Digital vs. Analog Marketing

What changed when we went digital?

There have been at least two fundamental shifts in how we approach marketing in the digital era.

First, we've gone from addressable to guessable.   The concept of a persistent identifier that we could hang our programs on has evaporated in the digital age.   Gone is the physical address and phone number that formed the foundation of our knowing a consumer .  Now IP addresses and cookies form the 'bedrock' of digital knowledge where we often have to do a lot of inferring about an individual.  This means we need to think in terms of probabilities rather than absolutes.   It also may mean we should focus on the behavior itself and worry less about who is doing something. 

Second, we've gone from our media calendar to consumers' internal clocks.  The concept of a prescribed sequence of campaign steps within a defined calendar no longer applies when everything is interactive.  The notion of batches or drops needs to be augmented with support for pull and accessible content.  This means we need to think in terms of continuous exposure.  The implication of this is that we need to abandon the silos of channel and think about surrounding the consumer with interesting content to help her choose.