In what way is digital marketing developing? – We will never create a formula for a perfect commercial

Advertising costs will (not) be lower

As he further explains, what is essentially new is that will we will measure the effects of our marketing activities faster, cheaper and more accurately as well as correct our actions because the feedback loop we use in management is now based on an information base of much better quality. However, the fact that advertising will be more precise and focused on a specific target group does not mean that the companies will spend less money on advertising.

– In business, fewer costs for advertising is not the goal. It can happen, of course, that the costs of data processing and the total marketing costs increase in order to get to a specific target group and boost sales. It would be wrong to focus on one part of the cash flow of one business function of a company (such as marketing) and instead there should be an overview of how each business function contributes to reaching financial and other company goals. In other words, if the planned budget for marketing activities decreases from one million to one hundred thousand euros that doesn`t mean the plan will automatically get the support from the management (or the share holders). Instead, maybe a budget ten times bigger makes for a better plan, Mrdja explains.

According to him, reaching the specific target group was always the goal in marketing and today that is more possible than ever before.

– In the business life of a company most employees work on some way to lower the overall costs, but focusing on costs is focusing on your own weakness when it is much more important to decide on the (new) course of action rather than think about how to lower costs. Focusing on a specific target group can, of course, lead to cost savings but in my opinion the use of new information technologies in marketing activities that allows us to get to know those target groups better is more valuable, states Mrdja.

Personalized campaigns – Different commercials for the same product

What does that exactly mean? Personalized marketing is something that has been talked about for quite some time in the world of digital marketing. To make the viewer believe that an ad is meant for them personally is not easy. This is why some visionaries predict that in the future the companies will place different ads for the same product and that digital marketing would become personalized, meaning that based on the users` profile, some will get an ad that focuses on the numbers and others will get an ad that focuses on emotions. For our collocutor, this isn`t entirely impossible.

– Why not, people understand and describe the same phenomena in different ways. For instance, my professor colleagues have taught the same subject using either charts, tables or sentences. The practice of creating different ads for different markets has existed for a while now. Then, when you add the possibility of creating commercials with cheap devices such as mobile phones then the purchasing power of a target group, which can be very small in size, becomes the most important factor, Mrdja says.

This is what the perfect commercial should look like

Changes are inevitable for content creators too. We already know which subject lines in emails increase the possibility that the advertisement placed through this type of marketing will be seen and what elements should an Instagram ad contain to attract attention. Therefore, some fear that the amount of data in this domain will cause the loss of creativity, not enough desire to experiment or to attempt to do something new and different because the content creators will only follow established formulas that are proven to bring results.

However, our collocutor assures us that marketing will be among the last activities to become automated and where creativity will not be valued anymore. He reminds that almost everything people do today is a combination of information technologies and traditional activities. People make decisions and decision support systems work on the basis of previous human experience.

– Besides, all knowledge on email marketing, Instagram advertising and business formulas that yield results is temporary. In fact, everything we know today on the subject is necessary but not enough for success. Working in marketing is getting more complex and new trends should be observed. It`s similar to chess, each player must, for starters, learn the theory (and the practice) of openings and then follow the latest developments from all the tournaments so as to beat the opponent with the more creative middlegame tactics, our collocutor describes colorfully.

He points out that the fact that marketing activities are only a subsystem in the management of company is rarely a topic of discussion.

– In other words, marketing functions are not independent and cannot be realized on the basis on some algorithms (automation) but instead, it has to be based on company`s strategic and operational plans. Artificial intelligence is powerless when it comes to understanding the development strategy of a company. There are so many different strategies and different phases of implementation that decision making in marketing cannot be automated, Mrdja says.

Computers are only data processing machines

Therefore, a future scene of some super smart computer or artificial intelligence creating commercials and deciding what they should look like falls in the domain of science fiction.

– Every software design is actually process automation which enables the quick and precise repetition of certain activities that people had previously done without computers. So far, computers have not crossed the line of being able to do something people haven`t programmed (automated) them for. Computers are still only data processing machines, they can`t make decisions, though there are attempts to get computers to choose (suggest) a decision from a set of possible decisions, Mrdja says.

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But how will these changes impact us as consumers? There are those who believe people will become more distant and that they will even expect from others to “read” their thoughts in everyday interactions as if they were some sort of perfect imaginary algorithm. However, there is no need to worry.

– Digitalization processes encompass, to a certain extent, all human activities including marketing. Computer- based activities haven`t completely pushed out traditional activities anywhere. People communicate in physical and in virtual spaces and they can chose how much they will use information technologies for performing those activities. As far as “mind reading” goes, that is something that humans have always done and they have mastered that skill well. We all talk less than what is asked of us and we still reveal more than we would want to, Mrdja concludes.