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What should I be thinking of going into 2020?

There is a common perception that this is the hardest period to be in marketing. As the digital marketing platforms change and make our lives as marketers harder, as consumers become more cynical and hard to read and reach, it seems as if we’re being squeezed on all sides.

It might say more about me than it does about marketing, but I believe that every era of marketing presented its own challenges and opportunities. It is up to us to make the best of them.

The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of advertising (as opposed to marketing). The age where an ad agency could win a major account based on a tag line. We refer to this in all our proposals, because it is an image of advertising that most people still cling to. Agencies tend to be chosen at pitch stage (or given awards) based on a creative idea, but nowadays we’re judged on performance that’s measured in a very different way.

What made the golden age of advertising so good was that it was a period where big-ticket creative ideas were rewarded. Creatives dared more and companies let them roll with ideas for longer, because it took time to measure the results. The great campaigns of the time even defined a generation. This was the era that gave us the Malboro Man, the Volkswagen Lemon, and deBeers’ Diamonds are Forever. Campaigns that changed how people think.

Instead of tackling a single issue, in this article I’ve decided to look at some of the major shifts we’re seeing on a macro level. Shifts that will define how we should set ourselves up in 2020 in preparation for the next decade or so.

The role of the CMO

The role of marketing has become so varied and important that the traditional role of CMO is currently held by the CEO, and the CEO’s role is to bring a set of C-level executives that specialise in areas like brand, customer journey, growth and data together to deliver results that a traditional CMO couldn’t offer.

To go back to the Mad Men analogy, the CMO role will eventually go the same way as the lift guy in Mad Men. Everyone presses their own button in the lift now. Just like every member of the organisation is responsible for marketing in one way or another.

From where I’m sitting, and please keep in mind that my exposure to leadership of global organisations is limited to what I read, I think that global organisations will increasingly move towards models that promote specialisation in specific areas of marketing, so we’re getting more marketing people at C-level, not less, but they have more specific titles nowadays.

“GDPR, privacy - I’ve had enough!”

My first experience in digital marketing was in a company that was obsessed with the rules. We were super careful about our reputation with each person we contacted. I carried this over to Switch and I’ve always told our marketers to remember that we’re humans, and we’re talking to humans. As long as we market to people in a way that we would want our own data to be treated, then we should be safe.

In the short term, these new rules and regulations (and the restrictions on tools) are a pain for everyone, even if you were marketing ethically, however as time goes by it will help separate the wheat from the chaff. The regulations will help marketers who are building deep connections with their audiences to stand out from the ones who were trying to take shortcuts.

As marketers, we should take it upon ourselves to balance out the long-term good of whoever’s paying us to do our job and the well-being of the people we’re marketing to. If checks and balances on our industry make it harder for people to run smash-and-grab operations, then I’m willing to pay the price of inconvenience for it.

And what about consumers? What about their privacy?

Privacy seems to be the hot topic of the last half of this decade, and overall I think that consumers have much more protection than they’ve ever had before. My doubt, however, is whether most people care.

We tend to live in an echo-chamber (I know I do, at least) of people who care about the environment, people who care about their privacy, people who care about other humans - and yet the world is showing us that most people are OK with not doing making changes to protect the environment, to protect their privacy or to not vote for the Far Right.

People are happy with being a product if they’re getting something valuable in return, and my guess is that the privacy breaches need to be far more intrusive for them to see consumers moving away from tools they’ve learned to love.

Spam and privacy issues will continue so long as there are people who are willing to profit off them, but now spammers’ lives are made harder with increased regulation and harsher penalties.

IT’S TIME TO DUST THE RECIPE BOOKS AND LEARN HOW TO COOK AGAIN - AND THE NEXT FIVE YEARS WILL SEE A SLEW OF NEW RECIPES WITH FLAVOURS WE’VE NEVER IMAGINED BEFORE

The next 5 years

I’m strongly of the opinion that, despite all we’ve said till now, or maybe thanks to all we’ve said till now, 2020 is the best time to be a marketer. The next five years are going to see changes that will make us wonder what marketing looked like in 2019.

Just like we look back five years and the marketing profession was being decimated by Facebook. Everyone thought that being a marketer was just as easy as being able to post on Facebook. Businesses were convinced that all their marketing costs would vanish because the cost of physical media was going to vanish.

Now we’re in a world where the dominance of Facebook (the platform, not the company) is diminishing. People are spending more and more time on channels that we can’t monitor yet. They’re more likely to share stuff that excites them on the “dark” web: Whatsapp, Facebook Chat, Instagram chat, Snapchat etc. These are all encrypted from peer to peer, so we have no visibility into the content that’s being shared (and we’re OK with it), so we’re going to have to find new ways of monitoring how effective our content is.

As the reactions to our content go dark, so does the ability to listen, to gauge the engagement and to simply post your next offer on your Facebook page and press “Boost”. No more frozen lasagna. It’s time to dust the recipe books and learn how to cook again - and the next five years will see a slew of new recipes with flavours we’ve never imagined before.