For those of us in the technology world, digital is a technology concept – customer-driven technology to be sure, but still about the ones and zeroes in the end. Ask someone in the advertising industry about digital, however, and you’ll get a very different answer. It’s about the transformation of branding.
“Colors and the emotional aspect of what a brand represents – those days are gone,” says Eric Pilkington, Chief Digital Officer at McCann Health, a McCann Worldgroup agency, which is owned by advertising giant Interpublic Group. “It’s a different form of branding. It’s very experiential – building a series of experiences.”
Technology still plays a central role in the move to digital, of course, even for ad agencies. In fact, the digital road is one they’ve been down before, as the web forced agencies to reinvent their business models back in the 1990s. Now with the rise of mobile technologies, such reinvention is once again in the cards.
“Technology is extraordinarily disruptive,” admits Pilkington, who rode the dot.com wave at companies like WebMD. “But digital is not just the inclusion of mobile.”
To explain this more-than-mobile context for digital, Pilkington provides General Motors as an example. Over the last few years, Interpublic wrested partial control of the lucrative Chevrolet account from competitor Omnicom Group, with digital a key element to the new strategy.
“GM had to go through a total transformation,” Pilkington explains. “It was all digitally led – hundreds of web sites, programs, and data-centric customer modeling.”
Furthermore, this data-driven approach represented a marked difference from the traditional agency value proposition. “GM’s digital footprint is massive, including all sorts of transactions online,” Pilkington continues. “Well beyond the inferential and attitudinal modeling of the past. Now we can be predictive.”
In fact, the role data play in digital transformation is the cornerstone of Interpublic’s move to digital. The value to GM is profound. “The power of prediction: ability to build data and build models around that data,” Pilkington says. “How do you evoke relationships over time? Not just a car, but the right car? Data is the glue that allows us to do that.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/07/01/transforming-branding-digital-in-advertising/.
Eric Pilkington will be speaking on “The Internet of Things: The Opportunities and Challenges for Digital Strategy” at the Digital Strategy Innovation conference in Los Angeles, September 10 – 11.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: McCann Detroit.
