Marketing in the digital age

I'm a taking a break from completing a proposal. Frankly I’ve been looking at this response template for so long, I'm vaguely afraid I’ll get the bends if I look at something else but it’s time to come up for air. I'm still looking in awe at IBM’s* marketing content from the sixties and seventies. Look at this slice of pure awesomeness.

It really shows that IBM had a distinctive and futuristic in house style but it begs the question, who was this marketing aimed at? In fact it begs the question who is all enterprise marketing aimed at?

Marketing in general is an odd beast, Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying that “marketing is the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America” which is a hell of a thing to say about an industry which is worth over quarter of a trillion dollars a year. Worse thing is, he’s right. We can quantatise and analyse spend (and effect) across the entire corporate life-cycle, from sales to production but we can’t analyse just how effective our marketing is, how well we are spending it, how well our marketing channels are performing and what the impact of any change to our marketing strategy is. We can’t model “what if”, we can say with certainty that our marketing is actually working and we can’t claim credit for any successes. In short we’re punting things out there to a badly understood audience and hoping that cool + awards + column inches = increased sales.

In many ways marketing hasn’t moved on from 1975 and the production of this presentation deck for some sales pitch or other. We can emphasise style, we can gauge impact and we can test with focus groups but we can’t know. To fix this we’ve tried all sorts of gambits from market segmentation to personalisation. None of them quite work, especially personalisation i.e.

Can anyone tell me what's going wrong here? He didn't interact with the adverts and he certainly didn't buy anything, he didn't even register most of them.  Worse still, in the second clip we saw how when the personalisation was wrong it was an incredibly jarring experience.  We can learn from this that personalisation does not equal relevance and without relevance marketing is not optimal spend and incorrect personalisation is massively disruptive to your message.

Well that will soon change. Like every other field where money has attracted hordes of mathematicians, marketing is about to be transformed. As TV, print, online and other marketing channels fuse in the glare of the forthcoming unification of technologies like IPTV, tablet publishing and online experience then the fields of web analytics, cloud technology, web content management and content creation will also fuse into the new digital marketing cloud. All marketing presentation will be driven by data analytics which will combine anonymous personalisation with content optimisation to not only present you with a personalised experience but have a fair stab at working out why you are doing what you are doing and what you want. Making the marketing content relevant to you and what you want.

iI you want to look at it another way. The coming technology inflexion will fuse data with content to create experience. Once you can tailor the experience you can control the message and once you can control the message you can optimise marketing. Optimised marketing will equal more sales.

So the next time you watch a marketing or advertising awards programme on the TV, just remember that what you are really watching is the latest and greatest generation of dinosaurs. Beautiful, clever, challenging and wonderful. But still dinosaurs. Within five years all that wonder, all that "buzz" and awards hype will be utterly obsolete. Fun eh?

* It might be from IBM or it might be a very clever viral for something or other. But given what else IBM’s marketing team came up with it is plausible to say the least.