[ad_1]
If the pressure-tested marketer is honest—no matter how great the diversified, integrated plan looks—the nearly relentless focus on digital media, and the accountability and measurement that come with it, is exhausting. Digital fatigue is real. And these days, due to the seemingly endless quest for greater intel and activation at scale, so is AI fatigue. We need to slow back down and protect the full funnel.
The digitally led, conversion-focused approach effectively tells seasoned professionals, who have built decadeslong careers around elegant media plans and found thoughtful ways to reach people with content and unique in-market positioning, that the only thing that matters is the math behind the reach of their campaigns. Conversion metrics rule the day, and the quarterly business review. Some of the world’s best marketers have been told that what used to be called “breakthrough” media is now less important.
Sure, nimble targeting, measurement and the ability to shift allocations are key to making the overall plan sing for the long term. But when we jam the plan into that conversion-based marketing bucket at the front end, we lose control. There is so much pressure to do so, and the cost is great. It’s that imagination-fueled input—the art of the “art and science” that the marketer spent a career building—that falls away. And with it, eventually, so goes the customer. What’s happening here?
Taking this issue to the granular level of programmatic for a moment, it becomes even more clear: When a marketer, the agency and the buying team are told they can enter an “efficient biddable marketplace” where they can buy at auction or in “pure digital formats based on machine buying,” there’s a huge flaw at play within this jargon-jammed pitch. That presumed hyperefficiency is all well and good when you’re the first to market. But when there are 15 of you in there, all you’re doing (or the machine, in part, is doing) is moving the competition for rate into another space that’s a black box. And you’re not actually getting a bargain. You’re not getting the arbitrage of the pitch. You’re blindly competing, moving with the competition for eyeballs into a different medium with less visibility.
Let’s look at this in real life. Think of a navigation app, for example: When it tells you to get off the road you’re on because there’s an accident ahead, as long as you get that message in the first five minutes, it’s really valuable. If you get that message 20 minutes later, everyone’s already on the service road. In today’s media environment, there is an element of “everyone being on the service road,” from a digital perspective.
