For the last five years, digital pundits have been predicting a dramatic change in our media consumption. They have foretold the convergence of digital and broadcast media, the erosion of mass audiences and the restructuring of the media and advertising industries. However, so far leading industry practices have remained static, even stagnant, and the overall pattern has barely changed in all these years.

This year marks the event when the long predicted future finally arrived heralded by the ever increasing number of advertisers looking for digital solutions.

The budget spent on digital marketing in Pakistan crossed the $5 million mark, the ‘digital agencies’ were set up by the dozens, established traditional agencies formed ‘digital’ divisions and both mainstream media companies and major marketers accepted the fact that the methods by which consumers absorb information and entertainment and the ways they perceive, retain, and engage with brands and brand messages have changed irrevocably. Now a sufficient number of consumers are spending enough time accessing information and entertainment via digital media platforms and have shifted the overall pattern of media use.

Yet digital platforms continue to remain a mystery for most Pakistani marketers. This is because they transform the traditional marketing and media ecosystem into an intimate, immersive, accountable environment in which consumers can interact with brands at every level of the purchase funnel.

This is very different from the traditional media, the content and communication for which used to be developed for a linear broadcast world where the consumer was the sheep or as more commonly called ‘captive viewer’. In today’s multi-channel world of ‘leaks’, however, it’s not really surprising that these old forms of advertising fail to translate well as consumers increasingly behave more like discerning critics who use the internet to pick through and make their own sense of the swathes of information available. To survive in this new reality, thus requires a massive change in mindset.

The first thing to understand about digital marketing is that (surprisingly) it is not primarily about technology. It’s about providing relevant and interesting value in the form of ideas and experiences that can get people talking, provide real entertainment value, or render a useful service to the consumer rather than just another (empty) marketing slogan or jingle. These marketing ideas and experiences thus need to be crafted with the same discipline as the underlying product so that the two become virtually indistinguishable.

Secondly, to effectively engage consumers in the new digital space, marketers need to define more clearly the values that underlie each of their brands and to instil them throughout the marketing programme through integrated marketing.

Thirdly, it helps to remember digital marketing’s greatest selling point. Digital benefits marketers by furnishing a real time, direct, uninterrupted view of the consumer and a measurable, efficient read on the return marketers are generating on each penny spent. This accountability and intimacy are particularly important now, when a cluttered and highly fragmented media environment has made ‘buying awareness’ prohibitively expensive.

However, it’s one thing to collect digital information, it’s quite another to draw intelligence from it. Leading marketers would be wise to build partnerships with their digital agencies to track ad placement, versioning and effectiveness as well as delve in social insights generated through ‘listening’ to the consumer. Thus to keep up with the times, the following are some recommendations for new digital marketers and traditional agencies:

• Shift just three per cent of your media spending and management attention to digital media and learn how to use those media to more effectively influence consumer purchase behaviour. Especially learn to develop formats which promote interaction with audiences.

• Digital is not a silo. Combine ‘above-the-line’ advertising and ‘below-the-line’ marketing (promotions, sponsorships, events, public relations) in new two-way interactive campaigns.

• Research through approaches and metrics that measure outcomes.

Traditional advertising has lost its storytelling charm and evolved instead into predictable, often bland, and largely invisible dance-based executions that are not memorable or inspiring. The entire industry is making digital media a bigger priority in their brand strategies.

It’s not that digital alone will dominate over other mediums. Mass advertising will continue to perform a role in driving awareness and will prioritise towards channels that deliver accountability, relevance and interactivity to fully capitalise on the online opportunity. The digital markets thus are only set to boom.