Digital Marketing... Just Simpler. #DigitalSense

A lot of things move very fast in the world of digital media & marketing, but most of the ones we need to worry about hardly change at all. I have digital training documents from nearly a decade ago written in such a way you could still use them today, despite all that transformation. It’s time to take a deep breath, inject some #DigitalSense and stop creating unnecessary confusion.

Some of the most common things I hear said in meetings about digital marketing are along the lines of ‘it’s so complicated, no one can every really understand it’ and in particular ‘everything changes so fast you can never hope to keep up’. Another fun marketing truism these days is that ‘this is as simple and as slow moving as things will ever be, they’re only going to get faster & more complicated from here’. Thought leaders will say quotes like these as some sort of inspirational rallying cry and burning platform for change, but they are often quite the opposite.

The same people are often then frustrated that the rest of their team/business isn’t adopting digital best practice as fast as they would like, and surprised that their colleagues feel safer sticking with the traditional bits of marketing which don’t threaten to completely change on them over night. Yet so much of this noise and this sense of change is completely made up, and as an industry it’s entirely in our power to simplify things and make it much easier for our colleagues to come along for the ride with us.

Now don’t get me wrong, I appreciate there are parts of the digital ecosystem which are indeed complex and rapidly evolving. The martech lunascape, the exact ad formats available, new data approaches etc. do move fast, but unless you work in one of the few jobs that really goes into this detail you really don’t need to worry about that. The principles of marketing, as increasingly clearly defined by advances in marketing science, are consistent north stars for us all to work towards - digital channels have disrupted the ways in which we can do that but since the first banner ads 25 years ago and the confirmation of social as a paid reach platform a decade ago not much else has really moved. Maybe direct commerce channels are a slight change in the last few years.

I’m alarmed for instance by the way in which I have seen countless companies train their teams on ‘programmatic’ media. They jump straight into the details of DSPs, SSPs and the great tussle of ad tech that now goes on as part of their media buy. This is sensible stuff to have a vague awareness of and fascinating for those who really want to know more (send them over to Circus Street), but it’s hardly the most important thing to train marketers on is it? All this technology is handled by their media team and agency, isn’t it thus better for them to understand what it does, what they need to ask of it etc. rather than exactly what makes it tick? Great if they get both, but don’t open your training by scaring the hell out of them.

For starters programmatic isn’t even a channel at all, it’s an underlying auction-based way of buying which increasingly applies to just about every type of media imaginable - if you’ve got a line on your media plans which says ‘programmatic’ that’s equally inexcusable. What’s commonly meant of course is display and video advertising - but you can just as well buy TV, out of home or Spotify programmatically. The complicated technology behind it is what makes it tick but what you really should be communicating is what it allows marketers to do, and what in turn consumers see.

Programmatic is an underlying technology which in theory allows you to get in front of the right consumers, in the right place, at the right time, hopefully with the right message. You can use that to powerfully drive relevant awareness through personalised creative, to move people down the purchase funnel through clever retargeting or even to achieve simpler media aims like controlling reach & frequency across multiple touch points. Not all the placements & channels you can buy programmatically are equal or play the same role and thinking about how they work in your mix is more important for marketers than being terrified by technology.

One of the best programmatic workshops I’ve ever seen was one we ran at Carat for Coca Cola a few years back - James Harris was responsible for much of the content but I can lay claim to having invented the workshop title: Programmagic. We didn’t talk technology at all, we chatted about business objectives, storytelling, creativity and the opportunities unlocked by that technology. Marketers engaged because they could immediately see how it would help deliver their marketing aspirations, and yes some of that did feel magic.

About 6/7 years ago now I coined a social strategy for Mondelēz Europe with Sonia Carr, which Kerstin Strubel and I later rolled out as a total digital approach globally. We called it Storytelling at Scale and it was all about smashing through the nonsense and myths in digital at the time (much of which sadly still remains) and reminding people that so much of what we try and achieve in traditional marketing remains the same - getting powerful creative to a big enough target audience is still as much the heart of digital marketing. I recently posted a From>To slide talking about some of this transformation on social media particularly, and 6 years later it’s shocking that people still find this radical.

I often open presentations with a couple of slides with visuals from Game of Thrones. One shows a vast army lining up, complete with terrifying looking giants - these are the marketing tactics of old, and contrary to what you might sometimes hear most of them still work very well. The overall strategy you need to win the battle is unchanged (driving physical and mental availability) and those giants are TV, still one of the most powerful forces in marketing. The second slide shows the arrival of dragons, blasting down fire from the air. These are a good analogy for the unique new power of digital - it really does change the dynamic of the battlefield and marketers do need to get their heads around it, but it’s just a tactic alongside the troops and strategy you have already. You cannot achieve many things without the ground troops, and however differently they fight the digital tactics are still needing to achieve the same goals.

Marketers really do need to get their heads around these new opportunities - if however you work in media/digital and are banging your head against the table wondering why they won’t take a step back and ask yourself if possibly you’re guilty of over complicating things yourself? For most marketers comms is just a part of their job and digital is just a slice of that. If every time they look to do more in digital they’re given a Pandora’s Box of unnecessary complexity and terminology, it’s no wonder they sometimes look the other way.

Worse yet, it's because we make them so terrified of the technology and don't tell them the simple questions they can ask ("Where are my ads actually appearing?") that digital media has ended up looking the other way as fake news, fraud and bad web design has crept in. It's for that reason that we took all the complex issues affecting the digital supply chain and turned them into a well communicated 'Trusted Marketplace' that everyone at Diageo could understand, and then in turn used that as the basis of the WFA's Global Media Charter to scale a positive media approach far & wide.

Digital channels and technology will most likely continue to fragment and develop new complexity, but good strategy rises above this. Even more than that, the technology which manages this complexity for us is accelerating rapidly too so whilst you might argue the world is as simple and slow as it will ever be, I’d argue in many ways we’re also at peak complexity and from here on in as things develop we’ll be relying on other technologies to simplify and navigate that for us. Can we agree to stop adding to the noise by not scaring marketers anymore? If you’re going to be training or communicating to marketers about digital over the next few weeks challenge yourself to strip out the technical buzzwords and spend more time talking about what actually matters to them and the business.

#DigitalSense by Jerry Daykin - Follow me on Twitter