“Marketers striving for digital excellence risk focusing too much on shiny new technologies instead of getting basics like measurement, skills, operational structure, and single customer view right.”
That’s the recap from an advance panel discussion among industry heavyweights in Australia. It was an opening salvo to this year’s Ad:Tech Australia conference set for March.
Big Mobile Group founder and chief commercial officer, Graham Christie, thinks matching the right skills to analysis of their digital delivery and technology is one of the biggest challenges modern marketers face.
“The basics are an issue, because there won’t be the basics in two or three months’ time,” Christie said. “Are marketers really providing themselves with the best chance of getting the best talent around this? We see a lot of senior marketers who are not ‘digital natives’ and have a more traditional background. They’re not entirely sure how to staff up teams and create a new organizational design around digital. That is a recipe for poor results.”
Keeping an eye on the customer is what matters to AIMIA CEO Robert Wong.
“There is fragmentation of media, and lots of marketers are struggling with technology, the complexity in customer touchpoints, new technology in terms of retail touchpoints and so on,” Wong said. “There are so many things you could do [with ad technology], you need to bring it back to the fundamentals of what will deliver value to your customer.”
Clive Dickens, recently appointed chief digital officer at Seven West, disparages how the industry “pits diverse, traditional advertising and media avenues such as newspapers, out-of-home, and TV, against digital as one lump entity.”
“Let’s break down the digital media into its component parts and start talking about what it is – classified, social, search – and compare those, rather than beating up the traditional ads industry,” Dickens said. “We all participate in this and we have to stop.”
The recap by Nadia Cameron appeared at the Australian website CMO and is worth reading in full by digital marketers worldwide. To check it out, click here.
