#BrandManagerMonth: Enter the digital future with Eight Thinking

Formerly MD at MECGroup as MD, Beale’s well known in the local marketing industry, given his award-filled marketing career history as integrated strategist with a strong creative focus. As a result, he’s often called on to judge the industry’s best work, and fast realised that there’s a fundamental gap in the market for true integrated strategic thinking that lives across paid, owned and earned media. Brands and agencies rigidly sticking to old ways and structures just don’t create that winning work. While our local work is internationally awarded, and the majority of the work is of a high standard, he feels many marketers or agencies have no idea what type of work is being presented internationally, so sometimes the level of work entered is just not good enough to get past round one.

“One of my biggest observations has been that locally we are still afraid to push the boundaries on innovation in marketing, such as first to market opportunities or technologies that brands would create themselves or build internationally. Locally we seem to wait for something to be done globally and then localise. I see a lot of localised international campaigns which for me, shouldn’t be happening,” he explains.

JT Beale

Luckily Eight Thinking, Beale’s new marketing consultancy, is poised to assist the industry in making the leap into the new marketing future. It’s a future where integration, marketing automation and digital will lead the conversation and brand stories that don’t permeates all channels will fizzle away without making the required impact.

Beale lets us in on how the business takes client and agency alike across the journey…

1. When and how did Eight Thinking consultancy get started?

Beale: I’d been pushed by my colleagues and friends for a few years to start my own business, but didn’t believe timing was right. After the last two years heading up MECGroup in Cape Town, I felt I’d garnered the learning I was missing, so started the consultancy in January of 2016.

I was originally trained as an integrated strategist, across digital and traditional with continued experience in this and then earned and owned media gave me a unique view that most strategists don’t get. After being on all sides, I believe that there’s a gap in the market for integrated strategic thinking that brings earned, owned and paid media thinking closer together, for truly integrated work.

2. Explain that gap in the market for true integrated strategic thinking cross paid, owned and earned media.

Beale: Currently, the agency and marketing environment is silo’d in the way paid, owned and earned is brought together. It’s no fault of one side, but legacy issues in marketing process and agencies.

The biggest gap is that the brief from client, if briefed at all, mostly still only touches on paid, with earned media, the PR or communications department, not being part of the process, digital department briefing digital agency separately, or having their own process to another separate agency. The overarching communication strategy rarely dives into all three from the start, and the way they can leverage off each other, and allow the consumer to have a seamless journey between touchpoints and content, without seeing disparate and different messages. This is where the gap is for integrated overarching strategy. It needs to give clear objectives for each paid, owned and earned, and show the relation of each tactic to each other, as a consumer does not engage with only digital, or traditional touchpoints. We’ve seen the importance of social media, or great sharable content and PR pieces, and how this can be exploded in reach with paid media, so we need to be more integrated in approaching it all together, not separate strategies for each.

3. What’s your prediction of the true impact of marketing automation and digital on the industry as a whole in ‘the new marketing future’?

Beale: I believe there’s going to be a huge shift in the marketers’ job scope, in the next few years. Gartner’s recent report showed that marketers are now proportioning 33% of their budgets to technology, and this goes to show that marketers will quickly have to come to grips with technologies that are going to allow more efficient communication, better targeting and segmented communication. The baseline of all of this is aggregated consumer data, and marketers will have to do a huge job in the next few years to shift thinking from just awareness base activity to gathering consumer data for more accurate long-term communication.

4. As March is #BrandManagerMonth on Bizcommunity, talk us through the brand management implications of the programmatic, automation and digital revolution.

Beale: Any brand manager worth their weight in gold needs a good understanding of digital marketing, so as not to leave it to the “digital guy” in the marketing department, if they truly want the best integrated work. Consumers spend more time on their mobile phones than any other media, so no marketer can continue to leave that to specialists. It’s part of everyone’s mix now, and in fact should be mobile first.

Programmatic and automation bring a scary thought to marketers, with the technology being able to adapt creative, targeting and segmenting on the fly, leaving less guess work but also interestingly less “strategic” approach. Brand managers will still need to do the rigorous work of positioning the brand, and what story they want to tell, programmatic only brings with it a way of buying and implementing the media that allows for defined audiences, with multiple messages and retargeting on a scale like never before.

The planning and trial and error for a marketer is essentially a thing of the past. The impact will be budgets shifting to the more addressable space, but marketers will quickly have to upskill themselves on understanding the tools, technology and process, so as not to leave it all “to agency”.

You’ve been warned! Find out more by visiting the Eight Thinking website, sending John an email or following Beale’s Twitter feed.