Prepare a business for the next waves → every client– Marketing automation → Adobe, Oracle, IBM– Data brokers → Google / Facebook and Adblockers– Decentralisation → Fintech and LegalTech– Work democratisation → Create your own agency on UpWork

How to keep going?

• Keep reading everything• Go to MeetUp groups on topics you are interested in• Sketch a five year plan

• All realistic goals are achievable within five years• Unrealistic goals take five to ten years

• Things change beyond prediction within five years• Be prepared to pivot!

Q&A

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