B2B Conversations: Happy Marketer, Part 7 – Digital

B2B Conversations continues with part seven of nine of B2Bento’s marathon interview with SEO & Social Media agency Happy Marketer.

Part Six covered what social and web analytics can and should be. What about digital marketing? Let’s look at what Prantik Mazumdar, Rachit Dayal, and David Liem have to say.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this interview are the personal views of the interviewees and and do not necessarily represent the philosophies or viewpoints of their organization or clients.

 (Anol Bhattacharya – AB, Prantik Mazumdar – PM, Rachit Dayal – RD, and David Liem – DL)

AB: This digital side, everything is measurable but as PM mentioned, in Singapore it’s less with only 6-7% of marketing budgets going to digital. The rest of the thing is offline – out of form, ATLs etc.

Now how do we measure? Where do we start to tally all these things? I’ve asked others and some silly answers like QR codes come up which everybody puts but nobody scans, but it has to be there.

RD: And RTB.

PM: You forgot big data. I still don’t know what does big data mean. What is small data? What is big data?

AB: I think the moment someone says big data I say you don’t have a big data problem you have a fragmented data problem.

PM: Structured, unstructured, I can still understand. What is big data?

AB: Big data means I don’t have any clue what I’m talking about. So that’s why I call it big data. So how? Where do we start to do that?

The problem is the moment we start pitching, the digital companies are pitching something – putting a landing page and measuring conversions every dollar and cent.

People start to count because it is something they can count, but they don’t take the same method to millions of dollars spent in TV ads. Millions of dollars spent in ATL. Why this step-child treatment?

PM: I honestly think the problem lies with us especially sales people like myself who sell digital very cheaply.

It’s a dilemma because the positive is that digital is measurable and if I go and tell everyone that every dollar and cent can be accountable, what I’m actually doing in a way is I’m not showing the limitations and I’m selling digital as a very cheap media because as you said there is no way to find out how effective a TV or a print ad is.

I’ll give you a classic case. I went to a particular university where the gentleman who I was pitching to was a professor of marketing but unfortunately he had no idea of digital.

There was an Economist magazine in front of him so I asked him, sir, how much do you spend advertising on that. He said about half a million. I asked how many students they get out of that. He said, I don’t know but there is a spike. I said, good to know that and how much do you think you want to spend on digital.

On digital I think at best he had ten thousand in mind but the expectations were perhaps at par and this is from a professor. He wants a spike. A feel-good thing.

While digital is accountable and measurable I think we as digital marketers need to approach it very differently. I don’t think we should always go for the cost per lead, cost per acquisition because like I said digital has potential impacts way beyond sales and leads.

There is an element of brand awareness. There is an element of customer service. A lot of intangibles. I think that’s where the offline guys have made a killing. If you go and see an SPH guy selling an ad he has a fixed price – a fixed CPM price which you take it or leave it. So I honestly feel it has to start from us.

Where is the next generation of digital marketers going to come from? Hear us out on it in Part Eight.