The news that the Co-op Bank has disbanded ‘digital marketing’ should come as no surprise.
For several years senior marketers have been wearily signalling that the need to maintain a digital marketing team separate from the rest of the marketing group was disappearing. And the ultimate manifestation of that realignment, the merger of the digital and marketing teams into a single unit, has been happening across marketing departments with increasing frequency over the last 12 months.
The reason for that integration should be obvious. Despite the recurring use of the dreary D prefix it has become harder and harder to isolate exactly what isn’t digital any more.
TV is digitally delivered and increasingly focused on an addressable, highly digital future.
Any decent newspaper in the 21st century – starting with the New York Times – is now making more money and seeing significantly more growth from its digital platform versus its print edition.
Radio in this country is now delivered to more listeners via a digital platform than broadcast.
Outdoor advertising is demonstrably a digital display business – albeit on big screens that consumers don’t own.
Even skywriting is, I am reliably informed, projected using digital technology these days.
The world has become completely digital and – as my fellow Marketing Week columnist Tom Goodwin has noted – just as referring to your computer as an ‘electrical laptop’ would strike everyone as odd, using the D prefix in any marketing in the near future will come across as slightly batty.
We have come full circle and marketing, as it has done so many times in the past, has absorbed and accommodated a new advance and emerged triumphantly changed as a result.
Of course, that does not mean that it’s back to the marketing coal face like it’s 1995 all over again. There are manifest implications of marketing in the ‘post-digital’ age that will affect all of us. Let us make a quick expedition around the main areas where we can expect significant change.
Marketing departments
If you still work in a company that has a demonstrably digital team sitting separately from the marketing department, take a deep breath, a few pictures for posterity and then prepare for a reorg. The Co-op Bank is not an exception and the binary divide between these two teams is about to come crashing down as financial savings, and the realisation that both groups are effectively engaged in the same work, become apparent.
While idiot digerati will be exposed, so too will those who aren’t open to the potential of options that have appeared over the past decade.
As we speak, most senior marketers are making their power play and ensuring that the head of digital is being shifted horizontally towards the nearest window while they unite the two teams under their direct leadership.
Initially that means a lot of sensitivity toward the conjoined team and, given there are no marketing teams being swallowed by the digital group, that means playing lip service to the importance of all things digital during the transition. But quickly normal marketing service will be resumed.
Job titles
Inevitably, the merger of groups will mean that duplication will result in some downsizing. It’s essential that any decent marketer caught up in this integration communicates both sides of the marketing coin.
On the one hand you need to avoid being precious about your digital creds. Signal early you are entirely comfortable losing the D prefix from your title and, for good measure, add something re-assuring like ‘I do not even know what digital means anymore’ or ‘isn’t everything digital now?’.
The merger process means that anyone who is a member of the extreme digerati will be the victim of the new regime. You know the type: obsessed with AI, convinced in the long-term value of VR, boastful that they don’t own a TV. They will be the first to go when the revolution comes.
Digital experience is a prerequisite
But make no mistake, it’s no good proclaiming that digital is wank and it’s time to get back to basics, pull all the money from Facebook and get it back into ‘proper’ media. The post-digital era cuts both ways.
While idiot digerati will be exposed, so too will those who aren’t open to the potential of all the new research and media options that have appeared over the past decade. When Alastair Pegg, the leading marketer at Co-op Bank, noted that that there was “no such thing as digital marketing” he followed up with the corollary that all “all marketing is digital marketing”.
While we might be dropping the D word and returning to calling it marketing, the 2019 version of our discipline looks very different from 20 years ago, when most marketing executives were learning their trade. After the digerati get their pink slips, anyone who refuses to open themselves to the potential of digital tactics in the mix will almost certainly follow.
Integration
Which brings us neatly to the fervent hope that integration will come back to the fore in the post digital age. It is entirely and utterly obvious that the answer to the digital versus traditional question is an unqualified ‘yes’ to both.
You want multiple channels in your mix. They are more than likely to come from all kinds of media and you want to integrate them into a coherent campaign that uses different tools to do different things, at different stages, and sometimes to different consumer segments.
That’s been bloody hard to do over the last decade with alternative, warring factions within client companies and agencies attempting to show their superiority over their rivals. It’s like trying to win the 1940 World Cup with a team built from Nazis and Allies, and an Italian fascist as the coach.
