Musings from GroupM: It's Time to Delete "Digital Consumer" Label - Sloan Broderick - MediaBizBloggers

As digital marketers we increasingly face a conundrum. The more we focus on mastering technology capabilities, the less we focus on consumer understanding. Both are critical for success.

Firstly, there is no such thing as a "digital consumer." Consumers do not define their lives, values, and behaviors by what communications channel they're engaged with at a particular moment. Marketers need to understand the full dimensions and context of a consumer's life, and only then can they link a brand offering to a consumer's wants and needs.

In order to achieve that end, marketers need to gain illuminating insights into their consumer. Not product facts or digital metrics overload—digital marketers have got the quantitative analytics covered in spades. What I'm talking about is a fundamental understanding of motivations and aspirations that give real meaning to the data through which we increasingly must sift. By doing so, we liberate agency solutions so that they are both relevant and effective.

Today, more than ever, the consumer is a device agnostic, multichannel overdosed, selfish, selfless, confused, laser focused, always on the go, fearful individual. We develop plans and deliver against the target in our daily vernacular of CPMs, CPAs, etc. But does buying on an exchange, driving a social activation campaign, leveraging cookie data, working site path data, etc., really work if you've missed the key insight about the consumer?

They path to winning consumers' trust and confidence must start with deep insights about factors that give meaning to their lives. It's not enough to simply get your message in front of consumers. If you lack critical insights about how to influence behavior change then nothing else matters. How many inputs can we effectively leverage before we hit analysis paralysis? Conversely, can we afford to not consider all the sources to get a great insight?

There are an abundance of tools we access today to target and understand the "who" and the "where." They include the following:

· Syndicated research
· Social, trends data (Twitter just launched location based trends)
· Primary / MediaCom's RealWorld Street**
· Media performance data
· Gut marketing instinct

All of these are useful and can help us reach our goals of understanding the consumer. But ultimately we must build communications plans grounded in the real world and make sure our teams take the time to develop ideas based on the insight. We can't let calendars, budgets, and business cycles drive our agenda, and we also must ensure that our clients are on board with the insights process. The insight is the key, and the touch points that surround our consumer's day-to-day-life will drive activation—not the labels we readily assign to them.

** RealWorld Street™ is an innovative spin on qualitative research. It is a MediaCom proprietary panel of neighboring households in Collingswood, NJ, that allows our agency to uncover deeper insights about what consumers actually do in and around their homes versus what they say via on-going lines of qualitative inquiries with the same consumers over a period of time.

Sloan Broderick is Managing Partner and Managing Director for MediaCom Interaction

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