Marketing Provocateur, Hilton Barbour Discusses Digital Transformation, Advertising Measurability and The Educational System — The Influential Series Issue #1
The Influential Series is an independent publication where I explore the minds of thought leaders in the marketing and technology space. To kick off this series I am very honored to be joined by Hilton Barbour for a Q&A session. Hilton has 15+ years of marketing experience, has worked internationally with some of the world’s most iconic brands such as IBM, Coca-Cola and Nokia. He is a marketing provocateur (or ‘gent’ as the Canadian translation) with an uncanny ability for asking intelligent questions and a genuinely nice guy who loves his family and friends.
JP: What are the key components for a successful digital transformation?
HB: There are a couple of obvious components. One is an Enterprise or leadership acknowledgement of what digital transformation actually means. I think it’s a great phrase but it is often so amorphously defined much like the word strategy.
The very first thing around what is a successful digital transformation I think is a codified definition of what do we expect to transform and why we transform it. That needs to be almost Ground Zero.
I know it sounds obvious but I think very few organizations do that part first. The second thing is, people get obsessed by the digital part and go directly to the technology. Where time and again what often gets short shift is the people. The one’s that are directly impacted, the one’s that are going to get up-ended and the one’s that are going to actually have to change. I think we need to understand those particular elements to ensure when the technology part happens the people are both aware, cognizant of why, appreciative of why the change is needed and actually bought into that change. Recently I’ve done a series of interviews on this topic and the one thing I’ve heard repeatedly is that digital transformation that doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the people is destined to fail. In my opinion, it’s really about the people not the pixels.
JP: What is your opinion on the notion that marketing and advertising needs to be measurable?
HB: I think it’s unavoidable, we espouse a lot of digital channels for their ability to measure and track everything and that is not a bad posture to have. You certainly want to know where your investments are going; you want to know what is working and what is not. My worry is that we’ve tipped the scales to say lets measure everything and work out what matters afterwards. I worry that too much data doesn’t directly correlate to more insight, more actionable things to do and that it can get in the way of experimentation.
You can optimize your way into never trying anything new because you are perpetually polishing a stone that may have originally been average to begin with. But because you just measured it relentlessly you got caught in a cycle of I’m still polishing, I’m still polishing this stone and it may have been a dud to begin with.
Suggesting that not measuring something is just not going to fly these days and we have the ability to do so. But there should always be a reason or rational when measuring.
JP: What is the best advice someone has ever given you?
HB: Let me answer the inverse of that, what is the worst advice someone has ever given me? I’m one of those people who struggles with this notion of just follow your dreams and the universe will fall into place. Call me skeptical but I worry this kind of pop psychology advice dangerously sets people in the wrong direction. I think that it creates significant potential for disappointment, wasted potential, people that probably would have been better invested in doing something else. Absolutely nurture pursuits or hobbies that make you happy but be pragmatic about whether that can sustain a career. Perhaps this ties into the sense of people not knowing where the world is going and a feeling that perhaps if I just tilted at this, the universal will fall into place and success and riches will await me. Ultimately I guess when your Mother is Scottish, you tend to have a very strong bent toward pragmatism.
JP: Do you feel that today’s educational system is properly preparing children for the world of tomorrow?
HB: No, not at all. I can only speak in a Canadian context from first-hand experience and as an observer of other markets. I am shocked we aren’t teaching the skills that people will need to survive, let alone strive in the decades ahead. The ability to do critical thinking, the ability to work in teams, the ability to collaborate, the ability to think in notions of design thinking, etc. This is beyond just the simplicity of learning how to code, the skill of how to differentiate human skill from what’s increasingly going to be automated skills etc., I have an 11 and 8 year old daughter, I am absolutely terrified about their prospects of jobs in the future. I am equally terrified at being asked, “Dad what should I study at University?” I genuinely don’t know if the vaunted and celebrated University Degree is still the answer. Perhaps I feel the educational system we have in Canada is adequate but far behind other parts of the world. The Nordics in particular, they’re always held up as an epitome of forward-thinking and inclusive educational systems. The UK is mandating computer coding in elementary school. I worry that the Canadian educational system is leaving our next generation scrambling and we will be uncompetitive on the global market. And for a country with deep social values and security nets for our people that’s a worry. If we’re uncompetitive and no-one’s working, who pays for the security nets.
JP: If you could ask any one person a question alive or dead, what would you ask?
HB: Considering I come from Zimbabwe and South Africa, I’d love to ask Nelson Mandela how he could forgive at the depth and level that he forgave after what happened to him. 26 years in prison, he came out, and unlike the vast majority of human beings in history, he had no axe to grind and actually subjugated all of his unimaginable frustration and anger resentment. I’ve always been fascinated by him as an individual but also his ability to give forgive something that most people never would. I would love to ask how he managed to do it, it astounds me. I mean I lose it when I’m stuck in traffic on the TTC.
Originally published at www.linkedin.com on July 17, 2017.
