Digital Marketing Services- something old, something new etc

it's like a graphic designer has done this, only a talentless dozy one.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the business of delivering the right sort of solutions to clients. In the space I work that boils down to a mixture of consultancy, technology, project management and delivery teams wrapped in a lovely risk and assurance blanket and sold to clients on a project by project basis. The problem is when the technology change which is underpinning the business shift with marketing is moving so fast that behaving in a project by project basis runs the risk of being far too reactive and slowly reactive to boot. There’s a risk that the traditional approach also risks missing the whole bundle of things which need to be delivered to make full advantage of the forthcoming technology inflexion. It’s not just about deploying a WCM package and getting the pretty-pretty bits sorted out. There are loads of people who can do that bit, they’re called digital agencies and the can do pretty-pretty just fine and can nearly deploy a working WCM system without making too much of a mess of it, during the pilot phase at least anyway.

No to my mind, this is also about the data repositories, it’s about the integration into line of business apps. It’s about data governance, it’s about analytics and visualisation. It’s about optimizing the processes which support marketing and online sales, it’s about appropriate configuration and customization and it’s about making the whole thing work, seamlessly, no matter what load is put on the stack and it’s about forgotten things like security and management. In short it’s a unified offering.

So where can I buy one of those then?

Currently? You can’t. There is no one provider who has aggregated these services into a single package. Though, as you can imagine, I’m changing that rapidly with my own company (more soon on that). The existing marketplace is dominated by over optimistic digital agencies and under integrated systems integrators but the first team for focus on their strengths will win.

I’m talking joint venture of course, you can’t turn a global SI into a digital agency via purchase any more than a digital agency can turn into a hard core SI by hiring a few developers and hitting the contract market for project managers. The two beasties are far too different for that sort of franken-business to work. We need to team up. A genned up digital agency with some realistic sales and a focused SI with a clear understanding of what needs to be delivered are a much more capable and reliable team to sort this change for clients than the lumpen mutated offerings out there at the moment.

Clients want and need the best. They need to be told what’s possible and what’s realistic. They need to be reminded of all the bits they’ve forgotten and they need a partner who can make it real for them and hold their hand through the difficult and nasty bits.