I was invited to deliver this lecture based on my career in marketing to the final year of INSEEC MBA class in March 2016.

1. MARKETING IN
THE DIGITAL AGE
LOOKING BACKWARDS
& FORWARDS
CHRIS BLAND

2. Agenda
• The state of media
• The state of brand marketing
• The state of agencies
• The waves of change
• My career in marketing
• How you should get started

3. PART 1
THE STATE
OF MEDIA

5. The Rise Of Programmatic Media
• Programmatic buying is the automation of media trading between media owners
& brands
• In the US, programmatic ad spend will reach $20.41Bn by 2016 , 63% of digital
display spend, eMarketer
• UK programmatic spend in 2016 will be £2Bn with Euro spend growing 25% in
2016, eMarketer
• Global will increase to 50% by 2019, Magna Global
• First display, then search, soon OOH, Radio and finally TV
• So what?
– Changes the rules of the game from buying content that people consume to buying people
consuming content
– Media owners are commoditised as data describing people is all powerful
– Enables true 1:1 marketing undermining the traditional broadcast paradigm

6. The Single Customer View
• A unique record holding demographic, behavioural, transactional and commercial
information about a single customer
• Enables understanding of full lifetime value rather than channel focussed session
value
• Requires a consistent and personal customer experience throughout the funnel
• Blurs the distinction between channels & platforms
• So what?
– This is a beguilingly simple concept but incredibly hard to service in a siloed world
– Requires technical and data mastery, customer empathy and predetermined or predictive
responses

7. The Google/Facebook Duopoly
• By 2017 Facebook and Google will control 65% to 70% of digital media
spend in the US - $160 billion worldwide by 2017
• “The best and most effective media ever is Google search. The second
best right now is Facebook. Effectively, they’re must-buys.”
• So what?
– It means every other digital media owner is now chasing a slice of the rest –
with non-digital in their sights
– Both systems are data “walled gardens” meaning that they do not allow full
user data out which makes consistent user experiences difficult
– Encourages users to choose one to manage all their personal data creating a
data food chain with just two apex predators!

8. Adblocking
• IAB UK’s Ad Blocking Report reveals that 22% of British adults online are
currently using ad blocking software – a rise from 18% in October 2015
• The phenomenon grew 41% globally in the last 12 months
• Stifling an estimated $22bn globally in lost advertising revenue in 2015
• So what?
– People are confirming what we suspected all along: people hate advertising
– Mass media, broadcast brand communication will be screened out and perpetrators
reviled
– 1:1 communication must take precedence and be generated by or earned by products
that surprise and delight
– Public brand comms must be approached with caution, skill and sincerity

9. Content & Native advertising
• People have much more control over their media consumption
• So brands (agencies) are trying to use content to woo consumer
attention (inbound, social, events)
• So what?
– Mass adoption of content marketing has minimised its effectiveness
– Native advertising (and now programmatic native) is the great new hope
– Wait till the adblockers catch up

10. PART 2
THE STATE OF
BRAND MARKETING

11. Advertising vs Marketing
• At its best, advertising can
– Enable content to be produced & consumed for free
– Make valuable contributions to culture and society
– Be a hugely enjoyable public spectacle
• But, as digital media goes mobile it has become much more
intimate, personal and productive
• So what?
– There is increasingly a tension between these two styles of communication
– Digital is more about the product than advertising

12. Customer experience vs product promotion
• The SCV, media personalisation and programmatic everything puts the
customer in the centre of everything
• The product will communicate less through advertising and more through
product marketing
• So what?
– Brands should prompt conversation with themselves and between
users/consumers
– Brand partnerships that deliver enhanced combined functionality will speak
volumes
– Brand advertising will become the preserve of mass market products that cannot
be personal eg FMCG when it will still offer questionable value for money

13. Full-funnel marketing
• We have a SCV, unified content management and personalised media
targeting capabilities
• So, as marketers, we should be delivering an end-to-end, personalised
experience to people
• So what?
– Marketing campaigns should target objectives related to specific areas of the
funnel: Awareness, Engagement, Conversion and Retention
– Campaigns effectiveness should be measured against KPIs that represent these
objectives only
– Campaigns should consider tactics from all channels to meet objectives

14. Measurement & data 1st
• Successful campaigns become always on tactics
• So campaigns are refined through data-lead optimisation not
rebriefed
• So what?
– Briefing should only be used when there is no existing data available
– The gut feel response should never again be the first resort
– Measurement strategy is the strategy
– Funnel-based measurement framework
• Avinash Kaushik: See, Think, Do

