A silent war is rag­ing between old school and new school mar­keters.

Old school mar­keters are des­per­ate­ly try­ing to fit cur­rent mar­ket­ing chan­nels into old mod­els. Par­al­lel to this, the strong­hold of media bureau/planners is slow­ly fad­ing as they aren’t adapt­ing (as they should) and are still tak­ing cred­it for what isn’t theirs.

More impor­tant­ly, brands are increas­ing­ly start­ing to be dig­i­tal first.

It’s about time.

As new chan­nels devel­op and oth­ers fade out, how can brands move on and become dig­i­tal first? How can brands lever­age cre­ativ­i­ty in dig­i­tal cam­paigns?

Accord­ing to Bas van den Beld, founder of State of Dig­i­tal:

“Cre­ativ­i­ty is usu­al­ly put at the end of the cycle, but should be part of the cycle through­out. With­out cre­ativ­i­ty the con­nec­tion with the cus­tomer will be lost so a brand has to allo­cate time and mon­ey to the dig­i­tal cre­ative process from the begin­ning.”

Here’s what Alain Heureux, for­mer vice pres­i­dent of IAB Europe and CEO of Egg Brus­sels, said:

“Cre­ativ­i­ty make the dif­fer­ence in any cam­paign or com­mu­ni­ca­tion as it cre­ates emo­tions. Dig­i­tal offers not only the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate emo­tions but also engage­ment and inter­ac­tions start­ing the con­ver­sa­tion or the shar­ing…”

And here’s what Kas­par Szy­man­s­ki, for­mer Google spam team mem­ber and SEO con­sul­tant, said:

“Cre­ativ­i­ty is essen­tial to dif­fer­en­ti­ate and stand out in a com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment with decreas­ing entry bar­ri­ers and cog­ni­tive over­flow reduc­ing most brand­ing efforts to back­ground noise for the tar­get audi­ence. A bloat­ed bud­get will not replace cre­ativ­i­ty but cre­ativ­i­ty does not nec­es­sar­i­ly require one.”

We have long since reached the time where brands need to be dig­i­tal first. It isn’t about using Google or Face­book; it’s about under­stand­ing the inter­ac­tion between mul­ti­ple array of chan­nels and how they all inter­act and play a role in our mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion ecosys­tem.

Creativity & Digitalization Of Marketing

When it comes to cre­ativ­i­ty, beau­ty is in the eye of the behold­er.

• Is it cre­ative that Coca-Cola rebrand­ed their core prod­uct with people’s names and feel­ings?
• Is it cre­ative how the shoe man­u­fac­tur­er Geox has been able to make a seem­ing­ly uncool top­ic of shoes being water resis­tant actu­al­ly be cool?

Both cam­paigns are great. But while I might find these cre­ative, oth­ers might not.

Com­pe­ti­tion does­n’t just come from com­pet­ing brands. The biggest influ­encers and com­peti­tors for atten­tion are more like­ly to be the friends and fam­i­ly of our tar­get audi­ence. Under­stand­ing this is cru­cial.

To involve your audi­ence, you must always strive to under­stand: why would they share our sto­ries and be influ­enced to buy our prod­ucts?

Suc­cess isn’t sim­ply about plac­ing a glossy mes­sage in front of the tar­get audi­ence any­more. Instead, it’s more impor­tant to be a part of their dai­ly lives, help­ing them tru­ly under­stand the val­ue of your offer­ing.

Matt Neal, man­ag­ing direc­tor at the British B2B mar­ket­ing agency Gilroy, sums this up nice­ly:

“The dig­i­ti­za­tion of mar­ket­ing has changed the way busi­ness to busi­ness orga­ni­za­tions seek and close new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties, in turn chang­ing the rela­tion­ship between mar­ket­ing and sales, and ques­tion­ing the need for these func­tions as they cur­rent­ly exist. But rather than reduc­ing the need for these roles, in my view, dig­i­ti­za­tion cre­ates whole new oppor­tu­ni­ties for each to become more effec­tive, not less.”

This applies to B2B as well as B2C. And on top of this, dig­i­tal has giv­en new com­pa­nies the oppor­tu­ni­ty to enter mar­kets and take over.

It’s inter­est­ing to com­pare the life­cy­cle of For­tune 500 com­pa­nies and the fast mov­ing world of the Inter­net. The life­time of com­pa­nies on that list has gone from more than 75 years to less than 15 years – and that fig­ure is still declin­ing.

Why Creativity Is So Important

Why is the idea that sparks the con­ver­sa­tion more impor­tant now that it ever was?

Let’s take Steve Jobs as an exam­ple. The vision­ary CEO for one of the coolest brands in the world under­stood that if a sales­per­son is your CEO, then the mis­sion of the com­pa­ny becomes exact­ly that: sales.

To become great, com­pa­nies must do some­thing right. They are inno­v­a­tive and end up own­ing some field. Then the com­pa­ny becomes valu­able, that brings in the mon­ey – and when mon­ey takes over, the qual­i­ty of the prod­uct becomes less impor­tant. The sales­man becomes top dog in the val­ue chain and they are put in charge.

This leads to the demo­tion of the prod­uct engi­neers and the design­ers, mak­ing it so that they lose inter­est. Jobs gave IBM and Xerox as great sam­ples of com­pa­nies that fal­tered in this way and in his words:

“The sales­men who led the com­pa­nies were smart and elo­quent, ‘but they didn’t know any­thing about the prod­uct.’ In the end this can doom a great com­pa­ny, because what con­sumers want is good prod­ucts.”

The above assump­tion is sim­pli­fied, and more ele­ments come into play. But essen­tial­ly, great/innovative prod­ucts will pre­vail. Great prod­ucts come from cre­ativ­i­ty, and this ties direct­ly into the mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

The best part about Jobs’ asser­tion? He was able to prove it.

Jobs start­ed Apple and brought for­ward inno­va­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty. The com­pa­ny was tak­en over by investors who want­ed to milk it. He was pushed out and then called in again after a mas­sive decline.

Through rad­i­cal man­age­ment, he made Apple soar like nev­er before. He made sure that inno­va­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty were at the heart of every prod­uct launch.

Clear­ly, Jobs under­stood that there are two fun­da­men­tal changes hap­pen­ing in the world of mar­ket­ing. One is glob­al­iza­tion. The oth­er is that the pow­er between buy­ers and sell­ers has shift­ed mas­sive­ly short­en­ing the lifes­pan of com­pa­nies that are only in it to milk their cash cows.

So this all leads me to the ques­tion I asked my col­leagues.

How Can Brands Leverage Creativity With Digital Campaigns?

This is all impor­tant. It’s all about sto­ry­telling. We use a Con­tent Con­nec­tion Map­ping mod­el, which maps top­ics to the brand and the emotions/rational they pro­voke toward the brand/product by the con­sumer.

By doing this, they not only get the under­stand­ing of the sto­ries they can tell but they get and under­stand­ing of how to lever­age the mul­ti­ple chan­nels and, more impor­tant­ly, under­stand them.

Bloat­ed bud­get isn’t the answer in this chang­ing world. The answer is being clever about your approach, under­stand­ing the chan­nels, and lever­ag­ing them on the fly. Being always on!

For fur­ther inspi­ra­tion, check out the cre­ative approach­es Ikea and Geox took with their dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing.