Definitions in the Digital Age

I’m attending the AdAge Digital Marketing Conference in New York, whereat a number of panels chocked full of learned speakers are grappling with the challenge of defining brands, let alone exploring digital marketing.

The marketing part is reasonably obvious; it's driven by technology, and the challenges are accordingly technical, such as:

• How do you monetize content creation, and who should own it?
• When do you want to repurpose content via a variety of delivery platforms?
• What constitutes a good deal re talent remuneration?
• Where are the best bets being placed for future players in the digital space?

It turns out that these sort of questions aren't all that new, really.  Change the media and the hairstyles of the panelists, and this could be a meeting taking place in the 1960s.  For that matter, people of insight and good intent have been debating how best to deliver marketing ever since the word first came into use in 1561.

We have over 400 years of working with a definition of marketing that is all but universally agreed upon and understood.  It's the "process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service."  So the conference is digging into a lot of interesting stuff on this front.

The 800 lb. gorilla here, however, is a combination of assumption, hope, and revealed truth: there's no such common language definition for brands:

• It's sometimes a list of qualities or attributes associated with a product or service
• Or a description of an experience that may or may not include said product or service
• It can describe the business that is responsible for actually selling things other than qualities or experiences of products and services
• Or reference the influence of business attributes in non-commercial material (i.e. branded content)
• Most often, any given panel uses some combination (or all) of said definitions

It doesn't help that the word "brand" (relevant to marketing) only dates back to 1949.  There's never been an agreed-upon, objective definition, irrespective of any recent confusion provided by technological innovation. 

Yet brands are the source from which basic assumptions about digital marketing arise, most centrally the conceit that exposing people to entertaining stuff has a rub-off, related, and somehow enduring benefit to businesses which create, deliver, or simply sponsor the stuff.

This means that there are two conclusions after almost 20 experts have taken the stage:

1. Somebody should figure out how to measure whether this assumption about brands has any validity
2. Whether such proof is forthcoming or doomed to be forever the plot of a sci-fi movie, companies need to dive fast and furious (and expensively) into digital marketing

I'm in 100% agreement with the former, and find the latter quite hilarious.

AdAge deserves kudos for putting together very thoughtful panels, and the production of the event has been flawless.  And what better entity but the preeminent ad rag (and electron-spewer, or whatever the slang is for an Internet site) to host conversations about the impact that digital distribution (tactic) is having on marketing and business decisions (strategy).

But if I were a client with a big budget, I'd have trouble getting up in front of any audience -- even one populated with the smugly converted -- and talk about my commitment to digital branding without any objective measure for why that money wouldn't have been better spent on, say, a cash payback to consumers.  Or an investment in T-bonds.

We're grappling with finding a definition for branding as we engage in all of this experimentation with digitally-delivered media.  We're either building a structure for business going forward, or a house of cards.  Nobody quite knows.

But I do know that none of us can talk about digital marketing without implicitly addressing our beliefs and expectations for brands.  On this front, there's more work ahead for everyone.  I suspect AdAge will help drive this conversation, just as it has so far.