Marketing and branding expert Mark Ritson is urging marketers to ditch the “D”-word. Writing in Marketingweek.com he says that having separate budgets for digital and non-digital work is not only outdated but pointless.
“If you have a prescribed marketing budget for digital in 2016, you’re making a massive mistake, and you just don’t get it,” says Ritson. He’s quick to point out that he’s not against digital and has in fact worked with a number of clients who have dedicated their entire marketing budget to digital – and have been extremely successful as a result.
The point is this: prescribed budgets allocated to digital, print or TV work and so on, do nothing but create silos – one for digital, one for non-digital. This is the wrong strategic approach, and marketers would be better served viewing their marketing budget as a single amount that should be used to achieve one objective – help the business succeed in the year ahead. Creating a false dichotomy between digital and non-digital spend will simply undermine optimal investment levels and become an obstacle in the way of strategic thinking.
According to Ritson, the key to negotiating the massive changes to the marketing industry that the digital era have caused, and to creating prosperous brands that will thrive into the next decade, will be to approach this year’s marketing strategy without any reference to the word “digital” at all.
To do this, he recommends the following plan. The first step is to remove all silos of digital and traditional marketing tools. The second is to ensure that there are no pre-allocated amounts in the budget that will create silos and get in the way of achieving the single marketing objective. His third point is that anyone whose role is labelled “digital marketing strategist” should work hard to remove the “D”-word from his job description before it truly becomes redundant. It’s not that marketers with digital skills are irrelevant – on the contrary, they’re essential. However, they should be using every tool they have at their disposal, and the one that is best for the job at hand. The last step is that all agencies should receive the same brief, at the same time, in the same room.
At the end of the day, digital investment should never be seen as any different to spend that is allocated to other platforms – every channel should compete on an even playing field for its share of the same pie. If Twitter is a better bet for your brand, budget and the objectives for the year than TV, this will become apparent in the account review. It’s a far more integrated approach, which will foster the crucial synergies between channels that so often form the heart of good communications planning.
Riston concludes that he is convinced of the effectiveness of this approach and is somewhat unsettled by the fact that most organisations seem to be going in the opposite direction.
The big take-out: Marketers should see their marketing budget as one amount to be used to achieve a single goal – there is no longer a place for allocating spend for digital and traditional channels that creates silos.