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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.
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I will then dive deeper into some specific issues
related to digital asset management and development.
Digital media content can be best understood based on the type,
delivery channel, device, and placement strategy.
Let's look at each of these dimensions more carefully.
There's a variety of media formats that digital marketers can choose from
to encode and embed marketing messages.
For example, information about a special sales event
can be delivered digitally in the form of written text, graphic banners,
photo and memes, interactive animations, or online videos.
The different types of digital media content need to be developed, designed,
created, and stored separately.
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As such, they cannot simply outsource the production to various specialized agencies
without first developing a comprehensive and multichannel communication strategy.
To make things even more complicated, the same piece of digital content
can be delivered through different communication channels,
each with a set of advantages and disadvantages.
This adds another layer of complexity to the strategic planning process.
For example, the announcement of a sales event can be delivered via an email,
or a text message, or various social media platforms, blogs,
websites, and mobile apps.
Then the same promotional message presented in these different formats,
delivered by different communication channels, may be receive
by different audiences on different media devices.
Can your email promotion sent from a Windows system
be viewed correctly on an Apple computer?
Is your website compatible with different browsers?
Is it mobile friendly?
Can your high-resolution promo video stream smoothly on slower cell networks?
These are just the few of the issues an effective digital marketer must consider
before launching a campaign.
Another key consideration in digital media management is placement strategy.
Where and how would you like to host and display your digital assets?
Like legacy media,
there are three placement strategies in digital media as well.
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Owned, earned, and paid media.
Owned media includes a company's website, blog, social media presence, and
other digital entities under its direct control.
Earned media is content that is organically generated by other users and
online publishers such as product reviews, social media following and sharing, and
coverage by online news outlets.
Paid media, on the other hand, is closer to traditional marketing,
whereby you pay a third party to display your message to other people.
The distinctions between paid, earned, and owned media were once clear.
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But it is increasingly hard to see them as either
or in today's digital media ecosystem.
Such distinctions are also becoming less relevant in the digital space.
For example, social media is technically earned media, but
it allows for paid placements and sponsored influence marketing.
This makes it a platform that supports varying strategies, techniques, and
campaign styles.
Organic search optimization and
paid search advertising are displayed in the same search engine result page
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but are often managed by different marketing teams.
Most online publishers now host original content, sponsored content, and
paid ads but do not make clear distinctions among them.
Today, the professional boundaries separating the PR, advertising, and
publishing industries do not meaningfully exist in the digital marketing world.
This provides digital marketers a bigger and
more dynamic space to flex their muscles.
Mike YaoAssociate Professor of Digital Media
