Fresh from the deeply technical O’Reilly Velocity conference, I decided to tackle digital transformation from the opposite end of the spectrum at last week’s Innovation Enterprise’s Digital Strategy Innovation conference in San Francisco. This digital marketing confab featured a remarkably diverse slate of digital cognoscenti from CNN (division of Time Warner TWX), U-Haul, Phillips Auction House, American Eagle Outfitters AEO, and more – only to be topped by the all-star attendee list, which included senior digital marketing executives from AT&T T, 3M MMM, Genentech (division of Roche), Avery Dennison AVY, MassMutual and several others.
These digital marketers – both speakers and attendees – are largely still struggling to put the customer in the center of their efforts, now twenty years since they first moved onto the Web. As I had a front row seat for the first Web wave, at a hot Web shop in 1995, then at an ad agency and dot.com consulting firms, I went into the conference wondering why the 2014 digital marketing challenge was so difficult. After all, hadn’t everybody figured this stuff out when they moved to the Web the first time around? The answer: it’s not the changes to marketing or technology that have raised the bar on digital transformation. The dramatic change in customer behavior and buying preferences are driving this revolution.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2014/09/30/omnichannel-more-than-a-digital-transformation-buzzword/.
