Not quite relevant to digital marketing, but we are expecting our third boy in February. What is related to digital marketing is that I crammed in a bunch of late November/ December meetings with agencies, advertisers, and media specialty companies before going under house arrest.  Having visited six cities in five weeks, I spoke with folks across the digital marketing world who, already having made decisions around the holiday season, were focused on 2011 execution. I did not hear any surprises; rather, the statements seemed to reflect groundswells. Below are the general statements that stand out:   

Things I Heard:  

• {Agency} We need to bring together multiple technologies to drive necessary efficiencies…and are having trouble doing it by ourselves.
• {Agency} I’d hate to try to make money in the media-buying business [for major advertiser] right now.
• {Agency} AOR’s [Agencies of Record] are offering to take over media specialties [such as Search] with increasing frequency, even if they lose money on that part of the business.
• {Agency} Everyone is talking about conversion attribution and gets it. But no one knows how to put it into action.

• {Advertiser} We have all sorts of data in our company, and no one is using it to make our digital marketing better.
• {Advertiser} Politically, we cannot get conversion attribution to work in a way that everyone agrees on.
• {Advertiser} We cannot rely on weekly or daily reports. We need data on tap when we need it.

Stuff I Predict  

1.     If 2009 was the year of consumer adoption of social and mobile, and 2010 marked the success of advertising within those media, 2011 will mark the rise of actionable analytics across all digital media types, including mobile and social. There is clear demand. (Offline/online  – not yet.

2.     Forward-thinking agency or marketing departments will  invest in ways to store, join, and access multiple, disparate data sets on demand, and to employ those who can deliver actionable insights from those data.

3.     Advertisers have tons of information within their POS (point of sale), CRM, and inventory systems. These data are crucial to actionable insights. Some digital agencies will take a page out of the systems integrator books, develop tech expertise, and learn how to leverage these data.  Some systems integrators/ consultancies will learn digital media. New companies will emerge, and current ones – mainly those that rely on media buying and planning as a main source of revenue – will face increased pressure around margins and growth.

4.     Some creatively-minded and brand-focused CMOs will realize that being a thought leader is not enough: they will spend more time as organizational leaders in 2011. Political structures, silos, and other anachronistic constructs of most marketing organizations will need to be carefully but resolutely dismantled, so that new structures can be built, individuals with different competencies hired, and cultures changed over time. These new structures will support how consumers consume media, not how org charts have always looked. This process will take time, but a few brave CMO’s will begin this in 2011.  Additionally, collaboration with the CIO organization will be increasingly important.

I’d be interested in hearing the thoughts of others around these observations and predictions.

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