L’Oréal CMO Stéphane Bérubé is the perhaps the most notable marketer to go public within the pages of Marketing Week. Who can forget his fabulous interview last year where proclaimed “we need to stop talking about digital – it’s all part of marketing”.

There is increasing evidence that Bérubé is at the vanguard of a shift towards common sense and a more nuanced view of marketing.

As another example, after an astonishing rise in popularity, Google Trends now shows a drop in interest in digital marketing for the first time in this country. If Google is to be believed we reached “peak-digital” at the end of 2017 and it’s been declining ever since. A trend that is also born out in American data too.

There are, lest we forget, three very good reasons why the term digital marketing should and eventually will disappear up its own ISDN slot.

Everything is digital
The whole notion of using the prefix ‘digital’ is entirely nonsensical if you stop and think about it for more than about thirty seconds. When I get to my class on marketing communications I always begin by asking my students to give me the names of non-digital tools to help frame the difference. And as they volunteer the usual suspects I let the mental marketing samurai that lurks within loose for a few violent seconds and cut their suggestions to tatters.

“Newspapers” some poor bastard in the front row ventures and I pounce! More than a third of the circulation revenues for The New York Times and almost half of its advertising income now derive from its digital editions.

The newspaper’s digital paywall business is growing as fast as Facebook and faster than Google. Sounds pretty digital to me.

“Outdoor” another hopeless lemming shouts out. Over half of all British outdoor advertising is now digital making out of home literally more digital than traditional.

So is radio, which, as of Q1 this year, saw digital platforms deliver more listened minutes than traditional broadcast in this country for the first time. TV broadcasts have been 100% digital since 2012.

Nicholas Negroponte, another MIT all-star, predicted all this 20 years ago. “Like air and drinking water,” he told a sceptical Wired magazine in 1998, “being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence”.

It was the late great Douglas Adams who described Negroponte as someone who “writes about the future with the authority of someone who has spent a great deal of time there”. So perhaps no-one should be surprised that his prediction is becoming business reality before our eyes.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.marketingweek.com