Digital communication is now a major consideration in any marketing budget, depending on whose numbers you believe, digital may now be even bigger than “traditional” communication channels.
So how should you develop your creative and communication briefs?
- Concentrate on traditional channels and adapt for Digital?
- Focus on digital and use traditional as the adjunct?
- Split the budget and treat them separately, or consider the cart and horse to be the one integrated delivery vehicle?
Making these choices, deciding which is the horse, the one that provides the “grunt,” you need and requiring real feeding, and which is the cart, which just needs some maintanence, is the key decision. Then you need to decide how you are going to manage the processes of feeding and maintaining, as they require very different strategies and capabilities.
Traditional media is passive, one way, the objective is to disrupt to gain attention and only then deliver a message with no effective feedback mechanism.
Digital media is wholly different. It has the native capability to be two way, a “conversation,” it cannot disrupt as the initiative is with the receiver rather than the sender, the originator can micro-target to the level of individuals, and there are immediate and hugely detailed feedback loops.
All this means that the manner in which the proposition is presented is entirely different, passive, mass creative Vs a message demanding action of an individual.
When put like that, the dilemma becomes more transparent, relatively easily addressed by a few simple questions:
- Is it a commodity, mass market product, or are you building a market customer by customer?
- Are you aiming to build awareness amongst a wide market profile or engagement of a niche?
- Can you identify and target the behavioral characteristics of your target market, or just the demographic ones?
The answers to these questions will offer insight not just to which is the horse, but how much, and what it needs to be fed to deliver the optimum result.
