Carolyn Bendall, ANZ’s head of marketing Australia division has said marketing (especially the online one) is now more science than art in the more digitalised world.
Bendall stated in a conference that the shift from traditional to digital has led to a quick change in how and where money is spent, revealing how the bank will spend three times more on paid search marketing this year than it did in 2014. She also added that the rise of content (and content marketing) was “rapidly replacing” much of the traditional role above and below the line advertising. Every brand is “facing the real challenge” of how to create engaging and shareable content.
Moreover, she said the change is “having implications of how we allocate our budgets, the skills we are hiring, agencies we are engaging and the tools and platforms we need to build”. The marketing professions was now more concerned with science than art.
“I am applying social and behavioural science, analytics and data driven marketing every day,” she said. “We have jobs in our team and skills we have hired for that didn’t exist even a couple of years ago. My head of analytical marketing has a PhD in neuro science.”
She added that share of voice was now virtually meaningless as she urged chief marketing officers to create their own disruption:
“Share of voice is no longer meaningful and CMOs need to be prepared to disrupt their own businesses and their own business models,” she said. “Today’s marketing discipline is far more science than art and it is here to stay.”
Although she has firmly stated that today’s marketing is less artsy, Bendall acknowledged there was more to modern marketing than digital, including the identification out of home and sponsorship as areas that provide “brand experiences that digital incapable to do”.