How brands need to adopt & leverage technology marketing?

This week there was an interesting debate around P&G CEO - Bob McDonald's comment. He had mentioned that:

“In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions.”

The word  "free" had raised a lot of eyebrows and threatened many on the future of advertising & marketing services business models. He was almost  saying that digital is the new mass market and that P&G does not have to pay big bucks to catch the attention  & mindspace of  such consumers, which they normally end-up spending for their brands offline. 

While I agree with him - some platforms will have to be leveraged where millions of consumers are already there in the digital market place, other marketing technologies need to be identified, invested and nurtured very carefully as most of these will increasingly become fragmented as more disruptive marketing technologies emerge in the years to come.

In fact I hold a contrarian view  that everything will not be free but I see technology marketing creating a new model of marketing spending - micro investing & budgeting - A lot of small budgets will have to apportioned intelligently across mutiple-technologies which can help marketing meet its brand objectives! Instead of a bazooka approach, it will be a stealth-gun method.

As I see the future, many new technologies will keep coming-up and world of technology marketing is going to see many disruptive innovations - by way of customer engagment technologies, customer experience platforms, payment technologies, BIG data & Analytics etc.. Today, it might be the facebook, google+ , twitter etc. and tomorrow it might be Pintrest, Instagram, some kind of a 3D software game etc.

The question really is how should brands decide which of these technologies do they need to invest and grow their marketing spends on? When we interact with many companies & their marketing departments, we do find them adopting marketing technology basis "flavour-of-the-season" approach.

1. Many a times, there is a need to adopt more depth to their thinking on how these technologies can leverage their current marketing strategies
2. Also, they need to evaluate and prioritize them from a host of options available to them but need to see which ones amongst them has a best-fit match to their marketing objectives.
3. They must refrain from having a herd mentality basis the buzz some of these technology marketing platforms create and start to adopt them without any framework or approach
4. Given they have limited resources and time to invest, it is important to debate & agree with all their marketing partners - both internal & external on how it will help achieve brand KPIs
5. Also, CIO & CMO will have to start working very closely as many of these technologies will link many of the company's internal departments like never before.

It was interesting to read Brian Solis  blog about the same topic and he had an interesting infographic which many of the CMOs can adopt as they evaluate and adopt many of these disruptive technologies for marketing:

It is important for CMOs to invest and back the right marketing technologies. They must carefully evaluate & measure the brand-fit & marketing objectives against each of them.