Is your digital strategy a separate conversation?

Now reasonably speaking, I’m not expecting these individuals to know the depth of digital – like programmatic, DSP’s and the various technologies that are implemented in the execution of campaigns but it is important to understand the channels and capabilities of digital campaigns.

Let us take a step back and look into the background of marketing education in South Africa. Majority of institutions that offer a marketing qualification consists of modules that are traditional marketing oriented which is where in my opinion the system fails marketing students and graduates. Digital Marketing (known as Rich Media or New Media in textbooks) is a channel of traditional marketing but is still not a major module which should not be the case especially now that marketers need to be educated on how this medium can be utilized effectively to engage with their target audience.

Now we can consider excuses such as:

• There not being enough digital professionals in the education system; and
• It would be too expensive to change the syllabus as the industry changes on a regular basis.

That’s a debate for another day.

My point: Digital Marketing needs to be considered a medium of Above The Line activities.

As we know, digital campaigns are more measurable as opposed to print and TV campaigns. Allow me to highlight that Print and TV is an industry I still very much respect and understand the magnitude of its effect in the market. However, digital on the other hand enables you access to data that gives marketers an understanding of their prospects behavior towards their brand. What old school marketers fail to understand is that consumers are always engaging with their devices – why not push more budget to the industry to build your audience?

The user is consistently engaging with their device. So the questions remain:

• How and where are you engaging with your target audience? 
• Do you know their day-to-day experiences? 
• Are you advertising to the right person at the right time? 
• Are you sending the right message at the right time?

The cornerstone of marketing is being able to understand your consumer’s behaviour.

Over the past five years there’s been a shift in the engagement of Standard Display, Rich Media and Video ad units but not much of a shift when it comes to online advertising sponsorships. Based on my experience this is a clear indication of digital advertising being looked at as a separate conversation at strategy phase, thus leading to the sad reality of campaigns going live weeks later than the TV, Radio and Billboard ads. This is instead of having all platforms going live at the same time with the same message. That’s how you get your target audience’s attention. Let’s start integrating.

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