Full mix experience in marketing used to mean knowing what you’re doing both above and below the line. Yet now, to be a full mix marketer you need to know how to manage and execute digital campaigns properly.
Proof of this comes in the shape of a report showing that online advertising is nearly as big as offline advertising, and is likely to overtake offline advertising sometime this year.
bq. Total UK online advertising expenditure in 2005 grew by 65.6 per cent to £1.4 billion to take the sector’s market share to 7.8 per cent, research by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Internet Advertising Bureau, the trade body for online advertising, showed. At £1.4 billion, online advertising expenditure is almost three quarters the size of national newspaper advertising, which was worth £1.9 billion in 2005.
This development has been well picked up by the blogosphere (in particular Open and Stuart Bruce), but what does it really mean for a marketer’s career.
Being a generalist or all-round marketer means you have to have real experience in delivering digital campaigns, yet many digital marketing roles are purely digital. Marketers without digital experience working in generalist roles will have to get digital experience to get on.
The next step for the generalist marketer who knows how to run a digital campaign is to be able to integrate a campaign offline and online, both in terms of strategy and creative.
Marketing employers will need to know what to look for on potential marketing employee’s CVs. I know what I’d look for – good solid experience of offline and online marketing, backed up by a reliable academic qualification such as CIM or IDM. Specific digital qualifications, such as the IDM Diploma in Direct and Interactive Marketing, while still relatively new will grow in value over the coming years.