There are many cool scenarios offered on how our lives will change when computers and ground- and satellite-linked networks become commonplace in the home. Here is a recent one: Imagine that your house knows you. Imagine it knows what you have in the fridge and what to order to prepare for Friday’s formal dinner for four. Imagine it knows to light your path through its halls, interpret your e-mail, and display digital reproductions on flat-panel monitors when your feminist grandmother visits or when your multipierced niece arrives. Technology is the ultimate shaper not only of the material substructure of society but also of human thought patterns.

One revolutionary technological force is digitalization. The digital revolution has fundamentally altered our concepts of space, time and mass. While it’s impossible to say exactly what the future will look like, a few things are certain. First, we will eventually reach an inflection point when the majority of the channels become digital; digital will be the mainstream and mainstay of media. Second, content created by companies and consumers alike will proliferate, particularly video content, and will be viewed on multiple screens and devices in people’s lives. People will increasingly search for the content they want among an ever-expanding mound of digital media. Third, as channels and content proliferate, the virtual and physical worlds will intertwine with consumers, crossing back and forth constantly between the two.

The shift to new media is not a fad or short-term trend; it is the inevitable result of a series of deep, long-term, structural changes. “A fad garners a lot of attention but doesn’t necessarily relate to a truly mass issue in terms of genuinely changing the way businesses operate or the way companies make money or the way consumers interact,” stressed OgilvyOne Asia-Pacific president Kent Wertime during an interview prior to his talk during the 3rd Internet and Mobile Marketing Summit, themed “Digital Delivers” organized by the Internet and Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines.

“When I ask people, ‘Do you think that in five years’ time, people will be using digital media more or using less?’ and I still haven’t had a client say ‘less.’ If this were just a fad, you might jump in, take the money and run. But we’re not here as fad agents: We’re talking about deep, long-term and verifiable changes in the market. We’re talking about the need to evolve in a sustained basis,” Wertime furthered.

The digital revolution has opened doors for new startup and niche companies with little capital to reach a worldwide market. “For novices and relatively new entrants, now is really the time to get your foundation right,” he added. Perhaps this isn’t far off of how marketers feel, too. Many companies are uncertain which digital route is the right one for them. But to be successful in this environment, one must be ready to make a step-change; small experiments will no longer suffice.

“The cornerstones of marketing—having a brand, knowing your customers—are still every bit as important: They’re just moving to digital. We’ve focused more on the things that have changed, but the basic principles still apply. We just have a whole new set of issues and tools to deal with. Often the technology is so different and new that it overwhelms a client’s focus on brands. We have to use digital media to serve the essence of a brand,” Wertime pointed out.

One must be ready to take a transformational view of marketing. This means making a shift to digital marketing. Marketers can’t simply add a few digital activities to their traditional marketing plans. Instead, they must fundamentally re-craft their approach to marketing around the features of the new media and digital marketing. This will bring about a renovation of marketing. While basic marketing principles remain—such as positioning and segmentation—digital channels will extend and accelerate how marketers engage consumers. As the pace of change accelerates, companies can no longer rely on their former business practices to sustain prosperity.

Companies that do well during a recession see a challenging business environment as an opportunity to explore new channel and media opportunities, particularly in digital. Some of the most successful companies and products were launched in recession. Wertime cited GE (founded in the panic of 1873), Disney (founded in the recession of 1923-24), HP (founded in the Great Depression of the 1930s), Microsoft (founded in the recession of 1975) and Apple’s iPod (launched in the recession of 2001).

According to Wertime, the new landscape of marketing analytics is that everything is measurable. In digital, everything generates data—and the volumes are enormous. Google’s digital database is probably the largest, capturing almost 10 billion searches per month. These huge quantities of data can give companies unprecedented visibility into how customers engage with brands and how that engagement ultimately leads to revenue. “Digital has put the math marketing revolution on steroids.”

In a digital world, technology deals with technology. As digital media spawned data, technology can be applied to track, aggregate and display that data in usable formats. As digital marketing grows, the variety of tracking tools is increasing. These include sophisticated relational databases, with analytical processing modules, to help sort and compare billions of pieces of data. However, if you don’t use the results of the analysis to make material decisions, you’ve lost the real advantage of the analytics. It’s a bit like a coach simply watching the scoreboard without altering his strategy.

