The Digital Channel is the Only Channel

In the agency/marketer ecosystem, we talk a lot about channels. Brands want to spread their communications and promotional efforts across the most strategic mix of channels to make sure their messages are dynamic, contextual and crafted to inspire specific action. The better you understand your brand and what you’re selling, the smarter you can be when deciding where to focus your efforts and your budget. Traditional advertising (tv, print, outdoor), content marketing, video, social media, email marketing, direct mail, events, sponsorships. This list goes on for days.

As our industry, and the planet, started reeling from COVID-19, our first fear was that client budgets would shut down entirely, and agencies would find themselves alone out in the desert. The belt-tightening did happen right away, and agencies have already had to respond proportionately with layoffs and aggressive cost-cutting. But the economy hasn’t actually stopped. It’s shifted. All of that work, meant for all of those channels, still needs to happen — but it’s clear that the ‘digital’ channel, and all of its digital tactics, are the clear path forward. The digital channel is now the only channel.

—

I remember a time, not long ago, when marketing efforts (and agencies) were either Traditional or Digital. The Digital evolution was wedging its way into a decades-old traditional media machine. CMOs thought about campaigns for print and broadcast, and then asked these newcomer ‘digital agencies’ to help figure out the corresponding online executions.

Over the last 10 years, those lines have blurred massively. Due to the relatively minuscule cost of entry into digital channels, most brands, and small brands especially, now start with digital, and then filter their digital ideas over to traditional channels like print or events when there’s a special occasion, and spare budget, to have impact.

Yes, really big companies with really big piles of cash put a lot of effort into all channels — but the Coronavirus has introduced the curvy-est curveball of our lifetimes. How do you engage with your customers when humans need to stay inside and away from each other?

Lots of channels have gone on ice. That forces marketers and agencies to flex their agility and adaptability, and it means we all need to get smarter about how we weather the storm.

Channels on ice

Which channels are on ice, or should be, considering the lock down?

Events
These were the first to go for us. For agencies, that means the promotional campaigns, the print collateral, the giveaways, the landing pages, the videos, the booth designs — everything that supports a brand’s presence at a conference or event gets shelved.

Retail
The entire retail sector is on a hard pause. Production timelines are longer for in-store design/campaign work, but this is now all back-burner at best. Branded experiences in retail environments have been shifting hard towards digital/mobile, but they’re still predominantly printed and analog.

Print
Advertising campaigns are inherently cross-channel, so the print advertising work may still be happening under a long term strategy, but media planners and buyers are facing a major unexpected disconnect between their projections and the current reality of a locked-down society. Beyond publishing, print collateral on the whole is intended for physical consumption in-hand. These projects — or at least the print production home stretch — are on hold.

Outdoor
Outdoor advertising is all about eyeballs and traffic. There’s no traffic on the roads, so the eyeballs just aren’t there. No need to put up that sexy new billboard this spring, so if you can shift those dollars to digital, pounce on the opportunity.

Channels that are exploding

Where’s the action?

Online
If it’s on a screen, it’s all gravy. Web projects (new launches, refreshes, landing page one-offs) are more critical now than ever, considering the slew of other channels in your mix that are suddenly wasteful or entirely useless to pursue. Social media content can’t be gobbled up quickly enough by the masses on lockdown. Campaigns that used to live on traditional channels can be and are being reworked for social.

Video
A digitally-native medium, video was already king. When you can’t stand in the same room and have a conversation with your customer, video is the next best way to present a human-to-human message. Leaning hard on video efforts, for social in particular, is a no-brainer. Agencies can stay very busy supporting or leading these efforts.

Webinars
Where video content can be crafted and delivered to massive audiences for little-to-no dollars, they’re hindered by their one-way nature. You’re able to broadcast content you’ve already created, but you can’t respond in real time. Webinars are stepping in to fill the void left by the great event-icide of 2020. With a bit of skill, you can engage directly with hundreds (thousands!) of people in a conversational way. You can play that video piece you created, and then talk about it and answer questions. This is as rich as it gets, it’s (mostly) scalable, and B2B audiences are especially eager to participate.