Only the smartest, most independent thinkers were able to hang on to the idea of media neutrality, integrated marketing and 360-degree campaigns. Now we’ve entered a digital armistice, we can only hope that the era of digital campaigns will come to an end and we can get back to integrated marketing in which diversity wins out.
It will start when we stop having silly charts showing the share of digital media that Facebook has versus Google (like this one). We all use this information but carving out digital media into a subcategory is increasingly unhelpful. And things will really start to take off when we stop giving awards for digital marketing and just start rewarding the campaign that achieves the most effectiveness.
It will be tough because there are so few marketers equipped to manage across so many different channels and integrate them properly. But in a post-digital era those who can jump from a meeting with ITV to one with LinkedIn, managing both fluently and with élan, are who we are going to need.
Digital transformation projects
Digital transformation has been a long and lovely gravy train for a huge army of consultants working for all the big audit firms but the work is about to dry up. Either the company in question has digitally transformed itself or it is so behind the times that it will go about that transformation within a cone of silence because it is so embarrassed to have not got its digital ducks lined up by now.
I was around when we all went mental about the Y2K bug and the risk it placed on global systems. You could not get on the Tube for a while without a couple of yuppies banging on about their role in preparing their clients for Y2K. Obviously, that talk died out very quickly once we survived New Year’s Day with nothing worse than a hangover, a mysterious bruise on our left leg and a vague recollection of a traffic cone somewhere in Clapham.
The same will now happen to all those bright young people and huge old firms making billions from digital transformation. The barrel full of fish is running dry.
Agency structure and offer
One area where we might see the D word remain is in the offer of some specialist communications agencies. Just as public relations agencies do a lot more than PR these days but retain the moniker, we may well see digital agencies continue to prevail. But even that looks increasingly unlikely.
Mark Read, the daring new head of WPP, made many things clear during his radical restructure of the holding company late last year, but one of the major insights came in the short shrift he gave digital in his plans for the future of his mega-agency.
“Digital is a word that has been banned from WPP,” Read noted at his investor conference late last year. “That artificial distinction between analogue and digital is not helpful.”
It was more than a soundbite. Read’s new strategy for WPP involves taking demonstrably full-service agencies like JWT and more ‘digitally savvy’ companies like Wunderman and merging them together in an attempt to prepare for the post-digital world ahead.
M&A in advertising
And internal WPP mergers of offline and online entities are only the start. With the realisation that all media are now, essentially, digital we should also see an increasingly competitive and confusing media M&A scene.
Given the growth and cash reserves rest with the digital giants these days, expect some big plays to come from that direction in the coming months.
At the moment most companies labour under the belief that they can only acquire assets in the immediate vicinity of their own operations. A big outdoor advertising firm like JCDecaux buys a smaller one like APN. A big digital giant like Spotify acquires a smaller up-and-coming platform like Gimlet.
But with the digitisation of everything and the integration mandate from clients likely to increase, expect more cross-media acquisition deals. Digital media companies should start to sniff around traditional firms and vice versa.
There is no reason, for example, why Facebook would not want to buy a TV station. Or, for that matter, why LinkedIn would not be well served by starting to buy up outdoor space in specialist B2B locations like airports and train stations.
Given the growth and cash reserves rest with the digital giants these days, expect some big plays to come from that direction in the coming months. Channel 5 is not going to make a move on Google, if you catch my drift.
Training
In a post-digital world we should finally wave a fond farewell to all the specialist courses and training programmes in digital marketing. Sure, there is room for technical skills at the lower end of the training totem pole but the idea that you need to be trained separately in digital marketing should disappear in the near future.
I’ve endured my fair share of these courses over the years. They inevitably start by declaring marketing to be effectively dead or outdated, then re-present the classic marketing syllabus with some digital examples to illustrate how everything has now totally changed. It’s not segmentation any more, oh no, its digital segmentation and here is an example using mobile phone companies to illustrate the point.
Ideally, marketing training will re-surface as an essential input in any marketer’s career path. That sentence should not present itself as radical but unfortunately it almost certainly is. A majority of marketers still believe that training in their craft is a non-essential element in their abilities and one of the prime reasons for that ignorance has been a preference for overtly tactical, second-rate courses in digital marketing.
That said..
