On my way to work this morning, I bumped into an old colleague. She’s a brand strategist at a renowned consultancy. It was nice to see her.
We got to talking about digital strategy, and whether digital mediums had matured sufficiently such that there wasn’t a need for both digital strategy and brand strategy. I started to chuckle.
There are five opinions every digital strategist should have:
1. Dynamic content integration and automation. That’s a mouthful. So is the insatiable appetite consumers have for content. How do brands satisfy that hunger, while creating and distributing content in a way that doesn’t break our backs? I’m open to answers.
2. Ecommerce as media. How can brands benefit from the collision of content and commerce, both to tell better stories about our products and services, and to provide users more value during a purchase? I’m fascinated by this topic, personally.
3. Cross-interface entertainment and sharing. Remember when two screens was a lot for a brand to handle? Well, what about three, four, even five? Forget channel planning. That seems old school. It feels like we should be calling it screen planning. Strategists should be advising brands about how consumers want screens to interact with one another.
4. Targeting. Every day, it seems like there’s another category of data users have made available to brands and marketers. We owe it to our clients to use it in a way that evolves their understanding of their customers, but doesn’t compromise our ethics around privacy and intrusiveness.
5. Synchronized sharing. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, we used to call this campaigns. The etymology is fascinating. Campaign planning stems from military planning, which dates back to World War II. It’s a rich history I’m happy to discuss. More importantly, we’re not at war with consumers. So, how we curate email, chat, social media, photos, video, music, and text for our brands has to change. Perhaps this is a fancy way of saying strategists should care about social media. I think it’s something bigger.
I rattled these off pretty quickly, startling my colleague. I’m pretty sure she thought she had caught up by recommending a Pinterest page to her clients. That’s a start! But it’s not the end of digital strategy.
I guess my job is not going anywhere anytime soon.
