Subline Podcast episode 3: The great myth of offline vs online
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Description
One of the reasons that I started this podcast was that it was becoming really obvious that there was a tribal thing happening in marketing, where you've got one side pitching against the other. You have guys who are standing up for all traditional marketing and pitching it against digital marketing, or online, and vice versa. There's guys like Mr Ritson and Gary V who seem to ... well, certainly, they don't seem to agree. I think sometimes we let those who shout the loudest set the direction, and the tone, for an industry when it's actually not the case. I've worked in online for 20 years now and, certainly, the last 10 years with some of the world's biggest brands. Not once in that time, have I ever said to anyone that traditional media is moving towards online media, in terms of spend. I've been a great advocate of traditional media. I think it plays a massive role in online performance media. I think most senior people in agencies, absolutely get that. What they're doing is defending the channels that they operate in, because they're the channels of today that they work in. But they may not necessarily be the channels of tomorrow, and who knows if online is going to stay the same, whether Google will be as dominate in search. What happens in social media with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. I think the opportunities are vast, but I think we can get lost sometimes, because there are these two distinct views. I know that it's an old Hollywood trick, isn't it? If you want to identify the bad guy, it's just the guy who's completely opposite to the good guy. That seems to be what's prevalent throughout all of our lives, that, at the moment, from a political sense, certainly in the marketing field, but I don't think anyone who operates in this field actually takes those views and thinks that, that's what it should be. At the end of the day, we're all trying to sell things. Whether that's through PPC, or SEO, or whatever type of media, that's what we do. Slightly different to what traditional media or advertising is because they're out building brand. I think sometimes there is some desperation in the online space, from an agency point of view, where they think that they have to be something that's different to everybody else. I have seen some crazy job titles recently where people are calling themselves marketing architects or marketing engineers or marketing this and that. It really is grasping at straws on differentiation. Trying to talk about technology in a slightly different way and our industry is pretty straightforward. We activate on a very limited set of channels and we drive sales. We have to be effective and efficient and differentiation at that is quite difficult to do. But let's not make our lives more difficult by picking a fight with traditional media. At the end of the day, certainly from online digital point of view, we absolutely need them. And to be honest, the more spend that there is going through traditional media, the better we can perform from a performance point of view online. PPC campaigns always run better when they are run parallel to a good TV campaign and the same can be said of press and radio. I mean, we just need each other to survive and I know it's great that we can all stand out by going to one end of the spectrum and say ah, those online guys don't get it ... ah those traditional guys, all their money should come to us. That isn't the truth. In client meetings as a leader of an independent agency with the big media agency, one of the big six holding companies, you can sometimes feel the tension and it shouldn't be there. We're not trying to grab their budget. We are trying to actually defend what we do and make sure that what we do is executed to its absolute best and sometimes we need to listen more. Sometimes we don't take the media plan seriously. We think, oh, it shou
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