Text by Pyr Marcondes, Senior Partner at Pipeline Capital.
Many market players expose the understanding that face-to-face and digital are correlated and integrated, there are few who master this uniqueness.
The previous edition of the Meio & Mensagem newspaper makes it clear that next year we will see the return of live events in style and the activation of brands in the face-to-face world should explode. It’s about time.
This phenomenon, however, is a piece (important, but still a piece) of the whole. Live events end. But integration with the digital world can make them eternal, recurrently feeding back into the relationship chain between brands and their audiences.
I’m certainly not the first to say this. However, excellence in this integration has yet to be achieved in Brazil.
There are undoubtedly always exceptions, where filmmakers, brand managers and their agencies break through this barrier of stand alone silos of events and activations between the face-to-face and digital with high quality. But they are exceptions.
I will mention here some classic stumbles of this truncated relationship:
Data: There is no planning, no tools, no management of data capture and integration between physical and virtual. The consumer who goes to an event or a store is still different from that same digital consumer, because brands do not know that the two are one. That is, the same.
Above and Bellow: Incredible, but the outdated and unproductive division between budgets and strategic management of above and below the line still persists in agencies and advertisers. For the love.
Technology: There are a number of platforms and technological resources available to the market that promote this type of crossover, but they are, for the most part, either unknown or neglected by both agencies and advertisers.
Mobile: There is incredibly persistent market blindness to the obvious and highly relevant role of mobile in this integration.
In discourse, many market players conceptually and publicly expose the understanding that these worlds are correlated and integrated, but, in reality, there are few who dominate with excellence — decades after this connection is digitally and technologically possible — this uniqueness, which seems to often more an ambiguity.
If we extend this value chain to the last mile of conversion and final sales, then it gets even more surprising. There are a lot of control gaps in the middle of the journey and attribution models, long known to everyone, just don’t really work.
And why is this?
Some assumptions of mine, the 7 deadly sins:
- Agencies and Advertisers still have a bit of innate laziness (lack of courage?) in researching in depth the technological solutions of this integrated chain;
- Both have fragile and disintegrated databases of the consumer’s various touchpoints with the brand;
- There is a dominant outdated concept, practices and techniques that provide this interconnection;
- The quarter’s desperation still gets in the way, because integrated actions are more complex and often have medium-term results;
- Ever tighter budgets make out-of-the-box (and cash) investments difficult;
- The management of companies in our industry is still going through a time of low integration of the different operational areas and the effective and deep digital transformation of companies is a homework to be done;
- Culture for innovation is still very low in the Brazilian marketing and communication market.
There must be other sins, I don’t know. Those I mentioned are historical and structural. In my opinion, the most important. And the hardest to solve.
If I can help support that need and challenge, here are my two cents:
Communities: Before being virtual or physical, strategies are initiated and planned in advance, understanding as a premise that these are instances of contact, platforms and channels, but that people are a priority and that it is with them that brands need, more than ever , build communities. Even more so in a data compliance environment, where only first party customers can talk to people (in a legal and non-invasive way) digitally. And live, well, live, if you restrict yourself to one-off actions, you’ve lost. Missed the opportunity to add continuous fans to your brand. From planting the foundations to establishing its community, which will perpetuate itself in time, unique and only with the recurring interaction of the virtual and the real.
Trio de Ouro: Technology, data and mobile are the inevitable and necessary tripod to build bridges between these worlds, which are becoming more and more one. Anyone who doesn’t understand this once and for all and doesn’t master it from now on will be left behind.
Go Brazil. Not only in the Cup, but in overcoming himself, in an inertia that at least a decade ago should have become history.
Text originally published by Meio&Mensagem.
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