'Digital marketing' to become just 'marketing' in 2013
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Digital is set to lose its prefix and just be referred to as “marketing” this year as all marketers’ output will become “inherently digital” over the coming months, Forrester predicts.
The research company forecasts that digital budgets will become 20 per cent of the total, accounting for about $50bn (£31bn) worldwide.
It predicts the momentum of digital disruption will continue to grow across all verticals in 2013 – such as healthcare providers being challenged by personal tracking devices, broadcasters threatened by the likes of YouTube and banking platforms competing with new services such as Square.
Forrester’s “Trends for the B2C CMO to watch in 2013” report warns these disruptors threaten to challenge all businesses if marketers do not expand the utility and value of the experience their brands deliver.
The report, compiled by Forrester’s CMO and market leadership professionals analyst Corinne Munchbach, advises CMOs to work across departments and with executive peers to assess their digital readiness and identify where messages, actions and products can be improved by digital.
Munchbach advises marketers to use surplus budget at the end of the fiscal year or tie funding for new projects to positive business results to ensure their companies commit funding to innovation projects.
Budget should also be reorganised out of channel silos and into new cross-platform teams organised around consumer segments, with experts on the relevant media, channels and devices for that particular vertical, Muchbach says.
The report also advises marketers to maintain a shared “centre of excellence” for broader campaigns to help achieve scale for overlapping initiatives and to establish a multifunctional group from the marketing, R&D, IT and operations divisions to track how digital elevates their parts of the business to improve the brand experience for consumers.
In the UK, online and mobile ad spend increased 13 per cent to £2.6bn in the first half of 2012, according to the IAB and PwCs advertising expenditure report.
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Readers' comments (48)
Marcel Huijsmans | Tue, 15 Jan 2013 7:16 am
Offline, online, digital, spatial: many channels to choose from to create a customer experience through customer touchpoints. But in the end it is all about the customer and the customer defines the channel to use and they determine how they want to be reached by marketing. If you are not 100% sure that your target customer can only be reached by one channel you better choose to use a mix of channels. One consumer configures its new car online with the nice car configurator, the other one wants to read the brochure (offline) and look at the options and a third demands a test drive (spatial). One channel does not exclude the other. As a marketing manager its your job to determine the right channels and an optimal return on investment from the chosen mix. Once decided you use experts to engage the customer.
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Hannah Jones | Tue, 15 Jan 2013 12:39 pm
We treat digital marketing as an arm of our overall marketing strategy & therefore will continue to use both terms.
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Stuart McDowall | Tue, 15 Jan 2013 12:50 pm
In my opinion Marketing is a concept, wider than Digital Marketing. Digital Marketing is a channel to deliver this concept!
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Anonymous | Tue, 15 Jan 2013 1:09 pm
I have had responsibility for digital marketing in many of my roles and I agree that digital marketing will integrate more within traditional marketing roles. It is part of the communications mix now,so should be embraced at least on some level by marketers and it will always be a distinct advantage to understand how offline and online work in integrated campaigns.Where I think organisations are failing in the digital arena is when they employ the IT team to look after it.The approach needs to be closely aligned to brand personality and therefore should always sit within marketing teams.
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Chris Manning - CEO, SearchEngineOptimizationInAtl | Tue, 15 Jan 2013 3:15 pm
I am going to have to say that there is still a pretty significant distinction between "Traditional" and "Digital" media.
Every day I see companies loosing large buckets of money to traditional firms who say they are "PR or Marketing Firms" that barely scratch the surface of "Digital Marketing" and are simply trying to do their traditional marketing in an electronic way or they are a broker for a 3rd party provider driving up the cost of media buys.
The challenges that traditional businesses are experiencing today is that they are "hiring" traditional marketing experts and firms in positions and for projects where a solid "digital strategy" needs to be implemented.
This is being done under the notion that "Marketing is Marketing" and they have a proven PR track record over the last 20 years so they must be good. This is simply not the case with the syndication of Digital Media...
A good example would be to say that an analog T.V. repair guy that has been the best for the last 20 years could repair a 3-D LED T.V. which is like night and day in terms of technology.
There are very good uses of "Traditional" and "Digital" media and in many cases a blended campaign of both can meet the needs of today's corporations.
The key is not simply spending but Strategy!
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Philip | Tue, 15 Jan 2013 4:34 pm
I agree with Lauren, Anonymous #2 and Will. I use Direct Mail to market businesses and realize there is a difference between the two. However, you must use the two in marketing to be effective. While my strategy began using the Mail approach, I quickly realized the need to include (add to) the Digital. All in all, I refer to it all as Marketing. It's like Martial Arts. There are different styles, disciplines and facets but it's all Martial Arts. The same is true of Marketing in my opinion.
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Iuliana Alexandrescu | Wed, 16 Jan 2013 9:55 am
Why does digital marketing strictly mean online and mobile? I'm curious to get your take on where new technologies fit in, such as digital interactive screens which can export the online experience directly into the mall/cinema/street/etc. and actively engage the user in a fun and memorable way - something that a static poster can't accomplish. I'm referring to this technology: http://www.atramedia.com/ (full disclosure: it's my own company, but I think the discussion is valid).
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Anonymous | Thu, 17 Jan 2013 0:18 am
What do you think about Colleges now offering degrees in social media vs. a traditional marketing or communications degree?
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Alan Kittle, Creative Director, Mason Zimbler | Thu, 17 Jan 2013 8:15 am
I wholeheartedly agree with Jonathan Bass’ commentary, particularly “Experience is where the value-added comes in. The principles are the same, whether offline, digital or mobile ... but the rules/the detail massively different”. Integrated marketing has been around for a long time – you would think we’d all understand the benefits by now. The best integrated agencies added a strong digital offering a long time ago and truly integrated creative thinkers don’t think about channels at the conceptual stage. So I say, don’t stop with removing marketing prefixes – dispense with client and agency labels too – make 2013 the year outdated tags were resigned to the history books.
My first creative director, who’d trained as an architect, encouraged me to follow the “form follows function” principal. If you combine that with the proven benefits of creative driven by audience insight, then you don’t need to label marketing as digital, traditional, mobile, ambient or direct.
I’d be genuinely disappointed if, when talking to a client, they were determined to ring-fence their marketing channels and failed to see the value in joined-up strategic thinking. Because audiences don’t act in a neat, vertical way – they are using their smart devices while watching television and sharing social content while reading newspapers on the bus. Chief Marketing Officers may have appointed rosters for each channel to gain from specialist experience. Therefore, they need to encourage those roster agencies to work together by embracing divergent thinking, then converge the best ideas so that audiences benefit from a consistently strong experience. Rather than getting hung up on prefixes we should be pursuing the perfect way to engage…find your audience’s story and show them where your brand fits in.
Inspire audiences, don’t pigeon hole them.
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Anonymous | Thu, 17 Jan 2013 3:37 pm
To be an effective internet/digital marketer you need to know:
Web design
HTML
CSS
SEO
UX
UI
Social Media
Content Marketing
Email marketing
Analytics
Conversion optimisation
etc...
Traditional marketing people just do not have these skills. Not ones that I've met anyway. Most traditional marketing people just blag their way into digital roles without knowing anything and then get the wool pulled over their eyes by "specialist" agencies whose only interest is to make as much money as possible. Results aren't their priority because 95% of marketers don't even know what results to look for and that's even IF they're looking at the results.
Even people that I've met with QUALIFICATIONS in digital marketing do not even have the skills to make their own website... not even using a CMS (most don't even know what a CMS is).
Saying that digital marketing is to become marketing may be right (due to ignorant people hiring ignorant people), but will ultimately mean that the industry is -- even more so --- full of people who don't know what they're doing, wasting their company's money and who are even too ignorant to realise that they're doing it.
No wonder there's so many new start-ups in London; digital marketing people (who actually know what they're doing) are jumping ship and taking the risk to start up their own companies... and leaving people who don't know what they're doing to rot in their ignorance.
"Better dead than smeg"
Arnold J Rimmer
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