At the recent Adobe Digital Marketing Symposium, on a panel, Vinay Dixit, VP of Strategy at Electrolux gave an analogy that was widely tweeted during the symposium. He said a laggard in digital is like a first time visitor to a nudist colony – you want to check out everyone else but you are also trying to cover up your own inadequacies.
Given it was a digital marketing symposium filled with over a 1,000 customers of Adobe, you’d expect there aren’t that many digital laggards in the audience. Though if Adobe’s own research is any indication, there may be quite a few digital marketers who are feeling somewhat inadequate.
Digital Distress
In its Digital Distress survey, Adobe found only 48% of digital marketers felt highly proficient in digital marketing – not marketers but digital marketers. This is not surprising when we consider the velocity of change. More than three quarters of marketers think marketing has changed more in the last two years than in the last 50.
Here’s a word cloud from the survey on how marketers keep up with the pace and stay in touch with the latest news and information.
Within the marketing community, whether you look at digital versus non-digital focused marketers or you look at senior decision makers versus the rest of the team, there is no consensus on which areas to focus on in the future. In spite of this lack of consensus, the majority of marketers expect to increase investments in marketing technology.
Further 61% of marketers think their digital marketing is a constant cycle of trial and error while they face increasing pressure to show ROI on the marketing spend.
Little wonder many would be feeling a little distressed.
Digital Transformation
The second theme that ran across the symposium was one of transformation. If marketing is facing such a pace of change then marketing organizations big and small must be experiencing various changes, restructuring and reorganization of people, process and technology.
The CIO of Tourism Australia gave an interesting account of the evolution of Tourism Australia’s online presence. From a basic information website when they first started to an updated presence where they turn over control of the website to tourists to allow them to use the site to share their travel experience in Australia – getting satisfied customers to do the job of selling Australia. Towards the end of his presentation, he gave an additional insight to what digital transformation means to the individuals’ careers – 30% of the jobs at the beginning of their transformation journey no longer exist today.
New jobs may have been created but not the same jobs as before.
The other aspect of transformation came from John Travis, the VP of Brand Marketing at Adobe. He walked through how marketing changed at Adobe. As an organization that already spends 76% of its marketing spend on digital, Adobe is not your average marketing organization but how it organizes itself and runs its marketing operation now can be very insightful for the rest of us who are earlier along the journey.
The most interesting comment that triggered some subsequent discussion with colleagues was his comment about the relationship with agency partners. Today most of us use our agencies to help manage the “day to day”. We try to outsource the non-core and retain the thinking of the long term within the organization. As/If your digital spend increases, that may be inversed and you start to insource the digital management and execution and depend on your agency partners to help you think about the longer term.
In that scenario, your agencies for tomorrow are not going to look like your agencies of today.
Digital Talent
The third area is about finding unicorns. On the topic of digital talent, a panelist at the symposium commented it was easier to find a unicorn than a skilled digital person and many in the audience chuckled in agreement.
I recognize this lament and I have made it often enough myself. Yet when you look at the overall marketing landscape, people expect there will be more, not less digital marketing and whether they are digital marketers or not, they expect and think their company needs to increase their digital marketing. There will never be enough digital marketing people to fill the ranks. Nor should you expect any digital marketing person you find to be solely responsible for helping the organization keep pace with the changes in digital and incorporate them into marketing.
The better approach is to get your existing digital team to help grow digital expertise across the marketing organization. Support all your existing marketing talent by giving them exposure and experience with digital. Only when there is broad based understanding of digital can the organization move to a more sophisticated level of digital marketing.
Along with comments on the scarcity of digital talent, I will also often hear the proclamation that in the future, there will be no digital marketing, just marketing. I agree. The only way to get there is to groom your own unicorns by helping your existing marketing talents grow that pointy spiraling horn.
Oh btw, when the Adobe Digital Marketing Symposium swings by again next year, don’t miss it!
Digital Optimist 