What is Digital?
‘Digital’ is a term we use in advertising that is becoming very dated as it gets harder and harder to define it.
In Marketing, it generally refers to any marketing message delivered using the Internet or where a computer is involved at the point of delivery. In may ways, it’s easier to define what Digital isn’t. It isn’t Print, though where computers personalize print with unique messages for each individual, this does come under the banner of Digital. It isn’t Events or PR, though it’s hard to imagine these without a Digital element.
Within a marketing agency, it refers also to the team that produces this work: the ‘Digital Department’. Problems occur when ‘Digital knowledge’ is isolated into a single team because consumers don’t make this distinction when they’re consuming content. Agencies need to change to remove this separation and many of them are – leading to endless internal discussions about integrating Digital into traditional advertising and marketing agencies. This can be very difficult because of the differences in processes, skillsets and expectations between these two groups.
The range of Digital channels and technologies for marketing is staggering and I keep a cheat list to refer to:
- 3D cinema/TV advertising
- 3D printing
- 3D TVs and displays
- Activity Streams
- Advertorials
- Affiliate marketing
- Android apps
- Article marketing
- Artificial intelligence
- Audio checkins (ShopKick)
- Augmented reality
- Autonomous vehicles
- Barcode scanning (Digital barcodes, bokodes, PayPoint, StickyBits)
- Biometric authentication
- Blog advertising
- Blogger relations
- Blogging
- Bookmarking (Digg, Delicious)
- Cloud Computing
- CloudWeb Platforms
- Computer-brain interface
- Console games
- Context delivery architecture
- Contextual advertising
- Corporate web site
- Data mining
- Digital point of sale displays
- Digital radio
- Digital television
- Diminished reality
- E-book readers
- E-commerce
- Electronic paper
- Electronics
- Email marketing
- Extreme transaction processing
- Forums
- Free content
- Freemium tools
- Gesture recognition
- Human augmentation
- iAds
- Idea management
- In-game advertising
- Internet Micropayment Systems
- Interactive TV
- Internet TV
- Intranets
- iPhone/iPad apps
- Interactive objects/environments (Arduino)
- Location-aware applications
- Location-based services
- Microblogging (Twitter, Sina Weibo)
- Microformats
- Mobile advertising
- Online competitions
- Online display ads
- Online/digital public relations
- Outdoor digital signage
- Pay per click
- Photo blogging (Instagram, Hipstamatic, Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook, RenRen)
- Podcasts
- Predictive analytics
- Promotional microsites
- Rich media apps
- Robotics
- RSS advertising
- Search engine optimization
- Semantic web
- SMS
- Social analytics
- Social media advertising
- Social media buzz monitoring
- Social network participation (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Sina Weibo, RenRen)
- Software development
- Spam
- Speech recognition
- Speech to speech translation
- Tablets (iPad, Samsung Galaxy)
- Tangible user interfaces
- Traffic Analytics (Google Analytics, WebTrends, Facebook Insights)
- User generated content
- Video blogging (YouTube, Viddy, Facebook)
- Video marketing
- Video search
- Video telepresence
- Virtual assistants
- Virtual worlds
- Web accessibility
- Web apps
- Webinars
- Widgets