Having been re-immersed back into the world of communications planning and advisory, a realization - or a "re-realization" struck me.
Whilst we are in a world that is increasingly becoming more "digitized" and where certain media vehicles are becoming more and more a "concierge service" - i.e., a centralized service to stay in touch with all things - we are still lacking in real integrators.
Digital planners - who can think of the brand beyond the digital medium and its intricacies - I think, are still lacking. Don't get me wrong: digital planners are a great bunch of people. And by the innate nature of the web as being very measurable and accountable, digital planners hold a very critical role in any communications plan.
However, I have the belief that digital planners - who are specialists in their own right and could command great respect from the rest of the marketing planning community - needs to take into consideration that brands are not created overnight.
Just because click-through rates or CPCs or CPAs or keywords or widgets or RFIs are high relative to eyeballs doesn't necessarily mean a successful campaign. These - IMHO - are measures of "efficiencies" rather than effectiveness: How much dollars is a campaign generating versus the investments that are being poured into it.
There is still a need to look at brands - and these metrics that measure how consumers interact, experience, relate, and animate a brand cannot be captured by merely looking at CPCs and CPAs and other conversion measures.
True: all businesses ought to be measured in terms of their revenue-generation capabilities. And therefore all campaigns that support this businesses need to generate sales. HOWEVER, a brand isn't built overnight - and the impact of so-called "branding campaigns" are not necessarily immediately felt or measurable. Heck, if we can measure overnight the impact of a "branding campaign", I think that would be the ideal scenario. However, sticking to our CPCs and CPAs and SEMs and SEOs and other measures an tactics as "mere campaign measures that matter because they are closer to the company's bottomline" could well be a myopic viewpoint.
Media planning as an industry has evolved - strategic planners from mainstream creative and agency-companies are now welcome in the world of "noughts and crosses" and are changing the way media planning is bein done. These strategic planners do not necessarily use numbers - but they "adapt" their knowledge of how brands are created and how consumers encounter/experience brands not just through messaging strategies but also through the message's interaction/synergy with the medium that carries that message - regardless of what that medium is.
The same is true for digital specialists - they have to "adapt" their technical knowledge and expertise to include a deep understanding of how brands are created - online and offline.
This is not to say that the digital medium ought to be an after-thought, after all the traditional, offline media have been fulfilled and their budgets optimized. What I am trying to say is digital specialists should also be able to talk about brands and brand-building - in the immediate and in the long-term - within their specialised field - and at the same time, outside the digital realm.
At the end of the day, we are aiming to provide better brand-consumer experiences that would transform target audiences into brand users (and revenue-sources) and into brand ambassadors. Clicking an ad - in Google, in MSN Search, in Yahoo.Com, or in some other vertical - is one aspect of that experience.
But it is not the only aspect of brand-building.
Brands are created over time, across multiple experience-opportunities, with the end-user reinforcing her relationship with the brand at her own time, at her own choosing. Revenues in the short-term are good and they are good for the bottomline of the company for this quarter or this month. But businesses - the last time I checked - are in it for the long-haul.
