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Facing an increasingly fragmented media audience in an ever more complex
ecosystem,
digital marketers face a new challenge today.
How to create coherent, creative, and
consistent marketing messages to be delivered over different communication
channels across different media platforms in different formats.
In the traditional media era, promotional marketing heavily relied
on mass advertising channels such as broadcast media and mass publications.
Given a scarcity of advertising space and high costs of media content production,
the creation and deployment of marketing messages were typically handled
by creative agencies and professional media producers.
On the one hand, this helped marketers by allowing them to focus on strategic
concerns rather than things like content creation, media planning and
management, and content delivery.
On the other hand,
the limited number of outlets also meant the power of marketing communication
was largely held in the hands of a small group of media and publishing companies.
In the age of digital and social media,
individual users can easily create content and share it with the world.
The company's website and
social media presence can reach millions of consumers around the world easily.
Video ads are no longer exclusively aired on television.
They can be posted, and often for free, on many video sharing and
social media platforms and viewed using a multitude of devices.
Businesses can directly target potential consumers via email,
text messages, mobile apps, and search engines.
A community of online influencers can successfully engage the attention of
tens of millions of people with just a few hundred characters.
The new communication environment disrupts the advertising production and
media planning industries and
tips the scale towards the demand side of the marketing communication.
However, more power also comes with more responsibility.
In the Digital Age,
an effective integrated marketing campaign must be coordinated by a versatile,
in-house marketing team with high levels of digital and technological literacy.
Marketing and brand managers today not only have to make business and
strategic decisions but
they also must fill the roles of creative director and media planner.
In this lesson, I'll first provide an overview of the different types of digital
media content and communication channels that marketers should be familiar with.