My friends and former colleagues at Nokia have been talking about the own, bought and earned digital media model for a long time, and it has significantly evolved from its earlier incarnations (for reference see 1, 2, 3 & 4). While the thinking behind the models has been very useful to me when planning and executing marketing campaigns, there is something that has been bothering me for a while about the whole thinking of digital, brazenly exemplified in these columns in the Finnish Marketing and Advertising site (here and here, suomeksi).

The fact of the matter is that both the digital and traditional channels of a brand are at the end of the day talking to/with the same consumer. Furthermore, digital channels, techniques and more importantly, thinking, can and should become embedded in the overall marketing strategy and executions. Nowadays there are different digital activations applicable for outdoor (interactive outdoor), events (solutions such as Uplause), TV (social media as a backchannel), and even print (see Kooaba Shortcut). Therefore digital is not separated from traditional channels, but becomes either the glue that binds them or the spread you put in your bread to give it flavour, be it butter, cajeta, mätitahna or Créme Bonjour ;).

I’ll have to turn this eventually into a deck for further clarity.