In various versions, each blind man touches only part of the elephant and arrives at a different conclusion.
One feels the tusk and believes an elephant is like a spear; another the side and perceives a wall. A third, who grabs the tail, believes it to be like a rope and so on. I can’t think of a better description of digital marketing today.
Ask just about anybody and they will say “I get it” and then explain one aspect or the other. They’re often quite knowledgeable and informed until you move the discussion an inch to the left or the right. Then they become babbling idiots. Obviously, it can’t go on this way.
The paid, owned and earned model
There seems to be a growing consensus that marketing is moving away from analog/digital and ATL/BTL dichotomies and towards a model of paid, owned and earned media. The idea is catching on because it’s so sensible and easy to “get.”
However, the concept is highly problematic. Where should priorities lay? How are the three interconnected? How do we evaluate them? Where does one start and the other end? How will problems be resolved? Who’s driving the bus???!!!
If you start asking these questions, you’ll quickly get some answers from someone who “gets it,” However, they will inevitably be of the sort of the famous blind men describing the tusk or the tail rather than the whole elephant.
Paid media
Talk to media agency people and they’ll say, “I get it. It’s all about data integration, DSP’s and optimization.”
They feel well equipped to the task. After all, they’ve been optimizing TV schedules for decades comfortable with numbers, and are used to working elaborate software platforms. They can know how to negotiate good deals and drive ROI.
However, ask them about the difference between the Internet and the Web or social networks and social media and they’ll give you a queer look. Try to engage a them in a discussion about user experience or social infrastructure and they will pontificate broadly, without even a basic knowledge of how a web site works.
Somewhere along the line in their quest to become strategic communication planners, media agencies forgot about media and have neglected crucial skills that would serve them well in the digital age.
Planners used to meet with media owners regularly, understand what makes one product a hit and another a flop and so on. Now all that has been relegated to mere “implementation.” The lack of direct contact has taken a toll.
Owned media
Talk to creative agency and PR oriented people and they’ll say, “I get it. It’s all about messaging and inspiring the consumer.”
They’re quite happy with that. They’ve been at it for a long time. They know how to write headlines and copy. A web site to them is just interactive print. Moreover, the emergence of online video makes the grand old dames of Madison Ave. feel right at home.
However, as someone who has trained a number of print editors to adapt to digital, I can attest that a web page is very little like print. Users scan screens rather than they read them. They don’t follow a linear pattern, but respond to relationships between content. It’s easy for people following old rules to fall into common web publishing mistakes.
Further, people on the web truly don’t read a book by its cover. In most cases, less than half of users arrive at a site through the home page. They usually get there through search engines or referring sites. What to do about that? Better go ask the media agency guys with their DSP’s…
Earned media
Talk to social media people and they’ll say, “I get it, it’s all about the conversation.”
They feel invigorated. All those years of training their thumbs on video games and classroom SMS’s is finally paying off! Their parents and teachers thought they were just goofing off. Hah! They were preparing for a new digital age!
Now it seems that the worm has turned. Pepsi’s “Refresh” project, hailed by many social media advocates as a harbinger of things to come, has turned into an enormous embarrassment. This forward looking company who so eagerly jumped at the new, new thing has seen their market share slide to levels not seen since people wore funny hats.
It turns out that those traditional guys who were optimizing schedules and crafting messages for all those years figured a few things out along the way. Money and marketing craft do matter.
And guess what? Tweeting really isn’t all that hard to learn. So you can expect social strategies to be incorporated into other functional areas. In case you missed it, I previously laid out 4 ways to do just that.
The futility of “getting It”
What will be the utility of massive data integration platforms in a fully semantic web? How will HTML5 affect our current understanding of user experience? Can conversations ever be honest and true in a world of asymmetric information?
To be honest, I really don’t know and by the time I am able to achieve some clarity, the important questions will be most likely be altogether different. We’re lucky enough to be living through amazing times, an era where people will look back and say, “Wow! that’s when it all really got started.”
So much like Socrates’ famous adage, the only true knowledge lies in knowing that you know nothing. Where does that leave us? Fortunately, there’s an answer for that.
The agency of the future?
A while back, just after I started this blog, I wrote about the merits of specialized vs. full service agencies. The basic premise was that the dichotomy is a classic example of what Clayton Christensen calls modular and integrated organizations.
Integrated Organization: When things are new, not well understood and operational interfaces are weak. Problems lack standard solutions. Therefore, people need to be close to each other and communication has to be very intense. A good example would be the early auto factory where raw materials went in the front and cars came out the back.
Modular Organization: When an industry becomes more mature, interfaces improve. Standard solutions to basic problems emerge and communication becomes more formalized. Firms begin to specialize in different parts of the process, much like the auto industry today, which is comprised of thousands of components suppliers.
It should be clear that over the past few decades marketing services has become increasingly modular. However, it seems just as clear that the trend is reversing towards a more integrated approach. Digital native agencies tend to be full service and, as recent articles in Ad Age and Adweek show, are starting to move into traditional spaces as well.
So the agency of the future will probably look a whole lot more like the agencies of the past, with a full service, integrated approach. That makes a lot of sense, because we truly don’t “get it.” When you’re trying to make sense of an elephant in the dark, it helps to have extra hands around.
The new era of paid, owned and earned media will be an era of integrated teams.
Greg Satell is a blogger and a consultant at the Americal online media Digital Tonto. You can read his blog entries at http://www.digitaltonto.com
