The notion that there is a divide between digital marketing and traditional marketing based on whether the technology used is analogue or digital is really a little ridiculous.

This thought was all sparked by a conversation I had with a prominent industry person yesterday. We were talking about the state of digital and traditional marketing in South Africa. During that entire conversation I felt that we were on different planets, as though our point of departure was entirely different. I concluded that I must be  communicating badly and when I thought about it I realized a reason.

The marketing, adverting and for that matter digital industry often think of digital as a medium. That your job is to have a smart idea that you push onto the customer and you use the media they use because then they will see it. This allows traditional ad agencies to think that because they have a digital or interactive section they are in the game. That digital is a channel. This is where the thinking is flawed.

Marketing needs to change because the way people find things out, how they learn, how they connect and so how ideas spread has changed. Its a fundamental behavioural change.

People are still people and brands are still brands, but neither behave the way they once did.

If you use new channels in the same way that you used old channels then the new channels wont work, they wont just work because they are digital You can rethink the way you use the traditional channels – so that they do work.

The divide is not between digital and traditional, or new media and old or anything like that. The divide is between those who cant understand the changing consumers and those who can. Its not a debate between media types its a debate about how ideas spread.

photo credit: x-ray delta one

At the TEDx event TedxNewtown I spoke about how marketing has changed since the Internet. This is what I said.

Once upon a time someone would stumble upon some stuff or craftsmen would start making something that they thought people would buy. They would then take it to a place where they thought people would buy it. If people liked what was on offer they would buy and they would tell their friends and pretty soon there would be demand.

Then along came industrialisation. The way business won the industrialisation game was to standardise offerings because by doing so they would enjoy the economies of scale, reduce costs and maximise profit. The focus was therefore productivity and efficiency and this is why companies are still run by efficiency experts.

The process of getting the word to spread so that people could buy in volume was taken out of the hands of the customer because modern broadcast media was far more effective at doing so and too expensive for ordinary consumers. Television was the most effective of them all. Branding attached the meaning the marketeer wanted for the brand and it was broadcast over and over again until it was believed, where else was the consumer to get the information to dispute it?

It was the widescale  use of broadcast media such as television that sparked the invention of the discipline of marketing in the 1960′s and supported the underlying principle of mass marketing, in the words of Seth Godin selling average stuff to average people (the most acceptable product to the largest possible market)

The Internet changed that. It changed it because it has altered the balance of power in the transaction.

Power can be thought of as having been derived from three sources, the threat of violence, from wealth or from knowledge and information. The Internet changed the source of information from the brand to the masses because it made it easy to access trusted information and opinion from friends and your network.

Brand control evaporated as information became searchable and free.

At the same time the Internet provided the cheapest and most effective tool for the spreading of ideas for the consumer, the one to many channel of television could be replaced by the more trusted one to one channel of the Internet. The consumer now had the knowledge, the information and in his hands the cheapest and most effective tool for idea dissemination ever invented.

How do you market products and services when the basis of modern marketing has been eroded?

The answer is simply that that you go back to the core of the process which was established long before marketing was even invented:

You make stuff that people want and you offer it in a way that is remarkable – so that people talk about it and so they will spread the word for you.

The AAA Digital Marketing Academy is set to prepare and up-skill the marketing and communication industry for the growth in the use of digital media.

Worldwide trends are telling the story:

• The consumer’s trust in traditional advertising and PR is declining.
• Control of brands is shifting to the costumer.
• Customers are more likely to seek product advice online than from advertisements and corporate brochures.
• Over 50’s are the fastest growing group of social media users.

South Africa has been relatively insulated because of the poor connectivity and a static internet population. Over 5 million experienced internet users in the higher LSMs is a significant market. Mobile is already a major factor and the imminent bringing on stream of the new undersea cables and increased and probably cheaper bandwidth, should dramatically push up broadband usage.

At 38% year on year growth digital advertising was the fastest growing media type in South Africa during 2008 and advertising is only a part of a complete digital strategy.

Presidential no hoper Barack Obama was elected to the most powerful job in the world on the back of a digital marketing campaign.

In tough economic times marketers are looking for more measurable results.

I have no doubt that as a marketer you appreciate all this, but can you make it work and who are you going to turn to help, guidance and advice, who are you going get to plan our strategy and how are you going to implement it, and how qualified are the internet and social media marketing gurus?

AAA Digital Marketing Academy is designed to fill that gap. We intend to develop a corps of digital savvy strategists and marketers who don’t only understand the technology but more importantly how to deploy it in integrated communications campaigns.

I am privileged to be the initiator and director of the Academy.

We are initially offering two courses, but will continuously roll out more.

The foundation course is on Digital Strategy which covers the latest thinking on digital and social marketing and a knowledge of the tools available. This is a practical course which will provide an understanding of the field. We will then take each topic and cover it in more detail in a series of verticals courses designed to cover topics covered in the strategy course in depth and  providing actionable skills, graduates will be well equipped to implement campaigns.

The Google Adwords course is the first of the verticals to be rolled out, under the guidance of an industry expert who works with Adwords every day the participant will qualify for the theoretical part of Google GAP qualification. Other verticals will follow.

Nobody in advertising or marketing can afford not to know this stuff, and this is how to get the knowledge you need.

For more information go to AAA Digital Marketing Academy.

Pic from mushon on Flickr