Subline PMP Episode 04: The Death of Digital

The death of digital. Maybe that's overstating it just a little bit, but there's been a lot of chatter out there over the last few weeks on social media mainly around Mindshare's forecast for 2019's spends, and that chatter has been around digital reaching maturity.

I think the first thing that we really should talk about is the word "digital" because I think, if we're talking about online, we should use the word "online" because that's really what it is, because digital can include digital out of home, it can include digital TV, digital press, so I think if we talk more specifically about online, then it becomes much easier to look at whether we have hit maturity in that field or not.

I think if you look at the growth of certain online channels over the past few years, certainly the percentage growth terms is declining, were not growing as quickly as were in the past, but I think saying that we've reached maturity in digital is probably a bit of a step too far.

There were some Shopify research done recently that was talking about the very first online transaction which was in 1994, and it was a website called Net Market, and it was the sale of a CD, including posting, packing, and it took a credit card in payment online for that, and when you think it, that was just 24 years ago. In 24 years, where we are in eCommerce is sort of amazing, but it's actually been a journey and not an easy one, and it hasn't really seen the growth that you may have expected when you looked at this back in maybe '95, '96.

So heres my top three reasons why I think we haven't hit maturity, and I might throw in a bonus four at the end, let's see.

Number one, eCommerce. As I just said, 1994 was the very first transaction online. It was for a CD, I think it was for $15 or something like that. Currently in the UK, we are hovering around about 18-19% of all commerce is done online. That's all we've got to in 24 years. So if you look at where we are from a commerce point of view, there's still a long way to go. Now, if you look at the pain and suffering that's causing on the high street, imagine when we get to 45 or 50% of commerce being transacted online, and what effect that will have. So I think the number one factor in future growth is how we deal with eCommerce and the digital transformation of stores and the new pure players that are coming along.

Now, admittedly this is a lot of performance media that I'm talking about, but that's my background, so that's what I'm going to be talking about.

Number two. I think number two, and Google will love me for saying this, is YouTube. I think YouTube is just in it's infancy. Nobody has worked out how to advertise on YouTube yet, or very few people. In fact, if you speak to Google about it, I think that even they would admit that it's a bit like the very early days of TV, where people were taking photographs of Newspaper adverts and showing them on TV, and that's where we are on YouTube.

We're repurposing adverts that were meant for a different medium, and trying to shoe horn them into a different form of online, and a different way of looking at it. So I think that has got tremendous growth when people get that working. Admittedly that's more from a branding point of view, rather than a performance point of view, but can see that there is going to be opportunities moving forward of actually buying, and I think what YouTube has got in it's performance adverts, which are below the video generally where it shows products that are either spoken about or mentioned in the video. I think that's got great potential moving forward.

So number one, eCommerce. Number two, YouTube.

Number three, I think,