Feel the algorithm of the night
Not sure if you’ve heard or not. There’s this newish thing called digital advertising. According to some, it’s the future of marketing. According to others, it’s a fad. It’s probably neither. And it’s definitely not a replacement for conventional stuff like radio, print and television.
But it is a thing. So that means we have to acknowledge it. For what it is. And that’s a tool. And like any tool, when you swing it right, it does the job it’s meant to do. Expecting it to do any more than that is expecting too much. But that’s easy to do with digital. Because that’s how digital was sold to the world: as the cybernated messiah; an electric brain with algorithms for eyeballs and twice as many teeth as the TV.
And a lot of brands took the bait. Because it made sense. It was an exciting new frontier to explore. The logic was sound. Digital offered brands programmatic advertising with artificial intelligence that analysed and evaluated visitor behaviour, targeting ads to very specific niches.
The proposition was, digital would cut down on wastage. The opposition was, digital would cut the total consumer base into portions too narrow to be of consequence. It was an interesting debate. But also an impossible one. What were the hard metrics for measuring the Risk/Reward Ratio? What role would tracking vanity metrics play in measuring ROI?
There was no consensus. No agreed upon rules before the whistle blew and the game began. As sites like Facebook and YouTube emerged as social media mega-platforms, programmatic advertising metrics like recognition and reputation became a bigger and bigger priority for many brands. Even if there was little, if any, pure data available to support a link between positive or negative digital mention and measuring ROI beyond base revenue impact.
Digital has its place in every brand’s strategy. It’s part of the mix. It isn’t the future of marketing. But it isn’t a fad either.
It doesn’t need to replace conventional stuff like radio, print and television outright. There is a science to getting a return on your digital investments. And an art to making remarkable digital impressions. How well a brand succeeds creatively at both will drive their likeability. And regardless of what metrics you trust or which ones you think are telling the truth, no brand ever missed an opportunity for growth by being more likable. That’s why digital counts.
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