After years of “experts” self promoting themselves while talking about digital marketing it looks like the hype circle is coming full circle.
Adobe inspected traffic across thousands of its client sites and found that 28% of the traffic showed “non-human signals” indicating that it was fraudulent. Bob Hoffman of The Ad Contrarian calculated, based on this fact, that ad fraud may reach $66 billion in 2018, which is 10 times more than the $6.5 billion predicted for 2017 by the ANA.
Facebook is in serious trouble now that the exploits of its management have been exposed and finally marketers are realizing that social media is nothing more another media outlet. So where does this leave digital marketing?
Today time is the new currency and people don’t have the time to read brand stories. In the past we have said it needs to be relevant to your audience, but even that’s no guarantee it will be read.
So the how are brand supposed to use digital? That depends on how long it takes a consumer to decide to buy your product. Do people need to go online to buy ice cream? Of course not, but you can bet they are going to go online to learn about products like electronics, cars and bikes.
What we also have to understand is that there are a lot of digital touch points for products. You can’t impact them all and you shouldn’t try to.
Digital marketing works best when it’s part of an integrated strategy and marketers understand just how important the digital channel is to that moment when a prospect becomes a customer.
The best way to introduce a new frozen pizza could be TV, combined with the Internet, but are people really going to go to a frozen pizza website? I can name a lot of instances when point o purchase and packaging is more important than ads on or off line.
There are always going to be people who believe that digital marketing is the end all to any marketing campaign. Depending on the product that may or may not be true. The so called experts owe an apology to all of us for promoting their personal brand at the expense of nonsense.
