Marketing in an era of online/social media and offline ‘IRL’ (In Real Life) commerce has become extraordinarily complicated. So much so that one Chief Marketing Officer, Josh Golden (of marketing strategy and management services firm Quad), has identified several unfortunate trends that can render it less effective. 

Writing in Forbes, he points to the widespread fallacy of treating online and IRL marketing as unconnected realms when they are deeply intertwined in most people’s lives. And he sees the tendency toward marketing “disaggregation” – splitting it up into different specialisms like strategy, creative, media, and production, each catered for by different firms – as an expensive and inefficient error of judgment (most modern companies want integrated aggregated marketing services from the same provider).

All of which is to convey an obvious truth: to deliver genuine value, contemporary marketing has to keep up with the dizzying pace of technological innovation and … Read more