We need a plan on how we plan

From the explosion of digital marketing activities through multiple media channels and technologies, the online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WeChat and Youtube, have dominated marketers’ attention in the past few years. The branding concept in traditional marketing was transformed into capturing conversations and engaging the consumers with quantified metrics such as likes and shares.

Another big leap forward was taken in the form of big data analytics, social listening, viral video marketing, online influencer's engagements, and online payment integrated digital campaigns.

The year ahead promises to be just as bountiful. With all the creative and passionate marketing minds in the industry, we never lack excitement. What I see is a need for a short pause, and what we lack perhaps is a "revised plan" on guiding us how we plan.

2014 was a year where we witnessed the immense power that digital added to our industry, and transformation into integrated campaigns taking care of both offline and online channels. Multiple agencies were employed to carry out the tasks, including creative agencies, media agencies, PR agencies, and of course the newly joint force from digital agencies.

A year later in 2015, the line between digital/traditional was getting even blurrier with the digital side still being placed under the spotlight. It was no longer possible to differentiate whether a pubic figure should be considered as a celebrity or online influencer or often being both. Agencies were finding a difficult time to define their responsibilities and scope of services as each party was overlapping.

What I predict in the year ahead is the intensification of this phenomenon. We will see multiple agencies taking on different roles and carrying out overlapping marketing functions. Ad agencies and PR firms will take on responsibilities for the branding and creative ideas for marketers, while leaving digital firms to focus solely on the online platforms and data analytics.

The term "silo effect" is used in business, and it accurately illustrates the situation that will need to change as the marketing industry evolves. It is the lack of communication within teams and across departments commonly found in relatively large corporates with teams setting their own goals, and leading to the halted flow of information and data.

The complication arises due to changes in consumer media consumption where our audience engages with content in various formats and media without consciously noticing which devices or channels.

We should not continue to see traditional and digital channel audiences as alienated demographic groups when we see an increase in digital consumption by midage audiences. As I cannot emphasise more, we have already entered the era of “postdigital” where living in a digital world is commonplace. It is soon the time we no longer use the term “innovative” to describe digital campaigns, as to what has happened to TV ads previously.

For a marketing campaign to succeed, it is not how many different tasks a single agency can take up, it is about whether productive and efficient communication can be formed between various parties. Perhaps it is time where marketers should deemphasise the term “digital”, and invite all of your agencies to the same table for the first time.

The writer is Jeffrey Hau, director of Prizm.