A famous meme of 2020 taught me that Digital Transformation wasn’t accelerated by the CEO or CDO, but by Covid-19. Everywhere you look today in marketlandia, digital takes center stage: your insights are digitally sourced, your brands are digitally advertised, your path to purchase is digitized, and your purchase channels become more digital than ever. Given the ubiquity of the word digital, it’s time to remove it from our vocabulary too probably. In 2020, everything is digital, like in the late 1880s everything became somehow electrical.
Just ten years ago, platforms like YouTube and Facebook were in their infancy and fighting for the crumbs of the media budgets. Every year since then we wondered at the declining share of investment of Traditional Medias (TV, Print and OOH) and the increase of Digital Media. It’s such a worthless stat to sit and admire or even target. No one outside of our marketing bubble even thinks of advertising as TV vs Digital. What is more important is the reach potential for each media format, irrespective of the pipes build to deliver the signal (pipes which honestly are the same these days too – all is digital).
Three things to remember or debate:
- Digital Media is not one thing – focus on the behaviors of people, how they view, scroll, skip, multi-screen, or even engage with your content in the multitude of digital formats and channels. Focus less on “we need to be digital-first”, focus on the details of today’s media.
- The most iconic campaigns transcend digital media and aim to become news in themselves. Guess who is also in charge of the amplification: all media, including TV.
- And last, if you can’t grab their attention, it doesn’t help that it is digital-first, or TV last.
Digital is now everywhere like the air we breathe, so stop congratulating yourself for inhaling air, and focus on its scent.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
