Digital Marketing Is Still Marketing
by Niall McKeown on 16.05.2012Misinformation is more dangerous than no information. Many institutions in charge of promoting digital marketing are selling the concept that it’s a technology driven function of a business. They refer to digital marketing as an “ICT” function and not only is this simply wrong, it is also causing severe damage to a lot of small businesses.
One of the skills of a talented marketer is to understand the customer, and produce what appear to be simple outputs to persuade customers to behave in a particular way. What’s happened is that we have taken the simple outputs derived by professional marketers and mistaken this process as being easy, replicable and within the grasp of every businessman or woman without professional assistance.
George Wright from US corporate, BlendTec created a viral video that reached the masses when he got his eccentric CEO to blend unusual objects to demonstrate the toughness of their blender. George is a professional marketer with a great eye for spotting the unusual. He was ripe to create the BlendTec video as he had all of the ingredients necessary to create something special, unusual and unique, which would help propel the BlendTec brand. His senses had been honed by the 11 years he spent in a marketing agency.
Skip forward and we find that George is being held as an exemplar case of how anyone can make viral videos for their business. “He just shoved a broom handle into a blender and stuck the video on YouTube” proclaim the ICT promoters. This is partially true and yes anyone can shove a handle into a blender (although I don’t recommend it), and then post the output on YouTube. But the adding of the video to YouTube and even the making of the video were the easy parts. Identifying the concept and knowing what would stick with the viewer took years of experience.
Marketers have always depended on technologists. Be it graphic designers who create a fabulous spectacle on paper, or the printers who produce glossy leaflets for a campaign; marketers get nowhere without a bit of help- they are ideas people. This has not changed in the age of Digital Marketing. Marketers remain reliant on those au fait with digital technology to implement strategy; but just as this collaboration doesn’t make a marketer an ICT expert, nor does it make someone competent in ICT, a marketer.
I therefore argue that digital marketing, while technical in some areas, is not an ICT function. I proclaim that encouraging small businesses to take marketing matters into their own hands is causing hundreds of small business owners to wrongly invest their energies into areas they don’t understand, which usually results in little business growth.
Small businesses are now attending countless conferences on Digital Marketing, hoping to discover what buttons they should press to make their business successful. They pick up on outputs (such as viral videos or social media case studies), see that conceptually the message is simple and therefore are forced to conclude that they can replicate the outputs. They are never shown the months or years of energy that build to the point of creating successful digital campaigns.
Sure social media can be used by anyone, it’s not hard. In my experience however, those that use this channel to produce new business were already professional sales people and communicators. They were not professional technologists. I have yet to find, out of hundreds of engagements with small businesses, any business that has grown simply by embracing digital marketing as an ICT function and ignoring marketing theory.
Picasso, it is said, once charged a woman 5000 francs for sketching her portrait on a Parisian bridge. The woman was outraged at the price, saying, “Why have you charged me so much, it only took you a few minutes?” Picasso responded by telling her, “It has taken all my life training to be able to do this”.
Want to vent your rage at the author? Tweet him:










