Newsline - Digital
When will we tip?

Over the last few weeks we have seen a groundswell of debate regarding why in this region, at many levels digital is still having such a rough time of it. With this month's launch of the IAB in Singapore (of which Zenith is an eager founder member), and with the occurrence of the second Singapore adTech, we have seen the spotlight being shone on the Singaporean digital market's failure to gain the foothold in the industry it deserves.

Globally, depending on who you listen to, 'digital' currently accounts for approximately 12% of the total advertising pie. In the US that figure is 17%, and in the UK the figure has reached the heady heights of 20%, eclipsing spend in newspapers as long as two years ago. So, why in Singapore, a developed, mature consumer internet market is that figure currently closer to 4%, and more importantly, what will be the catalyst that drives the change?

Where the 'blame' lies is unclear. Some commentators see the agencies as the culprits (http://www.marketing-interactive.com/news/13335), whilst others point the finger at safe, risk averse marketers within client organisations - the reality is probably somewhere in between, with agencies unable to offer adequate, up front ROI assurances, and clients lacking the willingness to experiment and test new opportunities that is often required to deliver great campaigns. A naturally risk averse Singaporean culture certainly doesn't help, and this risk aversion is only heightened by the financial circumstances of the last 12 months.

However, with the average Singaporean already spending 20% of their media time online, it is still difficult to fathom why even the most risk averse of marketers are still slow to see that being where their consumers are is an absolute necessity.

When, why and how quickly we will see a seismic shift from 4% to 20% is equally difficult to predict, but below are 5 predictions of elements that I believe will be amongst the spurs to move the figure of 4% towards 20%.


1) One major catalyst to change will be when the risk flips. The old cliché in the US was that 'no brand manager ever got fired for doing a 30 second spot’, and that was the case........ until about five years ago. Suddenly marketers started to be judged on how well they were using digital channels, and the less adept marketing managers did suddenly start getting fired for just doing 30 second spots. The risk had flipped, and they could no longer afford to risk not experimenting and innovating.
In the US and Europe, the cannier clients spotted early, before the risk flipped that 'digital' was a quick and sure fire way to become famous within their organisation. Many a marketer's career received a welcome boost by becoming known as the 'digital guy' - the person in the organisation who had latched on to digital, making it their pet project and being seen as the innovator, the change agent.
We are starting to see the first signs of this happening in this market. Clients are starting to be tasked on increasing their focus on digital and are now striving to hit digital based KPIs, and once something appears in KPIs, they generally gather in pace. It seems that in Singapore as has happened in other markets, the risk is starting to flip.
There are also those clients in Singapore who are now embracing digital and seeing it as their way of becoming famous, of progressing their careers.

2) The second major catalyst I see is somewhat further in the future, and when we get there, we truly will be a long way from spending 2% of our budgets online. That point is when nobody sees digital as digital anymore. When usage of digital tools becomes absolutely ubiquitous and advertisers and users alike don't even consider the internet and mobile to be any different to TV, radio or newspapers, just different channels. Once we get to this point we will be in a position where digital communication will be seen as equal.

The term 'post digital age' has bubbled up recently, and at first listen, it’s confusing - are we suddenly going to reject our new tech toys that we have come to rely on? But what the term actually refers to is a time when we don't see things like the internet and TV on our mobiles as technology anymore, but just regular things that we use every day.

Clay Shirky puts this point far more eloquently in his recent TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html ). To him, innovation will really start to happen when people start taking the shiny new toys for granted


On a similar note, it's interesting to see kids’ reactions when you talk to them about 'technology'. One recent study by MSN looking into how kids use technology encountered nothing but blank looks when researchers asked them about how they used technology. As far as they were concerened video games, Instant Messenger and the internet wasn’t technology, it was just “stuff”.

As Douglas Adams put it, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

As we all get more and more used to these new ‘technologies’ we will naturally become more comfortable with them and identify how as marketers we can utilise them.


