Discussion at the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda summit confirmed what marketing organisations have been experiencing and talking about continually with clients; the current pace of change is faster than ever, relentless even, and agility and collaboration need to be hardwired into the organisational DNA of every future-proof business.
A question of balance
At a time characterised by uncertainty and flux, it’s comforting to fall back on perennial marketing truths. For one, our industry has always strived for balance. Traditionally, this meant achieving the right split of advertising versus sales promotion, building desire for brands over the long term while consistently meeting immediately measurable targets.
Translated to our current landscape, the rise of addressable media (pdf), individually targeted by device, means we can reach the right person at the right place at precisely the right moment – and at scale.
But what we are seeing now is a “paradox of time online”, whereby brands can be relevant and timely in meeting consumers’ instant demands, and forge meaningful long-term relationships with consumers.
While some media owners want us to believe that brands face a three-second audition to win attention, suggesting we focus on creating thumb-stopping moments, this risks foregoing rich, deeper engagement over the long term. We need both.
Modern marketing, happily, has an advanced toolkit of softer qualities – the intuition, ingenuity and insight that translate to durable brand building – to balance against its tech-driven automation and programmatic capability.
What does this mean for agencies?
So, what is the optimal balance in our super-fluid, paradoxical media landscape? Well, we’re now at a point of peak complexity, which finds us roughly half way through the shift from old to new. In the UK there is roughly a 50:50 split between offline and online media revenue. Then within digital, approximately 50% of display and video is being directed into programmatic activity (pdf), harnessing the precision targeting that translates to measurable transactions.
But while our capability for super-precise short-term targeting will only continue to increase as programmatic advances, the life cycle of a consumer’s relationship with a brand still needs to be long term. At GroupM we use the example of a Mercedes buyer; if you start talking at precisely the moment a 54-year-old driver can afford an E-Class, we will probably not succeed. If we build years of desire, admiration understanding and preference, then that point of conversion is much more likely to result in a purchase. We need to work at both ends of the funnel.
What next?
Within the machine-driven aspect of marketing, the human touch is still needed to interpret data and set the rules within those systems.
In practice, this means using a range of automated online activities to target and amplify promotional messages to increase their efficacy, continually interpreting audience data to make real-time copy and bid changes over the course of a campaign.
A perfect mix
As media consumption becomes more complex, marketing, in turn, becomes increasingly polarised. But alongside the programmatic versus creative debate, there is an urgent need for agencies to get smarter in each area.
This means hiring for creativity and intuition as well an understanding of data analysis. Crucially, we also need to structure ourselves to be flexible and allocate resources to benefit clients’ specific needs, applying this at a granular level during each media campaign.
Ian Leslie wrote an excellent piece for the Financial Times on the state of our industry and digital disruption. Yes, communications are being transformed and can now be precise, relevant, timely, sequential and cross device (well, almost), but no, media agencies are not going to be replaced by robots and algorithms. Connecting brands with their audiences can also be creative, meaningful and memorable – and digital enables us to do this so long as we make use of the data available to us, interpret it and apply our intuition.
Lindsay Pattison is the worldwide chief executive of Maxus and former president of WACL. She is speaking at the Guardian Changing Media Summit 2016
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