Animation/Editing
Less a channel, more of an area of creative and production expertise. Great video has nuanced editing, motion design and animation layered in already, but what do you do when you can’t ramp up the production team to go out and shoot that next piece of content? You can edit existing footage in new ways, or create video content entirely through graphics and animation. This can all be done fully remote, and the resulting output can be world class, even though the rest of the video production sector is pretty severely handcuffed at the moment.

Content vs Channel

For marketers and agency types, it’s always all about the content. The mechanisms for delivering that content to a receptive audience have been changing and will continue to fragment, but the critical and hard work of creating content that compels action is completely unaffected by the global pandemic. That’s a major silver lining for agencies — if we’re able to produce content for digital-only channels, we should be able to survive. Ultimately the channel is just the delivery method. Good content is driven by brand strategy first, and then supported by a delivery strategy based on our ever-changing media landscape — with or without Coronavirus adding mayhem to the mix.

“…the critical and hard work of creating content that compels action is completely unaffected by the global pandemic.”

Digital fully dominates

For most brands, digital channels have been and will continue to be where it’s at. If you dabbled in (fully analog) traditional channels, it’s clear that those methods of engagement are ineffective and wasteful in the short term at the very least. Maybe this crisis will signal the end of some of those straggler channels/strategies that rely on a human-to-human interaction in order to render results for marketers.

We’ve already seen some clients going 100% digital. This makes a lot of sense when you’re selling a digital product or service, but I anticipate a near future where previously hands-on brands start to mandate digital-only marketing efforts on a strategic and policy level.

New models will emerge out of this shared experience, especially in retail and event industries. It’ll be a hybrid of the previously all-human approach with an all-digital approach that has struggled with a lack of humanity. The middle ground will be fascinating, especially as innovation spikes in the coming months and years.

What does this mean for us?

Brands face distinct challenges based on the unique business they’re in. Agencies are wildly dynamic and nuanced as well, and some are all-in on a niche (hopefully not ‘events’). But there are some obvious big-picture considerations that we all need to explore and respond to. If we can adapt and innovate our models, we can position ourselves to excel through the crisis and come out as winners, or at least survivors, on the other side.

Marketers

Marketers need to reassess their strategic approach to their communications channels. How can they generate the most value for their loyal customers considering this new reality? Where are their prospects congregating online? How have their lives and habits changed in relation to how they consume your products or services?

Talk to your agencies, ask them what they’re seeing. They’ll welcome a seat at the strategic table, and they’ll bring ideas for how your budget should evolve today, this week, this month, this quarter. Most importantly, this is the time to consider alternative channels and tactics that maybe didn’t make sense in the past. Are any of your ongoing strategies left-over relics from previous leaders? Societal and economic disruptions lead to innovation — now may be your time to grab the wheel and point the ship in a new direction.

Agencies

When the economy takes a nose dive, many of the things we do for our clients suddenly seem excessive. Especially the more traditional efforts that tend to cost a lot of money, and are hard to quantify on an ROI level.

I don’t think any agency, with or without ‘digital’ in their positioning statement, can exist in 2020 without digital capabilities. It’s our job to lean in hard on the things we do well, that are still relevant, or especially relevant considering the current landscape. And we need to lead. If your clients are best served by digital executions that aren’t in your wheelhouse, guide them to the right resources and lock down your position as a key strategic advisor.

If your clients are hitting the brakes hard on agency expenditures, that’s rough, and will hopefully prove to be temporary. There were a lot of knee-jerk reactions right when this all blew up, but most clients recognize the need to keep moving forward.

As agencies, we need to continue to shape our offerings around our clients’ core needs and challenges. Ideas win. Strategy wins. Execution and delivery methods are fluid, and you likely have the people and skill-sets you need to adjust and thrive.