Integration is key

There has been a lot of talk as of late saying that Obama won the elections purely because of his use of digital media. I think this view is unfounded. What made the difference for Obama was that he created an unprecedented integrated marketing campaign. The key to his campaign was Obama at every possible touch point. Traditional marketing uses a spread of different forms of media to get the best possible reach. And what Obama realized is that there was a massive audience out there that was engaging with predominately digital media. This audience was the youth market that had lost faith in politics. So what Obama did was go to the digital channels and engaged with that lost audience in an interactive manner. This won him the trust of that audience and as a result created a viral campaign and brought him an election victory.

The problem in South Africa is that marketers don’t seem to be totally committed to digital marketing. The fact of the matter is that there are around 6 million internet users and most of them are in the higher LSM groups. I am sure most brands would kill to have a few million extra customers. A few million extra customers can make a dramatic change to a brand’s market share. However when it comes to their marketing budget it seems that brand managers choose to ignore this large group of consumers and spend tiny fraction of their budget online. As a rule of thumb 10% of a brands marketing budget should be spent online. The first brands to adopt this approach will not doubt see the benefit in years to come. Those that don’t could go from market leaders to no longer on the shelf.

Another issue is the lack of integration of elements in the campaign. What normally happens is that a traditional agency comes up with a great idea and this rolled out in the traditional media. Near the end of the process someone realizes that “Dam we forgot to include a website in the campaign”  At this point the campaign has been rolled out and the budget has been spent. So the client ends of with a really basic site that is totally disjointed from the rest of the campaign. Also what tends to happen is that no budget is allocated to the online marketing of the site and product. So its like shooting a TV commercial but not have any budget to flight the ad. Agencies and Clients need to wake up and bring in the digital agency before the campaign is conceptualized. Doing this will result in a full integrated campaign that covers all channels effectively.

So my message is, start taking digital seriously. The digital camera killed the film. If you don’t believe me think back 20 years or so, Kodak was a household name and there camera film was widely stocked at most retailers. Walk into any major retailer and try see how easy its to find Kodak film. It took less than 5 years for digital to kill film. Don’t let this happen to your brand.