Marketing jobs are radically different in 2019 – but some employees can’t keep up
A revolution in how we consume media has turned advertising on its head, but recruits of all levels aren't being trained in essential new skills.
Keeley Pope understands better than most how jobs in Australia’s media and marketing have changed over the last decade. A recruiter with 25 years experience, she deals first-hand with exasperated employers who require new starters to have mastered a breathless list of digital skills. “Today, you’ve got to be able to go from editing a video one minute to analysing data the next and then briefing into a post-production house afterwards,” she says.
In fact, that’s just the start of it. Marketing roles in 2019, she explains, can also encompass social media strategy, paid content, e-commerce, app building, project management as well as skills in Photoshop, CMS and copywriting. “Even the mid-level roles are very much hands-on,” she adds. “Now, marketers are publishers in their own right, too.”
These changes are, of course, a result of how marketers and agencies have reacted to the differing ways we consume media – the decline of printed newspapers, say, or the rise of social media and TV-on-demand. The problem is many current employees have been caught cold: either forced to suddenly acquire skills they’ve never been trained for or rejected for new positions outright. “The onus is on the individual to upscale themselves.”
It’s a pattern noticed by Russell Easther, who teaches Mumbrella’s Digital Essentials training course for marketers. “People looking to swap jobs often get very intimidated by the huge list of requirements they need,” he says. “While some more junior or mid-level people aren’t getting mentored in their current jobs, because they’re finding senior managers are not skilled to do the tasks themselves.”
In fact, the changes to how we read, view and listen to media are accelerating at a greater pace than many of us realise: more than half of video viewing in Australia is happening on phones, and 48% relates to footage five minutes or longer; Aussies are streaming between 40–50 million minutes of TV a day; and nine million of us are on Instagram.
And all that change is affecting how businesses are marketing and growing. New research by PWC and Facebook, for instance, reveals more than a third of Australian small businesses are exporting to foreign markets, and more than a third of companies now earn international revenue within just two years of establishment.
And so brands have reacted. Digital marketing spend has grown by 13% in the last year, up to $2.24bn, with video showing the biggest leap, along with increases to display, classified and search (Google ads, basically). Meanwhile, programmatic spend in Australia has leapt to $1.7bn – a staggering increase from just $84m in 2012.
“The reality is modern market is diversifying,” says Easther. “So employees now need to know a little bit about a lot – whatever side of the fence you’re working on. So, to do marketing well, particularly in digital, you need to be able to hold a conversation, and you need to know the strategy of how all the channels work together.”
Furthermore, argues Liam Pietzka, the Sydney general manager of recruiters Aquent, Vitamin T and Firebrand Talent, modern employers are expecting evidence new recruits can deliver from the get-go. “As part of the recruitment process, candidates will often be given a brief and they’ll have to go away and interpret it,” he says. “It could be a campaign rollout, say, but it allows the business to asses the person. They’ll also want to see evidence in their history that they’ve demonstrated good ROI.”
On Easther’s course, he finds his students range from those starting out in creative agencies to senior marketing directors working client side and even those in media sales. “Some have learned digital from a few different sources and they come to formalise their learning,” he says. “While others have deep knowledge in one area but want to be more versatile. They might be a social specialist, say, but when they have a meeting to discuss programmatic, they wish they could contribute more.”
This year’s two-day March workshop will run in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and covers strategic models, content marketing, website development, paid media, social, retention marketing, search and strategy development.
“I like to ground people with the strategic fundamentals and building blocks to begin with,” he says. “We can then tie a lot of marketing channels back to them – that’s been a proven success in our workshops. We show them behind the scenes of some major advertising platforms, and we do hands-on demonstrations of marketing tools and client extensions so they can appreciate not just the strategy, but the hands-on skills required to deliver some components of digital marketing.”
But, confusingly, despite all the changes, the core fundamentals have remained the same. “There’s still marketing principles that exist, which can still work for us, because consumers really haven’t changed that much,” he argues. “It’s not completely a rethink in 2019, but an evolution. When someone Google searches in a category they don’t know, which listing are they going to click on? They’ll often pick the one they are familiar with. The balance of power has shifted to the consumer, and we show people how to get around that in our workshops.”
If you’re interested in attending Mumbrella’s Digital Essentials workshops, places are available for the March workshop dates across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. See here for more information and to book your place.