Marketing agencies have completely missed the potential of digital

We sit here in 2014 and we think we’ve “got” digital. We’ve been talking about it forever and we’ve introduced new processes, expressions, agencies. We’ve acquired, hired and rebuilt. What more evidence is needed? How could it be in an age where Unilever has a YouTube Channel, Oreo can put tweets on cookies and where we make TV ads out of recycled vines, that we’re not on top of it?

I believe we’ve accomplished nothing with new technology in marketing. We’ve missed the entire point of it all; we’ve taken the revolutionary power of digital and found a way to adapt it to what we had.

It’s always been this way because paradigm shifts are hard, be it the onset of the steam age, or the beginning of electricity. We tend to view the future through the mirror of the past, unable to start afresh with what the new technology means. We become fixated on embellishing what we had, instead of attempting to transform the status quo with what’s now possible.

Media owners still sell identical units from the past, merely digital equivalents of what we already knew, sold in the same way, to the same people in media agencies who use the same techniques to plan and execute. Clients operate as they always have, but with “digital people” with their own budget and present at meetings. Creative agencies are identical, the production line for ads is the same, the processes, templates and briefs identical. They’ve taken the supply specs for digital and bolted them on to the end. Even the technology we have embraced, like programmatic buying or retargeting, is based on an obsession with technology and a dearth of creativity. We’re getting better at narrow cast ads based on a misunderstanding of our own proficiency and a total lack of empathy about consumer behaviour.

Industry wide we’ve taken the most powerful, transformative force the business world has ever seen, a power so strong it’s reduced retail brands to ashes, bankrupted media channels, and redefined personal transportation, and have forced it to fit into what we could best deal with. If we are honest, digital has always been a problem. It threatened us, it undermined what we knew, it gave us measurement and removed artistry. We digested it as a problem, and as a result we’ve never once tasked ourselves with maximising it.

The first step is to blow up the agency environment and start again.

We are built on an anachronistic structure from the days when we were funded by commission and aligned to media channels that no longer exist. We live in a world where we listen to the radio on our phones, read magazines on tablets, watch TV on laptops. The very least important aspect of how we consume media is how the stuff gets to us, the most important aspect is the context. Yet we order our entire workflow and budgets around the irrelevant pipe.

We should bring media owners, media agencies, technology companies and creative agencies together. Adding technology, strategy, creativity and media knowledge together will allow us to do more interesting things than replicate what we know. With this structure we would take advantage of new technology like addressable TV, we’d use targeting and creative optimisation to find ways to make ads more personal. We’d find ways to do native at scale.

We’d invent new advertising units, entirely new ways to connect with people, or create ads with more interesting calls to action. Clicks to add products to shopping baskets, clicks to bookmark pages. We’d leverage new media platforms that don’t yet exist, mobile marketing in the notification layer, maps as a portal for search advertising. We’d see flow advertising across devices, to close the loop on shopping and send mobile coupons to people.

I’d hope that we’d also rise above the world of communications and think more broadly about what technology means for marketing. We could think more imaginatively and empathetically about how brands can connect more meaningfully. We’d invent new business models for the internet of things, establish what APIs or app links can do. We’d explore digital screens in retail, exploit omni-channel retail, find ways for brands to redesign call-centre processes and CRM strategy, employing over-the-top (OTT) messaging to be more personal.

We could move upstream to the big meaty problems in business and to improve products. Unleashed to transform the core business, we could help brands and business reinvent themselves for the digital age. Now more than ever companies face bigger threats than before. We should have been the people to get Kodak to become Instagram. What if we’d suggested an idea like Uber to General Motors? What can we do about the dying high street, or how can banks manage virtual currencies? What do companies threatened by the innovator’s dilemma do to keep fresh and nimble? This should be a role for marketeers in the digital age.

Let’s put down the drone, forget “follow Friday”. Let’s step up a gear, be bold and change the future of business.

Tom Goodwin is the CEO and founder of the Tomorrow Group. You can follow him on Twitter @tomfgoodwin

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