Embracing the Digital Space: The future of the IMC Professional

We are in hard times and in these hard times most IMC professionals tell their clients the same story. They say, “keep spending in a recession, don’t reduce your marketing budget”. But the question I always ask is, ‘are you spending more as a person, as an agency?; so why tell clients to do what you are not doing? Most of all, how many agencies keep investing in their staff during a recession?’ This is food for thought.

Let me quickly digress and use this analogy. What made the dinosaurs go into extinction and how did fishes survive till this day? From my brief study I found out that dinosaurs were land animals and something catastrophic happened on the earth and water engulfed the whole earth; and water was the environment in which the fishes were existing and it dominated the world hence their survival.

But dinosaurs were not meant for water and so they could not survive what happened to the world. Now I am using this just as a parable to you. If the world is changing in any way, it is definitely creating a new environment. Now it is either you adapt to that environment or you are in your natural habitat but if you are not part of that environment you are definitely going to go extinct, either on the client side or the agency’s; it is about the environment in which you are operating in.

Now let me use Chief Obafemi Awolow’s life to buttress my point. I chose him because he is someone I have a lot of respect for. When he was young he struggled for about 13 years of his life doing odd jobs and different businesses. He did not become a lawyer until he was about thirty-six. It was as if nothing was going on well for him but he was busy hustling, making things happen in the social world, organizing social and cultural activities and remaining relevant to people until things changed for him.

Now if you are in a recession and you sit down waiting for the world to change, you are going to die. You need to stay busy and relevant in what is going on around you and as you keep hustling do it with a mindset that it does not depend on the money in your pocket because if you look at the resources in your pocket you will not be motivated to do anything. Scarcity thinking will paralyze your sense of initiative. You need to fight and think about how you can keep moving despite money whether as an agency person or as a client person.

Now with the way the world is changing, do I still need a newspaper house? Do I still need to buy a paper? I can go on twitter now and find out what is going on. I found out that Osama was dead about 6am the day he died. I just got up, checked Twitter on my phone and found out he was dead. Do I still need to buy a newspaper anymore? Now if I can get a word out on a product I am about to launch on twitter, for instance, do I need to set a very big budget on traditional media?

Steve (Babaeko) spoke about something and it is very important: Nigeria leap frogged the industrial age when mobile telecommunication entered the stage in 2001. And what is happening now is that internet usage is flattening Nigeria. If you do not know, let me tell you, in the next five years your grandmother will be Twitting.
Already people aged 25-55 are fastest growing population on Facebook! Now the old folks are learning how to send SMS and after a short time they will learn how to use instant messages and then the Blackberry messenger. People are rising up to these developments and even as a telecoms company we are encouraging you to browse from your mobile because that will mean less traffic on our network and we will make more money.

The Internet and digital space are creating something that none of us know what it is, therefore an IMC professional who is not in the digital space is ENDANGERED already. Those who use it only for personal and social schmoozing are ENFEEBLED. Those who see the digital world for what it is and embrace it are truly ENDOWED like Dbanj loves to say.

In my opinion the digital world is so important because it is an open system. It is not a part of the marketing mix alone; it is something that nobody will really understand where one part of the mix ends and where another begins.

The goal of any 21st century digital strategy is to create EARNED media not PAID media. This is true whether you are on the client side or the agency side. Earned media is all about influencing the influencers. Not by simply paying them to talk pretty about your brand, but by giving them an experience they can share with their followers That is, it is not investment that you pay for, it is not advert or recognition that you pay for, it is that which is freely given that we must strive for.

Now how do you measure true customer loyalty? You do this by recommendation. If you have a customer who tells his friends that Etisalat has the best internet network this is better than ten million naira spent on any advert. Plug this on Facebook, if the person has 5000 friends that means that the same number of people have received the free advert. People are spending more time on their mobile because everybody is a citizen reporter now.

What is going on in the world is so fast that if you are missing out on what is happening in the digital space you will be endangered. For instance, Bella Naija started out as a blog but it has now become a website that commands thousands of followership, with the potential of one day stealing all the money that Guardian and Punch have been getting. The power of recommendation Bella Naija commanded took it from a hobby to a business in less than 5 years.

Look at Barak Obama’s campaign strategy. He built a 13 million strong email data base, recorded videos and sent it to this 13 million people. These people were always the first to know when he was going to make any major announcement. They would simply start propagating the message before it even hits the print or TV media. Imagine if you are a CEO with such a strong data base before you launch your product and you record a video and sent it to your top customers, the result will be staggering.

Sarah Palin hates granting interviews. She only talks to Fox News which is sympathetic to her and speaks on Facebook and twitter and people go there, pick up what she is saying and it enters news magazines. So she controls what she says and she speaks where nobody is going to question her and what she says becomes news.

Goodluck Jonathan declared his presidential ambition first on Facebook and thus entered the world records as the first sitting person in his type of position to do so. The main avenue Guinness is deploying to drive the Nigerian-Argentina match is through digital. You have to join Guinness VIP either via SMS or by clicking a link that takes you to a mobile site where you register. I hope we can see this all beyond advertising, beyond PR, beyond events; it is everything in the mix jamming into each other in the digital space.

At Etisalat Nigeria, we cannot place our Press adverts now without placing our Twitter handle and Facebook address on it because everybody is going there for information and before you know it we are going to reduce how much we are spending on traditional media. There are several examples of organisations increasingly deploying the digital space for their IMC needs.

In summary my considered opinion is that the future of the Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) professional lies on how they make use of and embrace the digital space.

Thank you.

(Being text of a presentation I gave at the May 2011 edition of M2 Brandwagon)