A focus for marketing in 2017

I notice that I last posted in June last year and that this wasn’t even a proper post, just a reference to a speech I had given in Istanbul that was conveniently YouTubed. In my defence, I have been busy doing other things such as building a house and involved in an interesting experiment in online education. Interestingly, my blog views haven’t decreased dramatically over that time, which I think says something instuctive about the whole content thing. It suggests that content is not a volume game, where frequency or even timing of posting is key, rather it suggests that content is a relevance game that is not driven by the act of publication, but driven by the act of search. This is why content socialisation is far more important that content publication. As I have said before, spend only 10 per cent (or less) of your content budget actually producing content and the remaining 90 per cent on socialising that content. Socialised content is the gift that carries on giving. Once it is out there it will carry on working for you without you having to do anything else. And this socialisation has to start with an understanding of what content (information) people actually want from you – identifying the questions for which your brand is the answer. Remember, the social digital space is not a distribution space where reach and frequency are the objectives, it is a connection space where the objectives are defined by behaviour identification and response.

Here endeth the predictable critique of content strategies.

Given that it is still January I believe I have permission to resume posting with a 2017 prediction piece. I was prompted to do this by reading Ashley Freidlin’s extremely comprehensive post on marketing and digital trends for 2017. This is essentially a review of the landscape and it its sheer scale is almost guaranteed to strike terror into the heart of every marketing director. Perhaps because of this, Ashley’s starts with saying that the guiding star for 2017 should be focus, so in that spirit I shall attempt to provide some basis for focus.

Focus on value

First, I would suggest that the best way of achieving focus is to focus on value. I sincerely hope that 2017 is the year marketing people wake up to the fact that much of what they have been doing in the social digital space is not creating sufficient value to justify doing it – no matter how many likes, shares, re-tweets it might have been garnering. Drop the reach and frequency metrics: value in the social digital space is created by behaviour identification and response, not reach and frequency.

With this in mind I hope 2017 will see the death of content marketing as we know it. Ashley suggests that content marketing is approaching its ‘plateau of productivity’ as per the Gartner Hype Cycle. I think it is approaching its ‘peak of inflated expectation’ and is about the slide into the ‘trough of disillusionment’ (for reasons I have set out many times before).

AI, Big Data, Internet of things, marketing automation, conversational interfaces, identity management, segmentation, augmented reality.  These are all the same thing

There is one thing that links all this stuff together and that is the algorithm. Understand algorithms and how they change the way we understand identity and all of this seemingly diverse stuff will fall into place. Critically, algorithms shift the way we understand  identity from seeking to understand who or where people are (old-fashioned segmentation and targeting), to understanding what they are doing (algorithmic segmentation). It is about behaviour identification and response again. That is why mobile is becoming so important because a mobile (and a wearable) is not as channel – as most people think – it is a behaviour detection device and also a data gathering device.

If I were to call out any of the above it would be augmented reality. This is vastly more important than virtual reality. Augmented reality allows you to place an algorithm between a person and the real world (not a fantasy world), the real world where transactions happen. Imagine a retail environment where an augmented reality app allows a brand or the retailer to create an individually customised offer to any shopper. Pokemon Buy, rather than Pokemon Go. And that is only the start. Augmented reality and the heads-up screen is the gateway to the world of the algorithm and real-time, real world customised and personalised experiences. It can be used, quite literally, to control how we see, experience and relate to the world around us.

The race for data

Linked to the above is the race for data. Organisations need to build what I call their data geology: layers of data sets they can then stitch together with algorithmic needles in order to understand and predict consumer behaviour. As a more general rule, the more data layers you have, the better. Volume of data trumps accuracy or precision of data in the world of the algorithm. The NSA and GCHQ have shown us how to do this and it is why these organisations are potentially the most powerful marketing agencies (indeed most powerful anything agencies) in the world: it is just that they have chosen to use this power only to identify terrorists and criminals at this point (at least as far as we know). Identifying, adding to and locking down your data is a critical task for any organisation, even if you haven’t yet hired the data scientists to help you work out what to do with it.  Which brings us to…

Talent

Data scientists. Get some. That’s it. The most important hire any marketer could make this year.

Blockchain

Getting my head around Blockchain is at the top of my 2017 to do list. Blockchain has the potential to do to the distribution and sharing of value, what the internet did to the distribution and sharing of information. It could usher-in the end of the trading era where information about money is more valuable than actual money. I don’t yet now how it is going to do this, but the place I would recommend starting is Jeremy Epstein’s blog. Jeremy is now focusing on Blockchain and he has always been a guy who is one-step-ahead. I was sort of interested in Blockchain, but when I heard Jeremy was focusing on it full-time, I became very interested.

And finally, advertising (it is not dead or dying)

Or more precisely the good old-fashioned world of audience-based marketing. This world hasn’t gone away. If a brand still wishes to be ‘a brand’ it has to put on a show for the audience, as well as becoming a fragmented ‘personalised experience’. Indeed the more personalised brands become, the more important it is to have a collective experience at the centre. Of course, brands as we know them might disappear and the whole brand landscape may become commoditised. In fact this could become one of the effects of Blockchain, but this isn’t gong to happen any time soon and there is nothing to be gained (for current brands) in hastening its advance.

However I do think audience-based marketing has to evolve if it is to survive and this will involve breaking the dependency on channel. Currently most marketing activity is defined by the channels it sits within, rather than defining the channels it sits within. As these channels have proliferated and as consumers have gained greater control over channel use selection the response has been to develop ‘multi-channel marketing’ and we have conjured into existence this mythical beast called ‘the omnichannel’. This is the wrong approach. Rather than focus on the channel, marketers need to focus on the ideas than can boss (and sit on top of) the channels.

Last year I ran a workshop for a TV company. I pointed out to them that in the past Red Bull used to pay them large amounts of money for the privilege of renting a 30 second window in their channel (i.e an ad) to get their message out to their consumers. Today, the TV company pays Red Bull money to allow Red Bull to have a 60 minute window in their channel in which they can get their message in front of consumers. Who is the boss here? Red Bull as a brand has become a series of events which define and ‘boss’ the channels they sit within. Its approach to F1 is the same, rather than sponsor an F1 team (traditional channel-based sponsorship idea), it became an F1 team. Brands need to look at Red Bull and learn.

Creating ideas that define the channels they sit within should be the principal creative challenge for brands and their agencies in 2017. I also did a workshop for a large agency group in Milan last year. The creative people here were spending their time pulling their hair out desperately pumping out vast amounts of content for their clients: feeding the multi-headed channel beast that is Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and… What a waste of time, energy, creativity and money when they should have been focusing on creating and bringing to life channel-bossing ideas.

 

 

 

 

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