Purple surpasses usage targets

While integration focuses on the consistency of the advertisers’ message, unification shifts the focus to the continuity of the consumer’s experience. The consumer’s main interest is not the integration of the brand’s image. What the consumer cares about is whether his or her personal information, preferences and needs are recognized by marketers, particularly if he or she is a loyal and long-standing customer.

Yahoo!’s Purple Hunt, an online treasure hunt over the different Yahoo! Web properties for purple gadgets, helped create a more continuous and customized participant journey with the brand. Yahoo! has succeeded in taking integration to deeper levels. Through the Purple Hunt, all of Yahoo!’s product usage targets were met with highlights, including achieving 195 percent of Mail and 183 percent Search user-engagement targets. Over the duration of the campaign, the microsite saw 7 million page views underscoring deep user engagement.  The campaign wasn’t just popular online as close to 100,000 people attended the Purple Hunt roadshows and more than 6,000 came to the Grand Finale, in the hope of winning the car.

As a result, the consumer experience was overwhelming. Over the last eight weeks, Yahoo!’s users in the Philippines, which account for more than 85 percent of the nation’s Internet population, were exposed to the Purple Hunt experience. With this first-of-its-kind integrated marketing campaign that centered on an online microsite, Yahoo! was able to secure the mass consumer participation for the entire two-month duration of the Purple Hunt. Other key components include TV, radio, web, OOH, events and mobile advertising. It was this combination of online and offline tactics that led to the campaign’s success.

“Pinoys took over the campaign. Yahoo! was their platform to get them deeply involved,” said L. Bennett Porter, head of marketing, Yahoo! emerging markets and “Queen Bee” emeritus, in an interview. She joined Yahoo! in 1999 and is currently responsible for the company’s merging markets marketing strategies and initiatives. Porter and her team spend their time thinking about how to develop 360-degree marketing campaigns that stop consumers in their tracks, regardless of whether they’re in Indonesia, the Middle East or on the World Wide Web. The team delivers insights that inform the company’s audience-centric business approach. “Yahoo! has evolved in many ways, yet has maintained extremely high user loyalty, proving that it has quickly become essential for many people in their daily lives,” Porter added.

In a data furnished this columnist, the Yahoo!-Nielsen “Online Industry Review” reveals the forecast expenditure on online advertising across each of the Southeast Asian markets under investigation. The study shows that the online advertising industry in the region is expected to grow more than 60 percent between 2008 and 2010, across all the included markets. Display advertising will continue to take the lion’s share of the online advertising pie, although Search advertising is expected to close the gap in Singapore and Malaysia by 2010.  Strong growth is also expected in Search advertising, particularly between 2008 and 2009, and for the less mature online advertising markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Branding green

Branding green initiatives are alive and well. Think of it as a product undergoing an overhaul to make it more competitive in the marketplace. The greening of the industry is gaining grounds, and so far, green and sustainable in the built environment and green architecture in the Philippines have made some inroads in key developments, such as malls and residential projects. But the demand for energy-wise, environment-friendly and healthy environment still has to reach a critical point before we can say that we have succeeded in effecting these changes.

Both Manilacon ’09 and Green Forum are in a league of their own—to be particularly sensitive to the need to balance environmentalism with economic growth. A historic first back-to-back significant events in the Philippine building industry is our call to arms to make this challenge—perhaps the most important one facing the planet—a true priority.

With its unifying theme “Enabling Responsible and Sustainable Solutions for the Built Environment” which unfolds from September 3 to 6 at the SMX Convention Center, these concepts are briefly described as follows:

• Enabling. Green AP, LADCI and their partners aim to increase awareness and contribute in realizing the green and sustainable built environment in the country through various joint initiatives presented at the Green Forum and Manilacon ’09;

• Responsible and sustainable. These are the challenges of what architecture and building should be, in response to the climate change and in line with global best available practices of sustainability; and

• Built environment. Pertains to the building industry as focus of Green Forum and Manilacon ’09 with other simultaneous events and highlights.