This year’s thoughts on marketing next year: The prelude

There’s been a lot percolating in my head over the last and it’s about time I got it out in a series of posts relating to marketing as I’ve seen it this year. Hopefully you’ll find it mildly helpful and interesting…and not too rambly.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I think anyone who works in a digital agency probably spent most of last year trying to demonstrate how modern marketing needs a distinctive and somewhat evolved approach to work in digital I daren’t say different because that merely feeds the binary decision making and black or white thinking that hinders many organisations. But as Eric Schmidt highlights, we do need to stop making a distinction between media.

That’s not to say that brands aren’t doing good things, it’s probably the most exciting time to be doing what we do. However things are still broken on a vast scale and the problems lie in systems, business models, metrics and marketers being outpaced by how people are using technology.

To use a Mark Zuckerberg quote: “A lot of this (change) is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.” The problem is of course, social norms are way ahead of most brands thanks to said technology.

My esteemed colleague Iain McDonald likes to use this little thought experiment to highlight how ridiculous some of our thinking actually is when you look at life through a digital lens.

First of all imagine if the Internet, as it is today, came before TV. Then someone said to you we are going to put a big box in the corner of your living room. You can only watch certain programmes when we say you can and then every 15 minutes we are going to show you half a dozen ads that are 9 times out of ten, irrelevant and uninteresting. We will then repeat many programmes that you have already seen throughout the year. You would obviously tell them to get stuffed.

Online behaviour and the use of technology is changing people’s expectations of brands and how they actually behave in the real world. I will cover a few things before the year is out that will hopefully help you for the next – a fresh start and all that guff.

Things like the re-calibrating of businesses, forgetting what you know, the great digital realisation that people don’t care about brands, marketing to networks, convergence of media, media slices rather than chunks, the system of objects, innovative research and measurement. Next post to come shortly…I hope.