RTB, CPM, SEO, PPC, CPC…shall I go on? Keeping current with the ever-evolving digital paid media landscape can be a challenge. It takes a lot of reading, testing, and learning. And maybe the best way to become competent is to just dive in: taking vendor sales calls, doing research, and building your own POV and strategy. Like most areas of digital marketing, it comes down to doing it on your own. But where can you start in the realm of paid digital media? Let’s begin with the rising practice of Real Time Bidding, a.k.a. RTB, since it is having such a dramatic impact on the media planning and buying discipline.
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In recent years I’ve been paying more and more attention to writing – articles, blog posts, even fiction – which wrestles with the near-future world economy, technology and the evolution of business and the nature of work. Writers such as Cory Doctorow and William Gibson, to name a couple, are prominent contributors on these topics. So, bear with me. I’m going to nerd out a bit on this, but I promise I’ll bring it back to Marketing and Analytics in the end.
There’s an ongoing discussion of whether massive societal changes will follow from some kind of (admittedly debatable) Singularity. Whether or not such a fundamental turning point is imminent, there are plenty of interesting things occurring right now which indicate bigger shifts … if we know where to look. A recent article in Fast Company related to these topics caught my attention. One interesting section:
This is the moment for an explosion of opportunity, there for the taking by those prepared to embrace the change. At the turn of the 20th century… those accustomed to the agrarian clock of sunrise-sunset and the pace of the growing season were forced to learn the faster ways of the urban-manufacturing world. There was widespread uneasiness about the future, about what a job would be, about what a community would be. Yet from those days of ambiguity emerged a century of tremendous progress.
The main theme of the article is that agility matters. It’s probably more important to be agile now than at any time in history. But this situation is not only, or even necessarily, negative or threatening. It’s more about being able to make the absolute most/best of any given scenario. I would argue that this holds not just at a macro level for technology, economics and culture. It’s also time to start thinking about what this means for marketing.
In Advertising Age’s annual digital issue published last month, Simon Dumenco, media columnist and new-media pundit, talked about “why most consumers will never engage with brands or content, and why it doesn’t matter.” In his article, The brutal truth about social media: It’s OK to be a little antisocial, Simon cites his colleague Matt Creamer’s report that “slightly more than 1% of fans of the biggest brands on Facebook are actually engaging brands.” He goes on to argue that while social media has certainly made it easier to engage a brand, consumers always “had plenty of ways of engaging with brands and content” prior to Twitter and Facebook. These included “toll-free numbers on the back of cake boxes, letters to the editor at print publications, and call-in shows on TV & radio,” but only a minority of consumers embraced such dialogue. We agree with Dumenco that “passively consuming content is just the way that most people choose to engage.” In fact, over the last two months Amie Ley, our Director of Public Relations & Social Media, and I have been using a sports analogy to explain this truth to our clients. We tell them that most of their fans are not Face Painters.
In an eMarketer interview late last fall, Pete Blackshaw, Global Head of Digital Marketing & Social Media for Nestle, had a quote that I latched onto. He said, “Social media is less of a stand-alone appetizer than a basic food ingredient for all marketing.” I think the food analogy coming from a forward-looking head of digital marketing at one of the world’s largest food manufacturers is more than a play on words. It is extremely sound advice delivered in a clever, succinct sound bite.
We have a similar philosophy permeating our agency: “Technology is not an idea… but ideas can no longer survive without technology.”
Coming to the end of summer, I can’t help take notice of Google’s push to influence what shopper marketing professionals call the “path-to-purchase”. The path-to-purchase is the route that shoppers take from discovery of a product to the actual purchase of a product. This may include several steps such as consulting research or product reviews on the internet, discussing products with friends, being exposed to media advertising, traveling to a store, and examining the product on shelf or display before buying. Google recently published and is heavily promoting an eBook titled Zero Moment of Truth that boldly marks their proprietary spot on the path-to-purchase.
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