The dark-side of digital marketing - Part 6

One of the most shocking revelations that came to light this year was Facebook’s involvement with Cambridge Analytica, a data firm which involved the two companies collaborating together to harvest user data for millions of Facebook users and then use that data to manipulate advertising. Facebook were reportedly paid money by a number of organizations including the campaign to elect Donald Trump as President of the United States and what they would do is that based on the data of a particular they would manipulate advertising on things that a particular user might not necessarily like, with things they would find favorable according to his Facebook profile. 

For example, if a person liked cats but didn’t necessarily like Donald Trump, he would see ads where Trump would be holding a cat and petting it. All this was done to manipulate the perception of a user. And experts say this data-mining had a huge hand in influencing the U.S election in 2016.

David C. Edelman talks about how the very idea of branding is bound to shift in the new age and privacy of users will be violated whether they like it or not and whether they know about it or not. The best way to avoid the dark-side on digital marketing is to be vigilant in regards to what you see and agree to online. Because this was one of the very reasons Facebook’s actions were deemed unethical rather than illegal, because everyone had agreed to it.

These revelations all serve as eye-opening warnings into the level at which the internet has taken control of our lives. While it possesses many virtues particularly when it comes to advancing the field of marketing, it also possesses many dark corners that need to be navigated with utmost caution

Creativity is still important in marketing - Part 5

Some people underestimate the value of creativity these days but the fact of the matter is that creativity is as important as ever. In fact if anything, it has become even more important in the new age of digital marketing because for an ad to truly stand-out in the large crowd that is the world-wide web, there has to be something unique and creative that garbs the customer’s attention. And if you look at companies like; Yelp, JetBlue Airways, MasterCard and Airbnb, all of them have launched and successfully run digital marketing campaigns based on one singular creative idea. Because good marketing is not just about creativity but also about finding a way to channel that creativity into a singular vision and giving it a pin-point sense of focus. JetBlue Airways for example launched a marketing campaign where they promoted the idea of excellent customer service and convenience for customers. 

They put this very idea into practice by answering all of their customers’ queries on Twitter whether they are related to booking of flights or just simple queries regarding seats. This allowed them to have a significant social-media presence and appeal particularly to the minds of the adolescents who are always looking for the easiest and simplest solutions. This also saves passengers the hassles of going to the website to solve their problems. Airbnb on the other hand used digital-marketing to rebrand their image from what is essentially a crowd-sourced hotel service to an application that allows people to see the world in a manner that is also economical on their wallet. The article Contextual Marketing by D. Kenny, J.F Marshall examines how these companies have all stood out by giving context to their uniqueness and creativity.

Creativity is often defined as divergent thinking and to be a successful marketer your mind has to be going and developing in different directions to truly make an impact. It is hardly important whether you’re advertising on billboards or smartphones when it comes to creativity. Marketing guru David C. Edelman consistently talks about the importance of creativity in his article and how he feels it is a force that will continue to influence marketing for generations to come.

Emergence of E-commerce industry and online services - Part 4

Perhaps, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the digital revolution has been the E-commerce industry. Though companies like Amazon and eBay both launched in the mid-90s it took years for them to become the E-commerce giants they are today because for one thing, that many people simply didn’t have access to the internet back then. However, in recent years, companies like Amazon, AliBaba, eBay aswell as Daraz and OLX in Pakistan have relied heavily on digital marketing. In many ways, digital marketing and E-commerce are two things that go hand in hand and realizing the importance that digital marketing carries can be seen as one of the primary reasons why all these companies are so successful today.

According to the article Consumer Perceptions Regarding E-Commerce Related Risks by Katherine Smith, the influence of e-commerce will only grow in the coming years and its influence on both the market and the mind of the consumer will greatly be felt.

Similarly, the idea of online services and applications has also benefitted and greatly been influenced by digital marketing. Services like Careem, Uber, Airbnb, GoLootlo! and PayTm have similarly relied heavily on digital marketing to promote their idea and services. And one added benefit they get through digital marketing is that they can simply add a download button under an advertisement and if the user is seeing that ad on his smartphone he can instantly download the application.

The effectiveness of digital marketing - Part 3

I’ve already reviewed the potential that digital marketing possesses according to author David C. Edelman, but what about the results? After all that is what people like to talk about when we get down to it all. One of the most positive aspects of digital marketing is that it has leveled the playing field meaning small-businesses have as much of an opportunity of competing with big-businesses if they have a marketing strategy that is good enough. Since both are already reaching a large audience, quality of marketing has become more important than ever. In Pakistan for example, small fast-food restaurants like; Jessie’s in Islamabad, Outpost BYOB in Lahore and Burger INC. in Karachi have found ways to compete with large fast-food chains like McDonald’s and KFC simply because they have fully utilized digital marketing and by creating enough of a buzz on social-media as well as posting pictures of the burgers on their menus and upcoming discounts, they have all managed to establish a loyal and constantly growing customer base.

