The Self-Fulfilling Digital Media Ecosystem

“If you build it, they will come” is an iconic movie sentence from the equally iconic “Field of Dreams.” It has been used in many a business presentation, especially in the early days of digital. Initially, digital believers used it to try and convince digital skeptics that all a marketer needed to do was build a website that consumers would then flock to, creating commercial nirvana for said business. Later on, social media prophets would use the magic sentence to extoll the virtues of fans and likes in social media.

Now that we are all a little older and wiser, we use that same sentence to indicate the exact reverse of what we used it for 10 years ago: to explain that the idea of just creating a digital presence is no longer going to cut it. There are too many screens, platforms, channels and messages competing with each other, so now we need to augment our digital presence with digital advertising to avoid our wondrous digital efforts from going completely unnoticed. Mark Zuckerberg, Sir Martin Sorrell and all the stakeholders in the digital ecosystem, rejoice!

I was reminded of the history of the magic sentence while talking with a major global marketer who is also a good personal friend. She told me that in her global team the ratio of digital media managers and traditional media managers runs 3 to 1. Her budgets, however, are stacked very differently: for every dollar she spends on traditional media, she spends about 25 cents on digital.

This situation is far from unique. I see it in virtually all marketing organizations. As an industry, we have created an enormous digital marketing ecosystem within marketing departments, which in turn relies on an even more enormous outside digital ecosystem in the form of digital agencies, specialists and tech creators.

And here is where I go back to the “Field of Dreams” reference, but in a slightly revised way: “If you build it, they will keep on building it.” All people within the digital ecosystem want to ensure their roles are seen as important — nay, indispensable — since what we’re talking about here is their job security, 401Ks and stock options.

The bloated head of digital who sits atop a relatively small budget body (compared to other marketing investments) is first and foremost interested in survival. And I am not faulting anyone in the digital ecosystem for this — it’s true for every salaried person.  They want it clear that the survival of the company as a whole depends on them, right? “Trust me, Larry, we simply have to have a daily updated collection of carefully curated Pinterest pages for our newest offering of household cleaners.”

But if we step back for one second and look at a marketer’s malformed digital body, we must agree that it is exactly that: malformed. How come marketers will take a meeting with Facebook, Google or any other hot new digital-media platform, while they are hard-pressed to recall the last time they sat down with a major TV or radio station, outdoor company or — heaven forbid — print publisher?

I’m not saying digital is not important. It is. Especially so, if digital is how you sell your product or service. But at the same time, lots of other touch points matter as much as or even more than your latest agency-guaranteed, viral, real-time, programmatically bought, user-generated-content piece.

I think it’s time marketers put their mouth where their money is.

By Maarten Albarda
Maarten has lived in five countries across three continents and honed his integrated marketing communication skills at JWT, Leo Burnett, McCann-Erickson, The Coca-Cola Company and AB-InBev. He now runs his own integrated marketing consultancy in partnership with Flock Associates, and has written the book “Z.E.R.O.” with Joseph Jaffe.
Courtesy of mediapost