A recent report from global research firm Forrester – predicting that ‘digital marketing’ will lose its prefix and become just ‘marketing’ in 2013 – has sparked a debate between marketers who agree with the forecast and those who believe digital should continue being treated as a separate discipline. In an effort to put this dispute to bed, here’s my response to the prediction.

Integrated marketing has been around for a long time. The strongest integrated agencies added a strong digital offering a long time ago and truly integrated creative thinkers don’t think about channels at the conceptual stage. Read More »

Social media is gently intruding further and further in to our lives. It’s starting to get unified with the desktop (look at the native Facebook facilities on Apple’s Mountain Lion OS and Windows 8′s ever-changing social tiles), and it is a constant presence in the physical world around us (how many QR codes can you spot in the next hour? And how many invitations to ‘like’ or ‘follow’ a company through a litany of social media outlets?). Read More »

Lionel Barber, the editor of The Financial Times, has unveiled the paper’s digital first strategy, which will cut 35 jobs and relegate newspapers to second place, as speculation about a sale of the Financial Times continues to circulate. Barber said the changes were needed to secure the paper’s future as “old titles” like the FT were being “routinely disrupted by new entrants such as Google, LinkedIn and Twitter”. Read More »

I keep reading that if media owners put their content behind paywalls, then advertising revenues will suffer. The theory, I guess, is that fewer people will access the content, and so the value to the advertiser will decrease.  But people have always paid for good content, and advertisers have always targeted subscribers, whether that content is a game, news, or a glossy magazine. What they pay to access it on, is – or should be – irrelevant. An active, engaged subscriber is surely worth more to an advertiser than an anonymous ‘eyeball’.  Read More »