By: Will Critchlow
The dominant form of brand marketing, however, has remained offline with TV taking the lion’s share of the budget and attention. We believe that as TV faces disruptive technology and business models, digital marketers have an opportunity to grow their influence and impact. In total, this is an opportunity worth tens of billions of dollars a year.
Building brands online first
We’re entering the age when the biggest brands in the world will be built online first. I hope to convince you of two things: first, that this change is happening right now. And second, that we are the people to win in this world.
Powerful content was becoming ever more effective. And yet the greatest examples of content that we were seeing at search conferences weren’t built by SEO agencies.
Brands were getting a bigger and bigger advantage in search. And yet the best brand builders weren’t SEO agencies.
For a long time, we’ve talked about how “SEO” isn’t a verb. You don’t “SEO a website.” Ranking well is an outcome, not an activity. It’s like fame. “Famous” isn’t a verb. You don’t “famous someone.” You get famous for doing other things (playing sport, performing music, appearing on TV). SEO is the same.
Online first
This whole phenomenon is “online first”: the biggest brands of tomorrow will be built online. This will be partly because the tools we have available to build brands online are going to get better and better, and partly because money is going to flow to digital from TV.
Our devices are also getting better and better. The cost of big screens is coming down; we now have full HD on our mobile devices.
How our industry competes
There are three broad areas that we all need to get great at to take advantage of this opportunity. Video fits into the first of these, which is technical creativity—that place where technology and storytelling meet:
1. Technical creativity
It is frustrated over the years by the creative storytellers who misunderstand (or don’t even care about) technology. The stupid apps that no one uses. The branded social networks that nobody joins. The above-the-line campaigns telling you to search for phrases they don’t rank for.
Old-school SEOs can spot crawl issues or indexing problems in their sleep. We’ve had to get good at things like analytics, UX, and conversion. Indeed, one of the most popular talks (and Slideshare of the day) was from Aaron Weyenberg at TED, and was all about UX. The things that stood out the most were all about the different ways they listened to their audience and gathered feedback at different stages of the process. This incorporated everything from the standard hall-way tests through qualitative and quantitative surveying to a really nicely-executed beta. You can see the full deck here:
