I got a present from my friend Timo Kiuru The Unthinkable Finn. It was the title of a book he thought I should write:

“Everything you know about story telling is wrong”

Well, thank you! That will not annoy anyone at all! After some initial hormonal spikes produced by my Swedish genes (or social upbringing depending on school of thought) I re-remembered that provocation isn’t necessarily bad, it can be a great way to make people stop and think, and to make them express their opinions. Which is exactly what I hope to achieve by my writing!

So I decided to up the ante and fry a bigger fish: Digital Marketing!

Bon appétit!

What is Digital?

Digital is one of those words that everyone has their own interpretation of. Some associate it with pre-rolls on YouTube, other with social media, yet others with some e-commerce application, nothing wrong with any of that.

I’d like to widen the definition a bit, or actually quite a lot. Digital is everything that isn’t physical. Your physical world right now might be the chair you are sitting in, the clothes you are wearing, the dog barking outside, the computer or mobile on which you are reading this article.

But the words you are reading are digital, the story I am telling is digital. If you are not just staring at the screen but actually paying attention to what you read, then you are having a digital experience right now.

We spend more than half our time awake in front of a screen, i.e. in the digital world, and the physical world continues to lose more and more of its audience. Maybe going Amish will be a thing in the future but it has still to enter Gartner’s Hype Cycle.

To conclude, almost everything is Digital, which means that almost all Marketing is Digital Marketing!

Blowing up Marketing #73

Apparently the definition of Marketing is equally hard to agree on. I just read 72 definitions of marketing, all different and not a single one a perfect fit.

So here is #73:

Marketing is the process of bringing a product or service to the market.

Bringing a product or service to the market is not something you do once and then you’re done, it is an ongoing process. The tools are the whole range of standard marketing activities, e.g. advertising, content / social / influencer / you-name-it marketing, marketing research etc.

This definition also allows me to squeeze in some non traditional parts of the process. We’ll come to that.

The current state of Digital Marketing

Digital has been all about content the last couple of years, and social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube has practically replaced the Web. I have covered this in an earlier article.