Categories: Articles

Feedback On Killing The Term eMarketing

Yesterday, my vote was to kill the term eMarketing and start using Digital Marketing as the proper nomenclature (see eMarketing – Can We Please Kill This Term?).
Here’s what Parth Shukla – Client Strategist – TV & ISP Portfolio at Bell.ca had to say:
“My vote is for ‘Interactive Marketing.’ To me, Digital marketing denotes a media. We don’t hear of ‘TV Marketing’ or ‘Print Marketing,’ so why restrict what we do to digital media?
I think what we are doing is experiential vs. other types of marketing. ‘Interactive’ denotes how we touch the consumer, it’s not a one way street like TV, where we send a message, let a consumer react, capture his reaction and hopefully make the messaging more relevant next time we interact with him.
We use the Internet pages and email as a medium today, but as we are seeing it will expand to podcasts, videocasts, integrated with TV and many more mediums. There will be a time when the personalized marketing that we do moves into other interaction points in a consumer’s day.
I am personally looking forward to the day when billboards have personalized messages like in the movie Minority Report. It’s not the intrusiveness that piqued my interest, but the relevance. I would be more than happy to let Coke know that I only drink Coke with pizza, so don’t spend all of your ad dollars on me during the Super Bowl, just give me a coupon I can use every time I order pizza and you have my loyalty.
All the fun we are having online today is just a pilot, to learn how the consumer wants to ‘interact’ with us the marketers. This will soon encompass ‘all’ the interactions with the consumer. Why will it encompass all interactions? Because it will be relevant to whom it matters the most-the consumer.
So, today the one medium… tomorrow the world. Hail to ‘Interactive Marketing’.”
Martin Pilote – Internet Strategist for Desjardins Financial Security had this to say:
“I’ll add ‘experience’ marketing to your list. Actually, when I think about digital marketing with all the Podcast, Blogs and Web 2.0 applications, what I really see is a ton of new experiences for the customers and, to me, that’s what ‘eMarketing’ is all about.”
UPDATE: On May 25th, Mark Goren – Copywriter at Zoum Armada added his thoughts:
“The beautiful thing about ‘new marketing’ is that it gives people the ability to touch each other and control exposure in ways they never could before. Of the terms put forth, none have the warmth to express these benefits. Interactive? There’s still too much of a gaming connotation. Digital? I agree with Parth Shukla’s comments. eMarketing? Too 1990s. Online? Same. Internet Marketing would probably be the closest, but it remains cold, impersonal and distant, like the others.
That’s why I like Martin Pilote’s thought. ‘Experience marketing’ shifts the focus from marketer to consumer, right where it should be. Another way to express this idea would be to call new marketing ‘Touch Marketing.’ The notion of experience is in there, as well as the idea of being able to feel (both physically and emotionally), meet others (one big community) and affect outcomes (decide what you’re exposed to).”
The battle rages on… what do you think?

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.