3) But possibly the most important step for us (especially digital people in the industry) to start making significant inroads into digital getting it's deserved share of the pie lies in the langauge we use to get to that point. Much of the discussion so far has been in terms of how to divert budget to digital from other less effective media in terms of consumer engagement or measurement. The language has tended to be relatively aggressive and to an extent has created a them and us situation where the discussion has come from the angle of how much of other media's current share digital should rightly get. Whilst an increase in digital spend will inevitably come at the expense of other traditional media, the drawing up of battle grounds by the digital industry against other media does us a disservice. Yes, it is a more accountable, and when done well more engaging, but this adversarial pitting of one media against the other does nothing to help the cause. Once those involved in digital start talking about what digital can add to existing campaigns, and once we start focusing on how campaigns which utilise more than one media are stronger and more effective, we will see progress. At the moment, it's a very rare brief that can be answered by using digital in isolation, but it does have a role in most campaigns. It's a subtle difference, but I suspect that when we start talking about how digital can strengthen campaigns and add to other media, enabling them to work much harder, rather than plotting to see whether we are going to take TV's money or print's money, we may see that traditional clients relax a little and we may see quicker progress.

4. One area where agencies and media owners can certainly take a fair share of the blame is in creativity. At the moment, the majority of briefs are responded to with a very media focused (for that read banner focused) approach. The reason for this is clear. It's the easy answer, and the answer that fits the way media agencies have traditionally made their money. For a media agency working on commission, a move to creativity, a move to a good strong idea usually means funds being diverted away from a media buy, and as a result, money moving away from the agency. To tackle this, we need help from our clients to recognise two things. The first, that the old media remuneration model of commission based payments doesn't necessarily work for digital and often offers disincentives to doing good work. Where is the incentive for example in a media agency recommending ideas in an area without media costs (social networks, virtual worlds etc.)? Thankfully, most clients already understand this and have been open to different payment models that appreciate that digital is different, and hopefully these changes should see a massive impact of levels of creativity coming from agencies.
The second area where we need help from clients is in the understanding that ideas can come from anywhere. Creative agencies do not have a monopoly on creative ideas, and as the boundaries between media and creative blur, especially in digital, it's important that clients allow (and insist on) a closer (and more equal) relationship between their media and creative agencies.

When these two things happen, the potential of idea centric responses to briefs rather than cookie cutter answers will increase massively, and as this happens the real potential for driving real engagement online will also increase massively. When this happens, budget holders will be falling over themselves to experiment and try new things in digital.



5. Finally, one thing that will also impact heavily on marketers willingness to invest in digital as a media will be a shift away from campaign based marketing. This will be a paradigm shift that will take some time happen. The existing fundamental thought around advertising is that it happens in nicely packaged boxes, known as campaigns that have a clear start date and a clear end date. It's an easy, clean concept to understand. However, in an on demand, always on world where consumers expect everything to be searchable, the concept of a time boxed campaign becomes less relevant.
Brands will increasingly have less choice about when they communicate with their consumers. It won't be enough for brands to decide which periods suit them to communicate with their consumers, and an always on presence will be a necessity. That presence won't necessarily always have to be a huge campaignable idea, but a brand will always need to have something that their customers can look for, find, play with and spend time with, and the obvious place for that to exist is online.
This is a paradigm shift and one that will not happen quickly, but when marketers move away from a campaign based way of thinking and come round to an always on model of marketing, with multiple modular activities that can de dialed up or switched off in real time depending on their real time results, digital will surely flourish and we will see the 4% and probably the 20% figure shattered.

I've picked 5 catalysts that I believe could be the major sparks to breathe life into the digital industry in this region, but I could have picked many more. I haven't touched on the increasing role of procurement departments and their desire to see a proven ROI - a proven ROI that digital can demonstrate. I haven't examined the role that a developing understanding of marketers in the region that digital is not just restricted to a conversion driving media, but can also be used to unlock emotional involvement with a brand, and I haven't considered the role that digital can play in acquiring immediate campaign and even product feedback, but all of these are elements that could play a major role in convincing marketers in our region that digital needs a bigger share.

It will happen, and when it happens it will happen quickly - much more quickly than any of us can reasonably expect now. That has been the experience around the world, and will be no different here. I'm confident that the figure of 19% that PWC predicts by 2013, (http://www.marketing-interactive.com/news/13477) will happen far quicker. 2011?