In a conversation with the Daniels Newsroom, Teaching Associate Professor Michael Myers discussed the future of digital marketing, technology and how students in the Daniels Department of Marketing can prepare.
Teaching Associate Professor Michael Myers
Q: How is digital marketing different from traditional marketing?
A: Digital marketing needs to be contextual. It should be able to deliver a message based on who you are, where you are and what time it is. You get to one-to-one marketing, and that’s your goal. Traditional marketing is about pushing a targeted message out to a relatively large number of people at once.
Q: What are big trends in digital marketing and technology?
A: Voice search. I know it’s hard to believe, but Siri will get better. People can simply talk to “it” (a device), and “it” will meet our needs. Voice search is a big change in how businesses will think about themselves and how they’ll structure their content, because people speak differently than they search.
The concept of voice search will also extend to the business interface, adding a proactive element. A favorite example of mine is this: If I’m riding my bike and I’m about a mile from Red Rocks, my personal assistant on my phone should come up and say, ‘Hey, Mike, that band that you’ve been listening to on Spotify is playing at Red Rocks in six months. Tickets are going to be available on Friday; do you want to get in the queue to buy those tickets, and if so, how many?’
In that example, there’s no screen involved. Starting this year, 50% of searches will be without a screen. It’s voice search. The whole thought of a personal assistant following you around and doing processes makes a ton of sense, and that’s going to become more of the norm.
There’s also artificial intelligence (A.I.) and machine learning. From a technical standpoint, machine learning is as smart as a toddler as far as capability, while A.I. can figure out complex problems when fed enough data.
Q: What’s an example of how A.I. might influence change in the current digital marketing trends?
A: Google search is run by an A.I. called RankBrain. This system evolves on the fly by addressing changes in how people search in an ever more dynamic context. RankBrain also contains an element called neural matching, which is essentially a big synonym engine. This technology gets us closer to natural language matching where you’ll have more complex conversations with Google about what you’re looking for, or what you’re trying to accomplish.
It used to be that you had to pick the right keywords to match within your content. But with neural matching, that’s become less important because it kind of knows what you mean, even if you don’t pick exactly the right word. And that starts to reconstruct what SEO is, and how it works.
Q: How do rules and regulations come into play as far as user privacy and effective marketing?
A: General Data Protection Regulation is a new data requirement in the EU that entails a lot of rules about data and how companies have access to that data. The California Consumer Data Privacy Act puts a set of limitations as far as what kind of data businesses can have and use on consumers.
At the same time, there’s a lot of conversation around ads. The “New York Times” recently ran an article about how advertising’s biggest problem is that people hate ads. There’s another one on “Wired” that says, ‘why don’t we just ban targeted advertising.’ Search is one of the few places where businesses will be able to determine a customer’s intent and meet their needs.
I think at some point, businesses are going to have to find a way to partner with users to allow them to deliver offers. Marketers are in the business of consent.
Q: What skills and experience can students get that will still be relevant when they graduate?
A: If you’re graduating as a marketing student and you don’t have at least one certification, like Google Analytics, Tableau, Salesforce, Constant Contact, something like that, then you’re at a disadvantage. It’s important. No one’s ever going to say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re too technical.’ Coding isn’t for everybody, but I would say everybody needs to at least understand the basics of how it works.
Ultimately you have to be intellectually curious. If you want to be successful at anything right now, you have to be curious.
To learn more about digital marketing at the Daniels College of Business, visit the Department of Marketing webpage.