Dinosaurs, rejoice! Welcome to post-digital marketing

When I joined my last agency many moons ago as a 'digital planning director', I declared it my mission to make myself redundant. In the sense of not using 'digital' in front of anything anymore; to, simply, assume it, bake it in. It took us some time.

'Digital', as part of marketing, has been with us for more than two decades now. Not anymore. That itch of a feeling that something big is bubbling underneath has been articulated in the latest WARC and Deloitte Toolkit 2014 report.

It's a manifesto that will catch many unawares. Take this: 'digital' is dead!

The significance of it is monumental. Digital is not a function or a separate discipline anymore. Not even the phrase should be used anymore, as it implies separation. Instead, we now again have… well, just branding.

The logic of the report is hard to dispute: digital is now so pervasive, so embedded in everything we do business and marketing-wise that it just doesn't make sense to be treated separately. It powers every channel; it didn't just create new ones, but also extends and reshapes the old ones. It's the silver lining that connects everything – the first 'meta medium' we ever had.

Like electricity or the internal combustion engine, it stopped being 'new' and just became ubiquitous. In a poignant phrase of one of the report authors, 'its maturity has effectively killed it'.

Consumers as well – particularly consumers! – don't think offline and online; 'digital' and 'analogue'. For them, it's just life, it's the things they 'do' and the expectation is that, in that life, a brand should have one face and one feel. One brand promise. The thing they've started buying it for in the first place.

The result is that big houses of brands – Unilevers, P&Gs, Mondelezes and Nestles of this world – have staked their new strategic ground. And it's the same it has ever been – just thorough long-term branding; the big picture. A deep knowledge of individual digital channels kind of felt like puddles of piss next to a massive forest fire. Branding is, simply, too big to be distilled down to a 'Like'.

The proverbial marketing 'dinosaurs' – more 'traditional' agencies and anyone else more infatuated with platform ideas than platform builds - have a reason to rejoice. The apocalyptic digital comet that looked like a done deal for their extinction has turned out to be a major upset, but not a total wipeout. The echo of their heavy trundling will still reverberate around…

But, will it? Will those species survive intact, unevolved, without adopting any of the new survival skills they could add to the old ones? How it seems, branding itself has evolved and mutated in the new digital climate.

The long-term thinking has always been crucial, as the seminal IPA report 'The long and the short of it' has showed. Although link made digital a natural response environment, Les Binet and Peter Field proved that you can't build or maintain a long-term brand just through a swarm of promotional actions.

But the nature of 'long term' is not the same anymore. It is now both long and short. So long that it becomes always on; so short that it becomes real time. It is like HBO series: high-impact individual episodes that build characters over a period of many open-ended annual seasons.

The campaign 'window' is now more of a 'sieve'. Campaigns are soft-launched through various content-discovery channels, amplified through others and extended through CRM. They start and stop when people start and stop talking about them.

Which means 'ecosystems', not just individual channels; for content discovery, transactions, loyalty schemes and customer service. Need states come first, channels second. It all reminds one of what Tony Stead – who invented the phrase 'account planning' – once said about its role: to answer the question 'And why the ***k would they?' As in, why would consumers bother with whatever we have to say or offer?

This leads to the new nature of insight, a move from individualistic Freud to collective Jung. In addition to mining ever deeper into the psyche of an individual, strategists can now also look at patterns and behaviours at the level of a category: thanks to vast 'data vapour trails', both microscope and telescope are needed.

We have been here before. When radio introduced sound that newspapers lacked and when TV brought moving pictures. Both times, clients and agencies learned new skills and incorporated them into that peculiar and powerful magic called 'branding'.

That is now happening again.

Lazar Dzamic is ex-planning director of Kitcatt Nohr Digitas.

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