Charting a course for digital marketing leadership: What we’ll explore at CMA's Oct 2 roundtable
As you may be aware, the CMA Digital Leadership Roundtable is later this week, first thing Thursday morning, Oct. 2 at the Harbour Castle. Your panel – a frankly great group, consisting of Doug Checkeris, CEO, MediaCom USA –back home in T.O. from his New York base for the day, Goodwin (Goody) Gibson, President, MacLaren MRM and Tammy Scott, Vice-President, Marketing, Telus – got together over lunch lat last week to hash out our strategy for the presentation. Trust me, based on my notes – as many as I was able to take amid the rapid fire conversation - there’s going to be no shortage of smart insight on the question at hand.
To paraphrase, the core of the subject of the morning: what does the industry and individual companies need to do to reorient themselves to succeeding in the digital marketing reality of the near future if not now - and who should lead that charge and how?
We thought we’d share with you most of the questions we’re planning to try to speak to. The idea is two fold:
• One we hope they’ll interest you and incite you to come out.
• But also, we want to invite you to send along any other questions you’d like to see addressed on Thursday. You can post your questions here in the comments section, or email me at sesutter@cogeco.ca
So here are the questions/themes we’ve got so far (and warning: actual verbiage and order may vary based on the panel’s interaction, new insights and whims:
1) Let’s get some thoughts on the core premise of this roundtable: digital spending is apparently going to continue to accelerate exponentially at the expense of traditional communications channels, and yet a good 25% - a full quarter of marketer - admit they don’t know how to proceed (and I’m sure there are those who won’t admit it, and those who don’t know what they don’t know yet). From your perspective, does this ring true? How bad is it? How big a challenge or opportunity is this?
2) What’s got to happen? What do organizations need to do, structurally and culturally to get on top of the digital sea change?
3) What are you doing – whether structurally, culturally, process-wise, or in terms of staffing and training – to adapt to the digital environment?
4) Who do you think most “gets” the digital future, aside from yourself of course… your competitors, your clients, others? And what they doing that we should all emulate?
5) My perception is that the general consumer is way ahead of most businesses – and most senior and mid-level management in most businesses - in adapting to and embracing the digital world… that they really are owning the whole experience, and a lot of companies with their legacy systems and mind-sets don’t even know it. Do you agree? Disagree?
6) Related to above question: Are your people digital savvy enough? Does your CEO have a Facebook page or a blog? Does your team know of to Twitter? Should they? Should there be a bare minimum of what people in marketing communications need to know to work in a digital future? What is that?
7) How is branding, vs. tactical marketing, changed by the new digital paradigm?
8) Who should be taking the lead on interactive or digital ideas and programs? … digital agency, media agency, client? Within clients, should it be marketing depart, CEO, IT?
9) Want to open up the measurement can of worms. We seem to have both not enough data and maybe too much at the same time?
With all things digital seems to be this double-edged sword. At one level, you are able to track people’s connections and interactions with most digital communications with unprecedented precision. And yet there’s lots of complaints that there’s no common definitions, things are confusing, and the data doesn’t tell you enough – and in a way it seems these new mediums and tools, by the very fact that they are potentially more accurately track-able, are held to a higher standard than other media, especially in their emerging phases.
What’s your take on the uses and abuses of measurement in the digital age?
10) Let’s talk money. Part 1: Where is the money going to be within media and content creation spending (and research spending)? Where should it be going? How should content be funded in the future?
And related to this: There are a couple of competing views out there. One is, compared to mass media productions and media buys, digital is cheap. Another is, this new technology stuff is pretty expensive, and there’s always something new to invest in just around the corner. What’s the reality?
11) Money Part 2: How the heck should marketing companies/agencies be compensated now that the old commission and fee models seem to be obsolete?
12) What’s the “next” big thing that’s going to turn the communications world on its head?
What do you think? What else should we talk about here?
Hope to see you Thursday.
-Stan Sutter, CMA Digital Leadership Roundtable moderator
