Other advertising platforms like outdoor, print and radio have been around for decades and significant changes to each medium have been few and far between, allowing people ample time to learn their intricacies and perfect their skills. The problem with the internet is that it’s only been around for two decades, mainstream for far less and everything keeps changing. How can people possibly keep up? I've met hundreds of marketers from across the industry in my daily work here at the IAB and while many are expert specialists and we have lots of excellent digital leaders, no one is an expert in everything because it is impossible to be. This is a huge challenge because quite often people will need to work with technology or a technique from an area they’ve never used before. It befuddles them, delays them, and before they know it everything’s moved on. Bill Gates once said that the leaders of the future will be those that can adapt to change the fastest, which I can’t disagree with at the moment given the current speed of technological change. But do we really want a world built on change experts? Sometimes the best results come from time and experience learning something’s intricacies. As I’ve mentioned, internet advertising does have strong expertise in silos like display, search and affiliate. Here the technology evolves and improves and the specialists can keep up with this if it’s their primary focus. Bringing it all together and delivering a fully integrated, expert marketing solution is the difficulty. “Lack of communication” is the phrase I hear the most in digital, so communicating more, sharing knowledge and ideas is obviously key – but does anyone really do it? And if they do, is it enough? Well, I obviously see knowledge sharing on a daily basis in meetings and events. However, I think we as a marketing industry can and must share a lot more information. While they exist, asking for simple things like great creative and successful case studies can be like drawing blood from a stone. Too much of internet advertising is perceived to be built on ‘knowledge’ and people are too protective of it. Sharing is a vital step for internet advertising to continue to mature, but fundamentally I believe the biggest fault lies with technology providers and software engineers: they make things far too complicated. Even the most user friendly technology isn’t user friendly enough if you look at the big picture. No, you will never need a single person to login to your display ad network interface, search interface, enewsletter admin, booking systems, planning systems, reports etc etc. It makes sense to have specific teams, but we do need people that understand to a significant degree what they all do to allow them to become the ‘internet advertising overlords’ we need. This has turned into a two sided rant, so I’ll bring it to a close with this: Share more + make things easier = more expertsIt seems like a no brainer, but who’s honestly doing both? Follow the IAB on Twitter
I couldn't agree more with your post Jack, regarding the sharing of information. But, as for experts, er, they appear to be a dime a dozen out there. Too many puporting to be such.
More frankness and openness will, as you say, help digital mature quicker. After all, advertisers are trying to mimic what people do in the digital world and it is exactly that, "frankness and openness", that people appear to value most on the web.
You stole my thunder John. Even the so called specialist experts are usually found to be less of an expert once you analyse and challenge their work. It's one thing to be able to know lots about a specialist subject (and do lots of name and technology dropping) but the reality is very few know how to apply this knowledge effectively to deliver optimal online campaigns.
And even when you take a specilist online agency, the person doing the critical elements of the work will often be a junior grad trained by a junior exec who was once trained by a junior exec, etc, etc. So actually even when they have a depth of specialist knowledge is is often produces quite one-dimentional expertise.
I meant to add, I completely agree with Jack. What the industry needs is a lot of talented and solid practitioners who understand quite a lot about all the online functions, and who have strong skills in knowing how to interrogate, challenge and extract the priority information from all the specialist functions.
Very good points! Wonderfully backed up by this video www.youtube.com/watch
Hi Amy,
Many thanks.
That's very funny indeed !!!!
The tragic thing is, it's ruining the business.
Agencies are now having to do ads that will not get sufficient
media spend because money is being divereted on line to talk.
Talk is cheap.
Ideas are powerful.
the same has happened in healthcare.
Every doctor is a specialist.
They all know a lot about one thing
and nothing about the whole.
there are few REAL general practitioners about.
so now, if you go to the wrong doctor
you get the wrong answer.
It's all been blown out of proportion.
Online is just a new media.
that's all.
It's not a professional ideas machine.
Yes it can be used by professionals
Yes it can inspire
Yes it can inform.
But ideas still come from people.
and they are all being made to struggle to survive
in agencies up and down the land
because of people like the one portrayed in that clip.
Jack Wallington
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 25 Nov 2009
Total Posts: 76
