Marketing is increasingly about the creative application of technology.
One of the (many) oddities of my journey into marketing was that I originally studied Maths and Computer Science at college. I just missed the personal computer boom and so my lasting memories are around scheduling time on a Vax mini-computer to compile and de-bug Pascal programs. It was not glamorous stuff, and to be perfectly honest I hated it. I left vowing never to work on computers ever again – and never to work with computer people…
However, some of my learning obviously stuck and so when I found my way into advertising, I was drawn to technology advertising and the application of technology to the craft of advertising. Most of my partners have similar stories – we’ve been around technology for all of our lives, having started in technology and then moving into marketing from there.
For that reason, we’ve often remarked that starting this company and pursuing the kind of marketing that we do felt like a natural progression. Our lives have prepared us to do exactly this kind of marketing – to think about marketing as the creation of digital services – applications – that do things for people.
It may be, therefore, that I’m heavily biased in believing that there has been a shift in the relationship of marketing and technology. However, I think that technology which was a tool to create marketing campaigns, is moving beyond simply being a medium for delivering marketing campaigns and is now becoming the marketing itself.
As I stated in the title for this post, I believe that the creation of marketing, now involves applying creativity and marketing thinking to technology. As we did with words, images, film and so on, we are starting to mould and work with technology. To make it do things that make statements, create lasting impressions and change behavior.
I think it is this integral role for technology that creates one of the biggest stumbling blocks for our industry. While agencies and clients talk about putting digital at the center of their campaigns – they are not actually (IMO) talking about putting technology very literally at the center of their marketing. In fact, the idea that technology is the marketing would probably be ridiculed in most agencies. For this reason, I think a lot of what’s termed digital marketing will remain extraneous (and superficial) in an increasingly digital world.