Younger marketers ‘too focused on digital’ and pace of tech change ‘a worry’
Major gaps are beginning to appear in the advertising industry as younger workers become too focused on digital at a time when traditional mass media channels continue to hold the attention of most Australians.
At the same time, more than a third of workers in the advertising, marketing and media industries admit they are fearful of being able to keep up with the pace of technological change, a Mumbrella survey of more than 1000 industry professionals has revealed.
Agencies losing skills in traditional media
Rising tools such as programmatic are areas of major concern, with just 13% of people saying they have an expertise in the area.
In total, 73% of people said that they felt their organisation needed better digital knowledge to be successful in the future.
But industry leaders agreed there was a skills gap growing, particularly in agencies where younger workers had little knowledge of legacy media such as newspapers, magazines and TV, skewing planning and buying towards digital channels which they were more familiar with.
Speaking from the audience, Rachel Lonergan, head of strategy at Foundation and formerly with The Newspaper Works, said she was concerned by the lack of understanding younger people in media agencies had of mass media that was not digital.
She said that by visiting agencies to tell the stories of newspapers “my observation was that the lack of knowledge in the five-years-and-under group in media agencies and creative agencies around traditional channels is pretty fatal.”
“There is no sense of that scale in that cohorts who see everything through that digital lens.”
News Corp MD of metro and regional, Damian Eales said a shift was needed. “We have made many mistakes – that’s the first thing,” Eales said.
“We don’t talk about circulations, despite the fact it’s starting to flatten out, we talk about ‘total paid audience’ and we talk about ‘audience’ and I think that we have got to earn the right as an organisation for all of the customer’s (work) from the top of the funnel to the bottom of that funnel and apply the right media at the right point in time. We have got to get away from this digital versus traditional – it doesn’t make sense any more.”
Marina Go, general manager Hearst at Bauer Media, said it was about making decisions for clients and that digital alone was not the answer for every client for every campaign.
Omnicom Media Group CEO Leigh Terry said the starting point was the key.
“You have to start from a channel neutral position and consider all channels and dismiss them on the basis of relevance, cost and everything else,” Terry said.
He said media agencies needed to make sure that staff, even if they were not consumers of traditional media channels themselves, were fully up to speed with them “because that’s your job”.
AANA CEO Sunita Gloster said that it was an issue the association needed to address.
“We were certainly hearing some noise around needing to pull apart the marketing fundamentals with that group again,” Gloster said.
“The key for us is to find ways to inspire them to revisit some old principles about marketing and inspire them to re-look at things.”
While there remains major concerns about the ability to keep up with technology, one area in particular appears to have more experts than any other.
The survey revealed 48% of people claim to have a high level of expertise in social media, while 47% said they had mid-level expertise, and just 6% admitted they were social media novices.
Another area where skills are lagging is in display advertising, with 23% saying they considered themselves novices in the space.
The shifting power base in skills is also seen in the respondents that claim the highest levels of expertise in particular areas, such as brands claiming a higher level of expertise in social media, content marketing, SEO and influencer marketing.
Media was the most comfortable with display and native advertising while agencies were more comfortable than brands and media only in the area of programmatic.
My magazine went digital for economic reasons, not because “it was the thing to do at the time”. Although my subscribers loyally followed, they tell me almost en masse they would still prefer a paper version
My take is that people are being told what to do ie you MUST go digital, rather than asking the users / readers to a large degree.
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Really bashing the media agencies this week aren’t you mumbrella …
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digital is key to the survival of the industry. its like retail without ecommerse.
or even years ago with a phone.
revolution. we just have to make it work and.
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interesting that 47% consider themselves experts in social media. is that understanding what a post is or how to do a post. i would hasten to add that about 5% understand the value of the underlying data.
Here is a question;
Would you rather have 1,000,000 engaged fans on twitter?
or
Would you rather have 5,000,000 fans on Facebook?
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