A Marketers Guide on Recovering from the Addiction to Digital

Today it seems like the marketing world is dominated by tech-savvy digital natives. While these young marketing professionals bring important new outlets to the marketing mix it seems that they are distracted by all that is new and sparkly.

While this is not meant to be a damning criticism, it is increasingly important for us senior marketers, who came of age prior to the internet of things, the internet itself, not to mention social media platforms, to provide guidance to the younger professionals so as not to let them slip down the slippery slope of only focusing on digital.

First of all, traditional media is not dead! Changed perhaps, but not dead. I recently read an article about the effectiveness of radio advertising in today’s media landscape (yes, I wrote radio!). And TV advertising is still the most effective way to reach kids ages six to 12 (see my homepage for how I built a little scooter company into an almost half a billion dollar revenue generating company).

More importantly, the basics of traditional marketing are being overlooked by this younger generation. Strategy, basic brand building, creating brand equity for the long-term success of a company should be guiding all of the efforts of marketers, young and less young alike.

My opinions, of course, are from being on the client side of the business for all of my career. Here is an interesting article on the agency point of view.