Nov 2008 Digital Marketing — Banners, Microsites & E-mail?
As more of the media we watch, read and enjoy becomes digital, more of the marketing community is taking up the digital mantel. Welcome. It is true that if the work is kept fairly straight-forward and the agency team have a good production partner they can deliver the banners, microsites and e-mails that check the “digital” box.
But is that really digital marketing?
One of my favourite tests for a digital marketing campaign is to ask if it is “interactive” not just digital. Can the audience act and does the ad react? Hard to do in traditional media.
A second test is whether it is impossible to run the work without using the computer that serves it. Having a film or pieice of video call your mobile phone like our St. Mary’s Ghost campaign did is hard if you don’t have a processor behind it and the forethought to use it. This is different then putting a film on YouTube or print piece in e-mail.
But really the real point is that digital marketing is different from traditional marketing at a more fundamental level. Consider the article below. There is a fundamentally different way of thinking when you do real Digital Marketing — It isn’t about campaigns, it is about programmes. It isn’t about who (audience demographics), it is when (mindset and interest).
And it isn’t just about creative that needs a computer to run, it is about marketing plans that can’t even be organised, much less executed, without some very specific applications and very big networked computers behind them.
At Last, What Agencies Are Learning From Ad Networks Revealed
Posted November 6th, 2008 by Joe Mandese
“More and more we are starting to look like advertising networks,” Don Epperson, CEO of Havas Digital acknowledged during his keynote kicking off the OMMA Ad Nets conference in New York this morning. “I am here today to tell you what agencies can learn from advertising networks.”
And he did.
So what’s the main takeaway? Well, agencies are learning to target consumers based as individuals, not based on advertising placements. To illustrate that, Epperson showed a banner ad for Havas client Air France on the nytimes.com, and implied it may no longer be making such placements based on the context of the editorial content, but on the context of the user that happens to be on that page.
“That’s a very big change,” Epperson emphasized.
Before he went on, he added the obligatory disclaimer: That for all the power of Havas Digital’s super, hyper-targeted optimization capabilities, it’s still fundamentally a brand steward that relies on all the powerful consumer insights that traditional shops have always relied on.
“Regardless of what we talk about today, strategic planning, communications planning, brand planning are never going to go away,” he emphasized, adding, “They will always be very important. It will always be art and science.”