Digital Marketing: Experiences, IT and the Future

Marketing is increasingly a digital process and marketers increasingly have to be technologists. That is the common wisdom bandied about in the myriad marketing conferences and publications that form the voice of the industry. Interestingly, for once they have it right though the analyses put forth would be greatly improved if they were at once more nuanced and if they simultaneously were formed with the active input of the unsung heroes of digital marketingIT professionals.

An outlandish idea? Perhaps. Heresy? Perhaps. Truth? Absolutely.

So what is digital marketing and what does this all really mean for the IT profession? What indeed is the cross-over between the 2 fields that few think of as connected?

Digital marketing is a catch-all moniker for a set of marketing artifacts and campaigns that have some or all of the following characteristics:

Each of these factors implies the heavy involvement of web and mobile technologies. It also implies the translation of business desires into technology-mediated realities. Further, they imply the need for back-end technologies to support the websites, applications, and other experiences which form their substance.

The core purveyors of these experiences are a set of companies calling themselves digital agencies, interactive agencies, experience agencies, marketing-services agencies, and advertising agencies. There are still some agencies that stick to traditional marketing which is to say direct mail, billboard, radio, and TV advertising, merchandising, and so on but it is worth mentioning that in all cases, technology plays a more dominant role than it ever has.

In the case of the digital agencies (well use that term going forward), technology is the fundamental essence and there are only a very few instances in which the creative thrust of these companies is remotely divorced from technology.

Digital agencies hire technologists by the busheldevelopers, testers, designers, site managers, and usability engineers. In many cases, they style themselves development shops with the particular application of coding being marketing artifacts and campaignswebsites, games, mobile applications, etc.

In the workings of these agencies, strategists, account directors, operations folks, marketers, and sales people are hand-in-glove with developers, testers, designers, and UX engineers. Few ideas or projects are conceived of, sold, or delivered with employees from all disciplines being harmonized as to process and outcome.

In my experience, however, 1 member of the team rarely has a seat at the tableIT. Representatives of the IT departments of the customers for whom the digital experiences are being built are rarely included.

Therein lies one of the major problems undergirding the entire digital marketing edificethe lack of real interaction with IT.

Lets start with the end for a moment. Ultimately the product of most of digital marketing agencies is a set of online or mobile experiences designed to promote a brand, a product, or a behavior in the base of consumers. These consumers consume these experiences via a software-driven device be it a desktop or laptop computer, a mobile phone, a music player, a tablet, or a television. These experiences have to be rendered, maintained, changed, and stabilized. They also have to be delivered quickly and on-demand.

All of these experiences have IT as the foundation and have IT professionals, as ever in the background, making them happen quietly. The IT Pro is the unsung hero of digital marketing.

The corporate world is beset with the problem of silos and too little collaboration and cross-pollination. In most cases, the notion of customer centricity ie a relentless focus only on what the customer needs help collapse these silos and focus the abundant energies of todays knowledge workers. But it doesnt go far enough.

Digital marketing, fundamentally based on consumer experiences, could be at the forefront of changing the culture of sequestering IT that prevails in todays enterprise.

Digital Marketing could be the Future

The future is IT and digital marketers are too busy dreaming up about new experiences, to talk to those who make these experiences possible every day.

Perhaps the Indian market can avoid this problem by incorporating IT into digital marketing as an organic constituent as opposed to as an after the fact bolt-on. Avoid treating IT like a second class citizen and perhaps India will move to the forefront of digital marketing.