A 20 year veteran of the competitive world of consumer product marketing, Marie-Josée Lamothe is managing director of branding at Google Canada.
Looking ahead to the next big thing in our industry, I expect to see a clear transformation in how marketers define success. The C-suite will increasingly hold their marketing departments accountable for their results and impact on bottom line. As a result, “profit-driven marketing” will become the new standard to define success.
In the recent past, we talked about branding as a means of connecting with your audience on an emotional level. In our industry, we could be mostly right brain brand marketers, approaching advertising as a forum for creative storytelling.
Then along came digital.
It’s been twenty years since the first banner ads ran online. With digital, we were exposed to a new creative canvas to build truly immersive brand experiences. But digital also offered something else, something for the left brain marketer – namely, the capacity to prove the ROI and efficiencies of brand advertising. And this capacity to blend creative with bottom-line analytics stands to change the face of marketing.
Among leading organizations, tomorrow’s marketing departments will be viewed as a profit centre instead of a cost centre. Left brain-inclined performance advertisers, who have historically sought out measurability and efficiency of the web, will establish the new rules for the industry at large.
Canadian consumers are already ahead of the industry. Canadians are world leaders in consuming online video – each of us watches more than 150 videos each month – and we now spend more time online than in front of traditional screens (but I caution that this isn’t a conversation about traditional versus digital).
If brand marketers want to catch up to the Canadian consumer, they must adopt many of the lessons learned by performance advertisers. Effective campaign managers will consider familiar problems in new ways. They will measure beyond the conversion and account for the customers’ journey across screens and media types, as well as accounting for the offline sales driven by digital investments. They will re-conceptualize e-commerce and affiliate programs as a part of a brand’s enlarged media ecosystem. And they will recognize that traditional screens and new platforms are now reliant on one another to optimize relevance of a brand’s overall reach and effectiveness.
The good news is this level of measurement is becoming possible. Over the last decade our industry has developed powerful metrics to measure advertising; advertisers can tally clicks, reach and the resulting conversions or purchases. This has redefined performance advertising (where the goal is an immediate sale or click). And we’re continuing to work on better metrics for brand advertising that can become as important as the click has become.
If we want to remain competitive and in touch with our consumers, no longer can we look at digital as a secondary consideration or simply a way of extending the reach of our traditional campaigns. Marketers who are making the biggest headway today are taking the reverse approach and leveraging the power of digital measurement to inform their traditional TV campaigns.
I believe that the most exciting times in marketing are yet to come. As our industry moves headlong into a digital future, marketers must balance their left-brain and right-brain skills to change the way we work and how we measure our accountability and impact on the bottom line. The payoff will be rich, multi-dimensional campaigns that resonate with today’s Canadian consumer – while driving profit.
