UM: The Digital Brain Drain - David Cohen - MediaBizBloggers

This will not simply be a post of how difficult it is to recruit and develop top tier digital talent. We know this to be true – and many have written on the subject before.

Rather, I wanted to talk about what we can do about it, and how we need to be thinking about developing talent during the analog todigital migration that we are all living through.

It is worth stating for the record that there is no doubt that we live in a world of grey. It's messy, dynamic, and exciting. The lines of demarcation between digital and analog are rapidly eroding, planners are becoming buyers, media companies are becoming agencies and agencies are becoming ad networks.

Craziness.

Over the past year, we have been fortunate to win several pieces of business. Naturally, these wins necessitated the need for staffing up our digital team. Make no mistake – digital recruiting is not for the faint of heart. A healthy dose of humor is required. The terms "entitled, bold, audacious and aggressive" come to mind. We have navigated the marketplace and have found many diamonds in the rough, but it is a very challenging recruiting environment. The depth of talent at the middle to senior level is very limited. There are a lot of the same folks circulating from one agency to another. We simply don't have enough practitioners in the market to handle the growth we are experiencing.

The industry has a number of efforts to bring fresh talent in. Job fairs, aggressive education, and recruiting on college campuses have been going on in earnest for the past few years. Hopefully the college graduates of today will be the digital marketing leadership of tomorrow, but what do we do to solve our talent shortage today? How do we cross-train our teams and ensure that all employees are conversant in digital technologies?

The answer is multi-dimensional. First and foremost, the solution requires a serious training effort which familiarizes all agencypersonnel to the basics of digital marketing – the nomenclature and basic principles. There will be some that will show an interest and aptitude for digital and those should be nurtured into specialists if so inclined. For us, the training includes both an e-learning component as well as in-person instruction. We just rolled out a whole new training effort this year, called "CuriosityU" – and we are really excited about it.

Secondly, a codified rotation program for junior and mid-level staff should be instituted so that employees can experience many different facets of the business and become better overall media practitioners. Finally, we are experimenting with "battle buddies" or mentors that can provide more personalized education and knowledge sharing on an ongoing basis.

From a structural standpoint there are many agencies that are trying to solve the digital brain drain through experimenting with new organizational structures. Some are eliminating digital specialists all together and others are combining their analog and digital teams into an overall client focused team. There is no simple answer and it is still early days to be able to determine what is the best practice is as we evolve into a more comprehensive digital ecosystem.

One thing however is certain. This is not the time to sit idly by. It requires effort, a plan, dedication and the determination to devote to this issue despite the daily tasks and initiatives that keep us all so busy.

What are you doing to solve the digital brain drain? How are you organizing yourself for success in the future? Let me know!

David is EVP, US Director of Digital Communications, David’s central goal is to spearhead UM’s digital and alternative media offering across the US and to accelerate, integrate and intensify a digital best practice throughout the UM universe. David can be reached at david_cohen@universalmccann.com.

Read all David's MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Curious Thoughts from Curious Minds - MediaBizBloggers.

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