Major technological developments in digital advertising (2000s-today)
Following the invention of the personal computers (PC), the late 1990s saw a rise in mediums of communication.From search engines like Yahoo! and Google to digital marketplace Amazon, the marketing landscape experienced an abundance of mediums of expression(digitalmarketinginstitute.com). Email became a form of owned media marketing that allowed companies to reach large audiences in a short amount of time. This provided new opportunities for marketers to grow their business, in conjunction with the traditional forms of media: TV, radio and print advertising(digitalmarketinginstitute.com). Marketers now used search engine optimization(SEO) as a means of increasing the traffic a website experiences when appearing as a search engine result.
The Power of Social Media
The early 2000s brought about the social media revolution in marketing. Technology contributed to the vast expansion of the scope of advertising and allowed brands to sell their products on a grander scale, through online marketplaces (Amazon). Advertising, along with technology, has shaped consumer habits and created higher demands for companies with regards to their branding, which now need to be more striking and eye-catching than ever. Additionally, marketing has now made a significant shift to an online medium, making social media platforms an attractive choice for brands. Social media sites such as Facebook (2004), Twitter (2007) andInstagram (2010) paved the way for the increased personalization and accurate targeting of consumer segments (digitalmarketinginstitute.com). Marketers used big data from these social media sites to track consumer buying habits and account for the traffic on their websites. Companies like Oracle and Optimove have emerged in light of the boom in data-driven analytics. They help brands decode consumer data, design unique cross-channel customer targeting, measure the impact of advertising campaigns and use artificial intelligence to continuously optimize their marketing strategy (https://www.optimove.com/).
What is Digital Disturbance and why is it important?
Arguably the most important concept in the conversation of digital marketing is digital disturbance. The term is an all-encompassing notion illustrating the emergence of digital technologies in modern-day business, in any and all industries. It can most accurately be synthesized as “an effect that changes the fundamental expectations and behaviors in a culture, market, industry or process that is caused by, or expressed through, digital capabilities, channels or assets” (Gartner.com). It is most often confused with the concept of disruptive technology, which is defined as a new technology that replaces a currently existing one, and“alters the landscape of an established market, significantly changing the way businesses have traditionally operated” (Deloitte.com). Digital disturbance, on the other hand, “occurs when your company innovates with technology in order to better serve customers” (Forbes.com).
This process is of significance as it affects the value proposition of a given brand’s products and services and provides a competitive edge over companies offering similar products. To put it simply, it results in competitors utilizing technology at a faster and more efficient rate, as well as offering more attractive solutions to consumer problems, and thus gaining a higher number of sales. The technologies in question are everything from big data, artificial intelligence, chatbots and machine learning.
Modern day examples of digital disturbance include Amazon replacing home and hardware giants such asSears, Uber now dominating the taxi-hailing industry, and online rental marketplace Airbnb now replacing the traditional hotel experience (Forbes.com). In short, digital disturbance leads to new business models coming into fruition at significantly lower costs, urging market forces to alter existing business models, thus providing consumers with even more options than they previously had. A Forbes article titled “TheDigital Imperative:Disrupt or be Disrupted” puts it best: “One company’s digital transformation is the competition’s digital disruption”.
It is important to note the importance of big data in the complexity of digital disturbance. An aid to digital marketing and technological development, big data was intended as a measure for collecting consumer analytics and providing a more unbiased analysis of potential target markets, as opposed to commonplace surveys or focus groups. It is this aim towards optimizing the consumer experience and providing goods and services on demand, that has furthered the need for seamless and accessible data.
Holger Hürtgen and Niko Mohr, McKinsey analysts, define data as “the new corporate asset class—and the best way for companies to generate and access it is to digitize everything they do” (Forbes.com). In addition, they further emphasize the distinction between the digitization of direct consumer interactions, as well as internal company strategies: “Digitizing customer interactions provides a wealth of information for marketing, sales, and product development, while digitizing internal processes generates data that can be used to optimize operations and improve productivity”(Forbes.com).