15. Changes in the marketing department
• Lack of digital resource (particularly at the senior levels) is a problem
• But the blurring of data and objectives across channel, platforms and
devices is stretching even the digital specialists
• So what?
– Digital and offline departments cause more harm than good
– Structuring by funnel objective is better than by channel or platform
– All channels platforms have something to contribute when ‘hacking’ a marketing
challenge

16. PART 3
THE STATE OF
AGENCIES

18. Media vs Creative
• Divided by the MadMen in the 1960s
• Now being restitched together to meet the integration demands of
digital
• So what?
– Clients have to brief media and creative separately with one side often
taking precedence
– Predictably, each side responds according to their perspective
• Creative agencies prescribe more elaborate creative
• Media agencies prescribe more (elaborate) media
– Media owners are taking work from both sides

19. The role of the big idea in an era of
scalable little ideas
• It used to be that the big idea won the day
• Post-mass media marketing big ideas are struggling with media
fragmentation
• So what?
– Small improvements to effectiveness and efficiency can make big differences
– Big ideas can come from product development, tech, business development etc
not just marketing
– Digital creative is increasingly being handled media owners familiar with their
custom formats
– Dynamic Creative Optimisation offer automated creative iterations using client
data feeds, user behaviour feedback and even automated video product
placement

20. Agencies vs In-house vs Consultancy
• What’s the difference?
• Ubiquitous programmatic is creating multi-channel campaign platforms
• Automation & self-serve leads to disintermediation
• So what?
– Clients have more choice between long-term out-sourcing to agencies or in-
housing versus short-term use of specialist consulting skills
– Agencies are preparing to deploy under a variety of remuneration models
– Where possible, performance-based remuneration is becoming increasingly
common

21. PART 4 THE WAVES OF CHANGE

22. The Role Of Data & Automation
• Data has always contributed insight but now it is starting to drive
the campaign in flight
• Media planning now includes not just the strategy and the campaign
forecast but also the tagging, the collection and the routing of data
• The managing, optimisation and reporting of digital campaigns will
increasingly be automated
• Adobe, Google and others are all looking to provide multi-channel
marketing platforms

23. Personal Data Brokers
• People will look for solutions to combat the abuse of personal data
and manage communication from brands
• Major digital service providers will offer this service
– Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google
– “Siren Servers” from Who Owns The Future? By Jaron Lanier
• Adblocking services will also play a role here if they can build out
their proposition, possibly in league with mobile network providers

24. Decentralisation through P2P
• P2P (Peer to Peer) is network technology that is robust, trustless,
decentralised, virtually free and extremely disrupting
• The internet is the purest form of P2P tech liberating personal
communications with web doing the same for public information
• Cryptography and compression technology disrupted the media publishing
industries
• The blockchain took things one step further by enabling the
decentralisation of money through Bitcoin
• The next wave will be the deployment of decentralised law through smart
contracts and DAOs

25. The Democratisation Of Work
• Decentralised technologies are now starting to have a radical effect
on work
• High quality freelance skills are available globally 24/7 (Upwork)
• Work hubs and Nomad working is creating cultures of migrant and
remote but highly-skilled and highly-paid workers
• Automated corporate services such as payroll, expenses, contracts,
escrow and payment will fuel an increasingly fluid economy
• Networking and collaboration tools are making remote teams
function as smoothly as office-bound teams

26. PART 5
MY CAREER IN
MARKETING

27. Getting Started
• Hang out with people cleverer than yourself
• Sell yourself (but not too low)
• Come across as both hard-working and fun
• Say yes to everything
• Read everything
• Ride the waves of change

28. My career waves
• Wave 1 - Digital & the DotCom bubble
• Wave 2 - Following a passion for travel
• Wave 3 - Search and digital performance
• Wave 4 - Integrated, full-marketing marketing
• Wave 5 - Looking beyond media

29. PART 6
HOW YOU SHOULD
GET STARTED

30. Don't look for a job, look for a
meaningful challenge
• A job won't be relevant for long
– 50% of the most sought after job titles now didn’t exist 10 years ago
• Solving a meaningful challenge has longevity
• What are the meaningful challenges and who is tackling them?
– Prepare a business for the next waves → every client
– Marketing automation → Adobe, Oracle, IBM
– Data brokers → Google / Facebook and Adblockers
– Decentralisation → Fintech and LegalTech
– Work democratisation → Create your own agency on UpWork

31. How to keep going?
• Keep reading everything
• Go to MeetUp groups on topics you are interested in
• Sketch a five year plan
• All realistic goals are achievable within five years
• Unrealistic goals take five to ten years
• Things change beyond prediction within five years
• Be prepared to pivot!

32. Q&A

33. Thank You