Digital advertising is dead. And agencies that tout their 'digital' credentials are deluded. I really hate the term digital. I actually think I detest it with the same passion that Nick Griffin hates people whose DNA unzipping didn't result in them looking 100% Caucasian. I hate it because it undervalues and plays down and puts into a box something that is unboxable. And I hate it because it has been taken for a ride by wanky ad agencies that have no clue what it means.
So digital as a silo like TV, like print, like direct mail, sucks. Digital as a silo is dead. It probably has been for a while. I mean think about it, really think about it - what does digital really mean? The wise folk of the world over at Wikipedia define digital (amongst other things) as the 1s and 0s that are everywhere, but never seen.
If we take that and run with it, is this digital?
Image courtesy of planetgordon.com via Flickr
How about this?
Picture courtesy of carla777
See where I'm going? Digital stuff is everywhere. It is, after all 2000 and frickin' 9. So this notion that you can put 'digital' into a department is nonsense. Agencies that have a discrete digital department need to wake up and smell the narcotics, because they are restricting themselves before getting to the starting line.
It's this fundamental lack of understanding of how technology has changed the behavior of customers everywhere that trips up a large chunk of companies when they try to convert their siloed (can I say jurassic) creative processes into a seamless world.
So for this reason along with others (the arrogance of the so-called brand guardians, the staggering sense of conformity that is nurtured in so many client-agency relationships and more...) I would take exception to Richard Huntington's claim that orthodox agencies have "got with the program when it comes to "digital". In many cases, self-proclaimed digital agencies haven't, with traditional agencies even further behind.
How can I be so sure?
Because at their core, underneath all the extravagant and tantalizing models for integration that so many in the advertising business wax lyrical about, there remains the truth that the model we base the creative process on is archaic, flawed and in dire need of re-appraisal.
I'm talking about the legendary communications funnel, that mysterious structure that no doubt sits in a locked vault in a secure room somewhere on Madison Avenue. It's wrong. And it's probably been out of date for a while, but I think in the last decade the disparity between how people behave and how the revered funnel states they behave has grown exponentially. So really it's up to us to try and evaluate where it's falling down, because you can bolt on whatever you like on a rotting foundation, eventually the whole damn thing will collapse.
So let's begin.
Marketing 101 tells us that this is how communications works: 
You could argue that even when this model was proposed (sometime when Cyrus commanded the Persian empire), it didn't fully acknowledge the roles of what other people say and do play in an individual's decision-making process (something that we all would be wise to explore further by picking up my homeboy Mark Earls' book Herd and reading it multiple times).
If the assumption that this decision making process is hermetically sealed from other potential sources of input (friends, family, reading a review in the newspaper, seeing someone with it on the street.. etc) was contested before the advent of mass internet use, surely it is now safe to say that the model for making purchase decisions needs a total overhaul. And by extension the way in which we plan and organise communications needs to reflect the way in which a potential purchase decision is made.
The advent of the information age has, as well know brought an end to the corporate gravy train in many ways because as has been said many times before, it is now more important than ever that what you say in your communication equates to what you do. There are plenty of high-profile examples of what happens when this is not the case from United Airlines' painfully witless response to their breaking of Dave Carroll's guitar (which now ranks in the top 10 search results for a "United Airlines" Google search) to the whole Dominos pizza fiasco. And I think it's pretty safe to say that with the internet being increasingly in the palm of your hand (AdMob do an excellent monthly mobile internet metrics report which you should all check out if you don't already) and with everything from mobile phones to mp3 players being able to capture sound, photos and video; the amount of information that people can contribute and digest with regards to our clients' brands and products will only increase.
So what's my point? My point is that now, from the point of initial exposure to a piece of communication or the point of identifying a need/desire to purchase (i.e. the point where you flip the 'awareness switch' about a particular category/product/brand), a person's exposure to information has the potential to greatly increase with regards to whatever product he or she is now more acutely aware of.
