So this was fun. I saw a link posted to this today, and admittedly I’m not a big Gartner guy, but it certainly piqued my interest. If you haven’t seen it before, Gartner has a series of different industries for which it creates what it calls a “hype cycle”.
Seeing as the world of digital marketing is a lot of show with a questionable amount of “go”, the cynic in me said, “hey a big company calling out over-hyped digital advertising techniques?” Sign. Me. Up.
And then I read it. Holy Crap.
Here’s the graph.
First of all, check out the grand insight here. There are 35+ different digital marketing strategies, tactics and other elements listed and every one of them is on a pathway to the “plateau of productivity”. I’m happy to see they acknowledge that when these elements come out there is a phase of inflated expectations, but as graphed, it assumes that every one of these elements will produce results eventually. Not one of them received the “obsolete before plateau” designation. That’s insane.
Lets take “Native Marketing”. For the uninitiated, these are those fake articles that appear next to real articles on news sites and other content shops. Most people can see these a mile away and they generally feature crap advertising, lousy stock photography, and a “gotcha” type headline. This is a pretty lousy marketing tactic but one Gartner believes in less than two years, it will achieve the plateau of productivity.
Now, Gartner could defend this by saying that they are merely attaching marketer expectations to these tactics, but there is one crucial sentence in the article that undermines that. They state:
“Marketers can use this year’s hype cycle for digital marketing and advertising to prioritize technology investments.”
Therefore, by their writing they are implicitly saying that those things that make it to the plateau of productivity are things in which you should invest. And again, they estimate that every one of the tactics they identify will reach a productive level.
Nonsense.
Finally, and this one is the best, it appears they have coined a new term and strategy for marketers – Personification. Their definition:
“Personification enables marketers to deliver targeted digital experiences to individuals based on their inferred membership in a characteristic customer segment rather than on their personal identity.”
They claim that this is steadily rising on the Innovation Trigger phase.
Um, does anyone notice anything about this definition? Maybe it’s just me, but this sure as heck sounds like what has been called “traditional (dinosaur!) marketing” all these years. Doesn’t every single marketer try to deliver targeted experiences and/or content to individuals based on their inferred membership in a segment? But go ahead and attach a new name to it, wrap it in the warm blanket of digital, and you’ve got yourself a breakthrough new marketing strategy.
So there you have it folks. Gartner’s in depth insights on Digital Marketing and Advertising this year. Sheesh!
themarketingdinosaur.com 