Categories: Articles

The Disconnect Between Marketing And Digital Marketing

Seth Godin has a Blog post today called, Time Has A Long Tail Too, that highlights perfectly the problems that Advertisers and Marketers are having with the Digital Marketing space. The crux of Godin’s post is about how still, after a few years, the Terry Tate Office Linebacker long-form video commercials for Reebok have an audience (welcome to The Long Tail… where products have an unlimited shelf life… with unlimited shelves). In fact, the one video I clicked over to check out on YouTube – Terry Tate’s World – had 932,933 with 332 comments and 4/5 star rating. The challenge is that when you go to the URL promoted at the end of the Terry Tate video, the site is down. You get a page error.

I’m going to make an assumption that someone didn’t just forget, or that a hosting mistake was not made, and say that advertising campaigns and online marketing campaigns are dramatically different from a traditional ad campaign. In a traditional ad campaign, Marketers could get in and out in the span of a couple of weeks. Times have changed. The length of an ad campaign in the Digital Marketing space is dictated by the audience not by when the ad spend dies.

Why would Reebok not want to capitalize on this audience? How much would it cost to keep the hosting of the Terry Tate page active, and use it to introduce consumers to newer brands and campaigns? The options seem endless, and there’s a captive (and interested) audience with a steady flow of traffic being driven to the site.

Marketing was about one-night stands. The Digital Marketing world has changed it to a relationship where Marketers can’t just scream their messages at Consumers. And, as Seth Godin points out, Marketing has shifted from a "how many" to "who" model.

I fear that traditional advertising people just don’t take the time to think about time.

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.