A metamorphosis of the marketing industry is underway as we spend more time on our mobiles, tablets and laptops.
According to Tom Goodwin in The Guardian Media: “We are not on top of digital marketing although we sit here and we think we’ve “got” digital. We’ve been talking about it forever and we’ve introduced new processes, expressions, and agencies. We’ve acquired, hired and rebuilt. 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?”
Some say we have hardly accomplished anything with new technology in marketing as we can’t think afresh and give a chance to the future revolutionary power of digital. Nobody likes change, as it has threatened and undermined us. It’s always been this way because any ideas of changes are hard, be it the onset of the age of electricity, the newspaper industry, graphic design or the steam age, we tend to adapt the future to the past, unable to start afresh with what the new technology means.
New “digital thinking” marketing ideas are not forthcoming as media owners still sell obsolete identical units from the past. We use the same people in media agencies who use the same techniques to plan and execute. Clients are given potentially wrong advice so as the old analogue marketing concepts are retained, and their jobs sustained. Creative agencies are identical and have nothing creative about them. The Ad production lines are the same, templates and briefs identical, and they lack responsiveness to consumer behaviour.
Instead of embracing digital marketing and maximising exposure on online media, we have reduced retail brands “as a joke” in impoverished media channels. The sooner we understand the new world we live in the better – smart phones are a tool for listening to radio, reading online newspapers, watching You Tube and searching using Google, or Yahoo to find what we want. On laptops and I-Pads. we need media, creativeness and technology to work together. We need to think of new ways to connect.
Marketing Gurus should work hard to improve the products/services made, on branding, positioning, and on understanding the future of marketing.
Brand agencies are the new form of digital advertising today. Their job is to re-design and shape the brand, and produce digital advertisements and marketing and enhance brand awareness. They should use automation tweak marketing and communication tactics fit for our digital age. A digitally aware SEO, should optimise real-time marketing to convert equity into sales and profitability.
One digital age agency is Karmarama in London, whose motto is “We believe in good works. We put our clients at the heart of everything we do and only focus on doing what’s right to help them win”. They have hired nice decent talented people who genuinely want to improve their clients’ needs:- “Keine wixer bitte” as the Germans say. According to Jon Wilkins their Executive Chairman “we promote BBC music, BT, Plusnet, Costa, Honda, Air New Zealand, Breast Cancer awareness and Cobra and we concentrate on driving online sales through digital media and new digital marketing strategies. We should reinvent brands and businesses for the digital age and help them make the vital change or they will be threatened by the innovators’ dilemma”.
We have to find ways for brands to be more personal and shed call-centre processes and CRM strategy, employing over-the-top (OTT) messaging. In the world of communications we should not question what marketing means for technology but we should embrace what technology means for marketing in social media, display advertising and e-commerce.
In 1889, Fusaiiro Yamaguchi began manufacturing “Hanafuda” Japanese playing cards in Kyoto, the company re-established as Yamauchi Nintendo & Co in 1902 to deal with future technologies and in 1980 Nintendo of America inc. in New York who launched the first LCD videogames with a microprocessor. Nintendo artist Sihigeru Miyamoto – was the author of the Donkey Kong game where the hero Jumpman – a carpenter, desperately races to save his girlfriend Pauline from a crazy Ape. Jumpman was later renamed as Mario and became the modern Super Mario. In 2000 The Nintendo Game Boy became the most popular selling console ever as sales surpassed 100m. In January 2010 Nintendo announced it would be distributing Monster Hunter Tri for Wii in Europe. With free online play and full Wii Speech support the Japanese gaming phenomenon made its first entry on a Nintendo system. In November 2012 with a new home console, Wii U the first high definition home console launched, catering to the younger generation. The age of Nintendos, and X-box has changed, and the real-time exchanges with websites and mobile apps has changed the definition of digital marketing.
In the future we will see more and improved concepts based on digital technology in the market place and marketing agencies will have to run to keep up with their task of spreading the word to eager recipients of news and data on these innovations.
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