So if we were to talk about the stages of awareness, interest, evaluation and purchase in the context of how much information is sought to enable the decision making, perhaps the picture should be more like this:
So, I'm saying that because of the vast amount of information we have at our disposal, and the ability for anyone to comment on their experiences with a brand/product/company, the inverted pyramid of the marketing funnel has to take into account the potential for a new injection of communication activity.
Eaon talks about McKinsey and co labeling this stage as 'active evaluation'. The name is not really important, but the realization that this is occurring is crucial.
So to wind it back to the beginning of this ever-increasing ramble, I said that the majority of ad agencies and clients don't fully understand the power the information age has given us as practitioners and people as customers; instead having 'digital' penned in as a website, display advertising (which AdAge reminded us last week is a hugely flawed channel) and spunking a ton of cash on paid search.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't build a website, shouldn't spend some money on SEM and so on, I'm saying that there needs to be an increase in creating content for people who are already coming into contact with your brand in a space where you're not saying anything. Review sites, Amazon, YouTube (now the 2nd largest search engine in the world, after it's daddy), app stores (from iTunes to Android to Ovi), the dreaded and loved at the same time social networks and so on are all places where whether you like it or not people are looking for what other people are saying about your company.
But it should never stop there. There's a concept in almost every sport that the effectiveness of say a tennis shot, a quarterback's throw, a square cut and a litany of other moves depends on the the wind-up and the follow through. Without both the actual shot/throw/stroke are greatly diminished. The same can be said for effective communication.
If you can't get on the shopping list, your work in creating ads is essentially useless. If you provide a less than memorable in-store/purchase/aftersales experience, you might get one sale, but you won't get another. And you definitely won't get recommended. Do that to enough people and someone will hammer you somewhere on the web. And if you're not creating content that is entertaining/useful/genuinely engaging then people who search for you will find that someone hammering you and the Google monster will start to pull that further up the rankings, to a place where even Mediacom won't be able to buy space.
So what do we do? I haven't done a list in a while, so now's as good a time as any:
1. Know your product, know your category intimately. What matters in that category, what features do people base their decisions on (note this is likely to be diametrically opposite to what you want them to base decisions on), what stops people from considering your product? Ask these questions.
2. Understand that people don't think or act in a linear fashion when it comes to making a purchase decision, they're constantly shopping around, looking for reviews, talking to store staff/friends/co-workers about their dilemma (I remember when I was working at Apple we found that on average, people would buy a mac after visiting the store 6 times!).
3. Find where people are asking questions about your category, find the communities that already exist devoted to informing people about TVs, locking wheel nuts, Morris dancing shoes or the markings on Master Chief's helmet in Halo 3. They could be on a forum, on ICQ or at a periodic meetup in a dark alley somewhere. Wherever they are, become a valuable part of that community by offering advice, answering questions or addressing complaints. And please take the time to discover people who are already talking good about you and make them the heroes of your story, facilitate fandom and your fans will be your most effective marketing ever.
4. Lock down both point of sale and after-sales. Make sure your staff/retail partners are who you want them to be (it's tough but then no-one said this was easy), provide as many points as possible for people to complain about you and then respond to each and every one. I promise you, from personal experience, that when you're pissed off at a company and vent and then that company replies in a polite and timely manner, it is a million times harder to remain that angry at them.
5. Make it your business, and the business of your ad agency/ideas factory/whatever to intimately focus on the technology of tomorrow and today, how people use it, how their use changes and how their interactions with it provide you with opportunities to facilitate activity related to your clients' company (there's a great post about how agencies need to think like software companies that you should all read as well).
Until we do that, we won't get the age of interaction. No matter what type of agency we work at, no matter what we say on our agency websites, in our client meetings, or on our blogs. It's simple.
So really digital is dead, the funnel is actually an hourglass and it's time to get our interactive on. Boom.
As a sort of postscript, I found this cartoon over on Le'Nise's blog (via Something Changed), about converting awareness into a sale, it kind of illustrates my point - I think...
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