Another aspect that can cause both great benefit and great harm to a company is that of customer reviews. To put it simply, if your product is good enough you can benefit from people responding positively to it by posting reviews and giving positive comments on social media. However, if your product lacks in quality these same people can completely sink your product by their negativity which has the potential to spread like wild-fire, especially on social media. And the same thing applies to marketing campaigns, if a company bases a campaign on something offensive people of social-media have the potential to completely destroy that company’s credibility and reputation just by posting a few negative comments.

Furthermore, analytics have emerged as one of the most concrete indicators of success and failure in modern-times as they give marketers exacts facts and figures of the number of people who are reading or viewing a particular ad. The article Why Thinking About Digital Analytics All Wrong highlights the effect Google Analytics in particular have had as well as the steps they have taken by streamlining and adding more and more dimensions to Analytics that allows a marketer to know all the necessary facts regarding a particular ad from how long he viewed a particular ad to how quickly he closed a particular ad.

The shift from traditional to digital marketing - Part 2

It's imminently clear that digital marketing is replacing traditional marketing as the numero uno method of marketing. But how?

For one thing, digital marketing costs less and is now even considered to be more efficient because its audience can be anyone and everyone, domestic and international. Due to simply the vastness of the world-wide web an ad has the potential to reach both a person scrolling down an article in the United States as well as a person casually checking his Facebook news feed in Pakistan. The possibilities are endless. Another new dimension that digital marketing has brought to the table is that it can target a number of demographics simultaneously. With just a little variation and good analytics, marketers can target children, adults and adolescents with the same ad. And while companies like Facebook have used this dimension negatively in the recent past – which I will elaborate later on – this element has immense potential if used correctly and ethically. Finally -- and this is perhaps the most important factor – digital marketing has the element of quickness. And can reach a large audience in a very small time-frame. The potential of an ad going viral is an even more exciting possibility of marketers because if an ad does go viral it happens quickly and has the possibility of capturing attention all over the internet.

And this change in trend in marketing isn’t something that happened overnight. It is actually something that has been years in the making. According to author David C. Edelman, A study from 2009 that aimed to investigate marketing budgets, particularly, the increase and decrease in specific areas of marketing showed that 60% of marketers had made up their minds about increasing their budgets for digital marketing by taking money away from the budget for traditional marketing. The same study showed that marketers believed that traditional marketing which includes; newspapers, billboards, magazines, TV, radio etc. would either experience a decrease in effectiveness in the upcoming three years, or the effectiveness would stay the same. Whereas, over 70% of the same marketers were of the view that the effectiveness of social media, mobile, and online video would continue to grow. Nine years on, and the changes are quite clearly visible.

Where is marketing going in the 21st century? - Part 1

The idea of advertising has always irked and interested people in equal amounts. Some people consider it to be a clever way of swindling people whereas other people look to it as an avenue of that demands creativity to be wholly successful and in that case, it is not swindling but rather an intelligent way of selling something. In actuality the answer lies somewhere in between. Yes, people in marketing and advertising have been known to use unethical ways of selling their products but in many and most cases it has been the creativity that really stood out as the element influencing success. In the 1960’s and 1970’s in particular, advertising experienced a golden-era in the United States which stemmed from Madison Avenue, New York City and included many advertising firms in the area competing and coming up with increasingly bold and creative advertising campaigns that have since been known to change the advertising industry forever.

However, the situation of the marketplace has changed drastically in the 21^st century. Gone are the days of advertising on billboards and newspapers. The days where creativity was often the only defining factor needed to get the consumer’s attention. These days, people have limited attention spans due to their over-reliance on technology which makes getting their attention an even tougher task. Studies have shown that most people just change the channel during commercial breaks whereas; no studies are needed to prove the fact that the majority of adolescents don’t even read newspapers anymore. All this makes advertising and marketing all the more difficult which is why digital has emerged as an avenue where marketers have looked to gain the attention of the consumer.

I think it’s wrong to say print media, billboards and television ads have lost their influence completely. That is simply untrue. However, their influence has decreased significantly in modern times especially compared to digital marketing which is on the rise. Why is this though? Besides the obvious reason that consumers should be targeted on the platform they spend most of their free-time on.