In a Mediatel piece recently I wrote about what I termed “peak digital” and argued that 2019 is likely to be the last year of unprecedented online growth, in terms of both spend and attention. There will be, I added, a realisation that digital can’t do everything.
As you might expect, the response to this from my broadcast colleagues was overwhelmingly positive – though I should perhaps remind them that I wasn’t stating that digital would be going away. The point I was making was that, as the market matures, we’re learning to appreciate digital’s strengths and weaknesses. We’ve acquired a greater sense of perspective.
And it is very evident to me that 2019’s market is a disjointed one, with digital teams (whether agency or in-housed) sitting in very separately spaces from brand teams – there is, in short, a widening gap between brand and digital. It’s a gap that needs to be bridged. Urgently.
Data truth vs Research truth
These two tribes don’t just sit in different places, they tend to speak different languages, with digital people holding to “data” truth and brand people talking about “research” truth – and because they adhere to these different takes on reality they can find it very difficult to work together.
"As the market matures, we’re learning to appreciate digital’s strengths and weaknesses. We’ve acquired a greater sense of perspective."
And they need to, because neither side, working in isolation, can deliver growth. In the digital domain, for instance, we’ve reached saturation point and search is longer delivering as it once did. But the people who work on the data side can’t see a way around this, aside from trying to spend more money in biddable media and optimising more. The truth, however, is that we’ve reached a point in the evolution in the market when that strategy will no longer work. We’re in a fix – and we just can’t expect to optimise our way out of it.
What’s to be done?
Well, we must recognise that the strength of digital media is in routing traffic. It’s OK at stimulating demand, of course it is, but we should still acknowledge that broadcast media does it better. Recognise this and you realise that the interplay between broadcast and digital media will be increasingly important. In particular, the challenge, increasingly, will be to understand how they interact with one another.
In short, search no longer delivers growth; and search cannot be expected to deliver a solution to this problem. The solution lies in understanding what it is that drives people to search in the first place – and a major barrier here is the fact that the “data truth” tribe is unwilling or unable to base their analyses on anything other than outcomes that can be counted.
"Cross media measurement is key to understanding the role of digital media in stimulating search demand and how it fits with other above-the-line media."
And that’s why cross-media measurement is so important, not just for our industry but for the wider economy. Cross media measurement is key to understanding the role of digital media in stimulating search demand and how it fits with other above-the-line media. It will allow us to understand the impact they have on one another – and in fact I’d go further and say that, ideally, it would allow us to de-duplicate reach cross channel.
That, in turn, could give a significant boost to publishers. For instance, the Ozone Project launch got a lot of interest from the digital team at Goodstuff because of its mass reach. It’s the first publisher initiative to stimulate that sort of response.
The market is moving. Advertisers are craving growth. And cross-media is where the solution lies.
