Video transcript

Is digital marketing a force for good or evil?

LISA HARRIS: We're going to be deliberately provocative. I'm going to ask some quite big
questions, and Mike's going to respond with some quite interesting answers, I hope. And you
may or may not agree with me or with Mike, but that's the whole point. And afterwards, we
want to know what you think. Mike, don't you think it's all just amazing? Don't you know that
90% of small businesses in the UK now report using social media for marketing?

MIKE MOLESWORTH: Well, the language you've represented there is that of hype. Lots of
people are using it, it's all really amazing, it's all really wonderful. And this is a kind of form of
technological determinism, this belief that the future is driven by technology, and business
and marketing driven by technology. But I think the problem when we use these headline
figures is we miss the fact that we don't know how many of those have routinised the use of
social media or the internet for marketing.

And we certainly don't know their success. We also don't know the problems they've had with
it. So we have to look behind these headline figures and say, well, what's actually happening,
and this is actually a benefit to businesses?

LISA HARRIS: But there's huge sums of money involved. In 2013, there was more than six
billion pounds spent on advertising online. And that's a huge sum of money.

MIKE MOLESWORTH: But again, this just really speaks to the size of the advertising market
behind new media. So what we have is a host of new marketing agencies all putting together
new advertising packages, and selling them to marketers. It really doesn't tell us about the
success of those particular techniques. So you look at something like banners, which even 10
years ago, were seen as the staple advertising platform. And now, it's widely recognised that
they simply don't work.

And yet, there's still banners everywhere, and there's still people buying them. And there's still
lots of companies trying to sell them.

LISA HARRIS: But what about mobile though? You can't deny how huge that's getting. 35% of
advertising spend is now on mobile.

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 Video transcript

MIKE MOLESWORTH: Yeah. And again, the problem there is all we really see is that having
failed to make any headway with banners or with interstitial ads on laptop and desktop
platforms. Now this kind of industry that's trying to make money out of marketing managers
has moved into mobile. And we were talking earlier that we have all sorts of ads appear on
the apps that we download. And yet, it's very hard to find anyone who's ever declared one of
those useful as useful to them or clicked on it other than by a mistake.

So actually, what you're seeing here is a kind of sophisticated marketing of marketing going
on, and lots of companies buying it. But what we need to do is to take a step back and say,
well, how is this working? Is it effective? Are there downsides to it?

LISA HARRIS: But what about video though? That's getting really big, especially short form
videos like Vine. Coke, for example, is doubling its spend on short form video in 2014.

MIKE MOLESWORTH: Yeah. Well, one way of looking at that is just there's an endless series
of innovations. And this market seems to work on a new platform comes along. People adopt
it, they try it. They actually end up getting bored with it often, and then they move onto the
next one. And there's no real evaluation. But one of our jobs is to actually evaluate how this
works. But having said that, I think there is scope for innovation, and the use of video forms,
non-traditional advertising video forms, is definitely one of the areas that possibly will
continue to grow and actually find some role in the marketplace.

LISA HARRIS: And what about all these new services like Snapchat, for example? Surely that
offers huge opportunity for marketers?

MIKE MOLESWORTH: Yeah. Well, Snapchat, I think, is interesting. And again, what you're
saying is, here's another platform that comes along, and you have a whole host of consultants
who go along to companies and say, well what you really need is a Snapchat account. But
Snapchat also perhaps tells us that not all of these platforms are suitable for marketing. Now,
if you look at the way that Snapchat is used by young people, we could question whether this
is actually a platform that marketers would want to be on.

LISA HARRIS: OK. So that was a very quick run through, some of the current debates in digital
marketing. And now we'd love to hear your views.

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