I attended the Digital Media 3.0 Event on Monday put on by Millennial Branding (disclaimer, I intern for them!) which included a panel of local industry professionals talking about the future of advertising, social media, and mobile marketing. Millennial Branding was founded by Dan Schawbel, a personal branding export, and holds events around Boston to help area professionals learn about different topics and network with like-minded people. The panel featured Larry Weber, author of Marketing for the Social web and chairman of W2 Group, Perry Hewitt, Director of Digital Communications and Communications Services at Harvard, Mike Proulx, leader of Hill Holliday’s Digital Strategy & Stephanie Miller, Director of Sales and Development for Triad Retail Media managing the CVS Online account.
The over-arching theme of the event focused on how digital media might as well just be referred to as media now, because there is no differentiation between the different mediums companies use to market to people. Instead of creating ideas for different silos of the marketing plan (print, digital, online, etc.) the over-arching theme of an idea will be used for each part. The medium in which the marketing happens may change, for example a transfer of people from print ads to computers and again to smartphones or tablets, but the concept and marketing idea will stay the same throughout the campaign.
The panelists had great comments about the future of digital media:
– Because we suffer from information overload, the future may consist of services that find what is important to the individual. With this, Perry Hewitt, from Harvard, explained how they at Harvard are trying to understand how to filter what content they disseminate to their followers. They want to be relevant and timely, because people are overwhelmed with information and find Harvard to be a reliable source.
– As many people are aware, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Because of this, video is extremely important to distribute as content so that your product, service, story or marketing concept can be seen through video as well.
– Personalization and locality will be increasingly in importance. As with information overload, people can’t be bothered with events/services not in their location or area, so they don’t want to be bothered with them. Google Ads and Facebook are starting to see this importance, and the world will continue working this way.
One of the best quotes from the evening came from Larry Weber, where he told a story of when he was speaking with his 21-year-old daughter on the phone, he said he was going online after dinner. She starts laughing at him, and he asks why. Her response, “We don’t use the word ‘online’- we just ARE.”