I wonder if people today know the film Matrix better than Plato’s allegory of the cave. They illustrate the same concept of a superficial reality projected onto us, from which only the fearless can escape. This is the image that we used to illustrate the state of digital marketing in 2020. Digital marketers staring at a wall onto which digital marketing providers are projecting images of end-users. Those images are not nearly as perfect as in our illustration. They are expressed as data sets, as interest categories, as intent.

For how long will we be calling it digital marketing, I wonder? We could already rebaptise it to Data marketing, for that is all it is about. Using data, to direct and optimize a campaigns executed by algorithms onto digital media. A few months back, Google removed more of the transparency in their data. They are of course far behind Facebook in that game: “No tracking allowed, here is the data you need”.

It made me think about the troubled waters data marketers are navigating in. We know that a lot of the digital activity that goes on behind the scenes is automated bot traffic. We know that we cannot track users from one marketing channel to the other, unless we are inside one of the big media players’s universe. We know that some users have installed ad blockers, that some are using incognito browsing windows, and in the future, third-party cookies will completely disappear. It is a wonder data marketers have any insight into the data at all.

Thinking like Plato and Neo: Does the data really provide insights? 

Nothing like a little philosophical step back to look at the bigger picture. The big worrying characteristic of the big marketing providers is that they are dictating the rules of the game, while they are providing the data on the basis of which you make decisions. By definition, the arbitrage is carried out by algorithms, not engineers fiddling with your data. This provides us with no guarantee whatsoever, that the data is free of bias. A very simple example from my days running a digital media agency: Google Analytics (the abiter) by default attributes conversions to paid search (the commercial offering) more favourably than organic (free) traffic.

Digital marketers are not dealing with raw data most of the time. It is interpreted data, and the interpretation has commercial intent. This is why the most important direction for digital marketers in these challenging times is to build proprietary data. If the entire user journey takes place within Amazon, or within the Google universe, or withing Facebook, you should be aware that you are not seeing raw data, but interpreted data. Building proprietary data means getting users to your own website, it means capturing tangible user data like email addresses, phone numbers and names, rather than relying on retargeting lists and intent audiences.

Read the full article on PPC Hero here:  https://www.ppchero.com/digital-marketing-in-a-vuca-world-is-it-time-to-emerge-from-platos-cave/

The main topics were of course Privacy and GDPR on one hand and then Automation and Artificial Intelligence on the other. In the conference programme, various topics touched on AI: Automation for PPC and Voice Search being the most prominent ones. But GDPR was discussed in every break, over every drink and in most of the questions asked during the individual sessions.

The conference addressed some really interesting questions this year:

• Should you use Ranking factor studies to guide the way you do SEO or simply use for inspiration?
• What are your options when organic reach in Facebook and other social media is dropping?
• Is AMP for mobile rendering or or just a temporary patch to a problem of speed?
• Should we be worried as marketers with the arrival of AI in the optimization interfaces?

Overall, there was a lot of discussion of Speed. Speed as a ranking factor – not time to first byte but time to full page render as Marcela de Vivo from Semrush stressed. There were session on AMP which are in essence a way to speed up pages.

At the beginning of the year, my prediction was that AI would be big but that it would be more of a hype effect than a reality for the Digital Marketer this year. Well, it looks like AI is more prominent than that. Frederick Valleys from Optymzr reminded us that the Quality score was the first Machine learning functionality in Adwords and has been around since the beginning of Paid Search. And we have seen new ML driven functionalities enter the scene little by little. The Smart bidding options (Target PPC, Target ROAS, Maximize Clicks and Maximise conversions) are all part of this, as Brad Geddes reminded us. And in a separate session, Ann Stanley showed an example of smart bidding for shopping campaigns involving remarketing: Optimize by Goals which you can find here.

What we won’t see is perhaps the shift from Machine Learning (ML) into Artificial Intelligence (AI) for these functionalities.

Voice search is another area where Artificial Intelligence has a big role to play. It was covered in the keynote by Beshad Bezhadi but also at a more concete level in a very popular session by Pete Campbell:

As is often the case, I met some wonderful people in the networking around the event – and also had some of the more interesting discussions off the record.

• Changes in the Google algorithm favouring niche approaches
• The need to constantly renew ourselves in this industry of constant change
• The need of business in other industries to learn from our experience as they will soon be facing the same challenges of constant change that we have for 20 years due to major technological, organisation and behavioural disruption across all business sectors.

Soon it will be time for SMX Paris – the programme is very different and there is no real speaker overlap so it will be another exciting conference on Search, Social, Analytics and Digital marketing overall.