Has digital marketing gone astray?
The internet has been a gift for brands. Not only has it created more ways than ever before to connect with people and sell them things, it’s delivered a firehose of data to marketers.
What emerged from that was the framework for how you build and grow a brand online: show up at the top of Google Search; bid on the right keywords; send lots of newsletters; discount liberally; aim for the click; optimise towards that; optimise more. And all the while you could point back to all that beautiful data as justification for it working perfectly.
But does it? According to Charlie Oscar – who describe themselves as a marketing science-powered digital agency – the answer is mostly no. And, by the way, we’ve been measuring the wrong data the whole time anyway.
THE CLICK IS SEDUCTIVE
That satisfying clunk of a finger on a mouse or trackpad has come to symbolise a lot for brands. Perhaps that’s because it’s such a neat and tidy metric: person clicks, person buys (or likes, or follows). In truth, says Charlie Oscar, it’s the wrong way to think about brand building.
“Being able to measure clicks is probably the biggest negative thing that’s ever happened to digital marketing,” says Dan Wilson, Chief Data Officer at Charlie Oscar. “In 20 years in this industry, I’ve not met anyone who thinks last click measurement is good and yet 99% of them use it. I’ve never met anyone who would happily stand up and defend it.”
Back when TV was the big brand builder, there was no such rigorous measurement. You’d send your advert into the cultural ether, and have faith that it would do its job. But when the internet came along, we held marketing to a much higher standard.
“Being able to measure clicks is probably the biggest negative thing that’s ever happened to digital marketing.”
Dan Wilson — Chief Data Officer, Charlie Oscar
“The interaction became the big thing,” says Will Frappell, Chief Growth Officer at Charlie Oscar. “But if you’re just measuring the click, you’re basically optimising for people who are more likely to click. You’re optimising towards the action rather than the actual impact of what the ad’s doing. Engagement is not a good indicator of performance.”
DATA CAN LEAD BRANDS ASTRAY
The irony is that digital marketing was meant to fix the ‘problem’ of measuring creative work. It would let us track, to the very pixel, which ad or piece of messaging was landing, and then hone in on that. Creative work would be better and more effective, outcomes would be more impressive and brands could be more confident about the money they spent on agencies.
In reality, the data is only a tiny fraction of the story – and often, say Charlie Oscar, not a very accurate one at that. They believe brands have spent years using misleading, short-term data to draw the wrong conclusions about brand building and advertising.
According to them, engagement metrics don’t necessarily improve creative work and can actively damage marketing efforts. It’s why people’s inboxes are inundated with emails that are little more than vehicles for flashing 20% off sales banners. People might be clicking on them, says Dan, but what does it do for your brand in the long term?
“You actually have to have an understanding of what you’re trying to say to people,” he explains. “You see so many businesses that become overly reliant on sales, because the only interesting thing about them starts to be 20% off. All you’ve actually done is taken 20% off your margin for someone who was about to pay full price tomorrow. It’s a hard way to scale a business.”
SOME LOVE FOR THE LURKERS
It also ignores a huge, underlying truth of the internet: it’s full of lurkers. People see things, admire them, file them away in their brain and don’t think about them again until weeks, months or years later – when that tiny creative nudge clicks on in their brain and they think, yes, that’s the brand for me. They might never have clicked or liked or followed, but whatever they saw or experienced had a tiny but important impact.
“Even if you look at influencers – one of the most modern channels going – 80% of the value is driven the same way that TV has always driven value,” says Dan. “People see this stuff, don’t click on it, don’t engage with it, but it makes some sort of impact on them, and they act differently in the future because of it.
“Do you think the Kardashians care how many people click on their ads? Of course they don’t. They know if they get their brand image in front of enough people it will grow.”
ALL CHANNELS ARE ADVERTISING CHANNELS
The mistake, according to Charlie Oscar, is treating ’brand’ channels and ‘performance’ channels as totally different beasts. In reality, everything is brand, and everything is performance – or it should be.
And it’s notable how many DTC brands that grew enormously with the help of pure performance marketing are now putting money into traditional creative formats and efforts such as TV, out of home events and sponsorships. Why? Because all those ‘old’ creative ways with their big ideas and clever copy and exceptional design still work.
Consumers don’t care if they come to your brand because they’ve seen an ad, or walked past a shop window, or scrolled past an influencer partnership. In fact, most of us probably can’t identify, precisely, what tips us towards buying something. Usually it’s an alchemical mix of influence, storytelling and comms that we’ve absorbed from a multitude of places, and which have been quietly and carefully shifting our preferences.
In that context, says Charlie Oscar, you can forget about whether someone is clicking on your paid search or following you on Instagram or responding to your over-eager discount emails. The one measure you need to care about is whether people are searching for you – and your brand specifically, rather than the category you inhabit. Are they looking for cheap flights to Rome and stumbling on you, or are they looking for your business specifically?
Having spent years sifting through data in the digital and performance marketing trenches, Charlie Oscar have come to a simple conclusion: creativity really and truly is the thing that makes that happen.
THE OLD WAYS WORK
“Digital spent 10 years trying to bleed the creativity out of marketing,” says Dan. “But if you go and look at what really makes an incremental difference, it’s the stuff everyone’s always known – it’s the creative stuff. It’s the bits that go out there and take risks.
“That doesn’t mean the more creative you are the better it’ll work, but it means if you want to make real measurable difference, you have to have a bit of creative license.”
Data shouldn’t wag its finger at you and say: don’t do that, it doesn’t work. We shouldn’t be in a situation where creative people are scared that data will say their work doesn’t work, or where data people assume they have all the answers. Creativity works not because of data analysis; it works because people understand people. The downside is that it requires brands to have some faith, and take a risk – and to understand that there’s a difference between a bad outcome and a bad bet.
“Marketers should take lots of bets and accept that not all of them will have good outcomes,” he says. “But if you have a good grip on data and creativity, you’ll take a lot of good bets. And if you take enough good bets over a long enough period of time, you tend to win.”
