I had the pleasure of spending some time at Haymarket Towers last week to begin the judging process at the Media Week awards. After years judging the awards, this year struck me as the first in which digital media is getting some real cut-through in the media buying and planning marketplace.
Many of the entries this year made reference to successful groups or campaigns set up on Facebook and, to a lesser extent, on Bebo, as well as activity on YouTube and other video sites. This is good progress and it’s great to see industry folk realising the value of digital within a campaign.
Indeed even search marketing was regularly played back as an addition to traditional marketing campaigns.
However, the pedant in me thinks much of the social media and YouTube contributions seemed to be post-rationalising rather than putting digital at the centre of the campaigns. Uploading a video and counting the hits does not a digital campaign make.
Brands need to use digital insights, glean feedback and comments from web users and feed this back into the campaign to keep its momentum strong. People are spending 8 hours of their leisure time per week online, so let’s hope this trend is reflected in the upfront planning process even more so in the award entries of future years.
