(Originally published in Impact magazine issue dated 04th February 2017)
In early 2000, a bunch of marketing, media, and technology folks kicked the grave of John Wanamaker and woke him up from his long sleep. John Wanamaker, who had died 78 years earlier, suddenly became the brand ambassador for digital advertising. For it was he who (apparently) said that half of his advertising was wasted, but he didn’t know which half. While there are some other claimants also for this quote, by the sheer number of times quoted, Wanamaker wins. For a few years since 2000, many digital presentations started with a slide with this quote and offered a magic bullet promising that in the new world, nothing will be wasted.
Sixteen years later, much water has flown under the bridge, and billions of cookies were baked, served, and crumbled. Adtech became part of the vocabulary. Platforms came and went. Standards, rule books, and best practice guides—all crafted with arts and science emerged. In many cases, by the time best practices were documented, the platform itself vanished or changed an algorithm, leaving the practitioners confused between best practice and next practice. There is a graveyard out there—of dead platforms, tools, and solutions. Along the way, an ominous underworld also developed—click farms, click baits, bots, invisible inventory, unseen videos, and so on. An underworld where encounter killing is absent.
While changes are happening every day, leaving planners realise what running on treadmill really means, the excitement of uncertainty and learning continues. Rapid learning, testing, and quickly moving on (or staying back) became the only certainty.
In this rapidly moving and churning world, the saner advice is not to invest in digital marketing (or as wise people say, marketing in a digital world).
Unless …
Unless, some ground rules are in place. None of these are new, and it might even raise some eyebrows and frowns, saying that all this is understood and taken care of. In reality, it is not. May be some very few brands do follow. Nevertheless, in this season of ‘listicles,’ here is one:
- Stating objectives and tasks: While marketing objectives are articulated well at the start, more often than not, what is expected of digital channel and how will it be measured are not stated. Clearly state the task and decide on what will be measured and how it will be measured.
- Creating communication or assets specifically made for the web/mobile: In most of the cases, it is merely an adaptation of a TVC or print ad. It is not the best way. Create different formats, leveraging the strengths of platform and medium and what the channel is expected to deliver.
- Re-crafting the brief: Brand briefs are always about a specific target audience, defined by demographics or psychographics. With the availability of data and segmentation possibilities, it is possible to re-craft the brief, targeting sub-segments, creating communication, and delivering on relevant media for them.
- Dynamic and multiple creatives: Experiment/test with multiple creatives (dynamic) based on external variables (from as basic as the geography to language to context to weather).
- Call to action: Have a strong call to action on all communications and test different call to actions.
- Defining the consumer journey in the channel and what data gets captured: What happens after the consumer sees the communication? Define which landing and final destinations, intermediate actions, what needs to be tracked and therefore tagged, what data can be captured, and what the related technical dependencies are.
- The existential questions: Did the communication really get served and to the right audience or was it served to bots? Deploying tools for ad verification, human views, and in-target reach are now becoming norms.
- Learning agenda: Have a learning agenda for each campaign, and create a hypothesis, test, and learn.
- Fair ‘pay’ for digital marketing partners: Agencies are no more ‘agents’ who bought media placements for a commission. Talent with varied and rich skill sets are now part of marketing partners’ teams, and they are not easy to come by. Not to mention the operational intensity. Some clients do recognize this today and have a fair position on this.
As said earlier, nothing perhaps is new here. But everyone doing everything mentioned above is rarely happening. With more stakeholders, digital campaign planning in detail is time consuming. But it’s worth the effort.
At least, half of Wanamaker’s ‘half problem’ would have got addressed.