Today's digital landscape has in some respects made a marketeers job slightly easier in relation to 'getting the brand message out'. 

But with it has also seen the rise of an omni-present stress ridden risk mindset. 

The bigger the company (brand) danger constantly lurks around every corner with ad fraud, brand safety, and data breaches presenting increasing threats - managing financial risk is now a key also a responsibility of marketing.

If a data breach causes an organisation to lose just 1% of its customers it will cost the business on average $2.8m (£2.1m), according to the IBM 2018 Cost of Data Breach study. Lose more than 4% of the customer base and the cost is closer to $6m (£4.7m).

"Marketing ain't what is was" is the new mantra. 

Today's seasoned marketeers now need to have a view on all kinds of company wide risk and for some it's creating burn out at best, along with unrealistic expectations from the board around what can/can't be done by historical silo based thinking, management and busted advertising budgets.

Just like the coal miners who carried 'Canaries' into the deep dark recesses of those coal mines in order that the early signs of danger could be spotted it seems that marketers are in need of their own digital canaries.

Prior to this pandemic 'Ad Tech' was made up of over 7k+ different companies, all of them involved in the digital ad buying ecosystem, this is a system that allowed brands and marketing companies to bid in real time to get their intrusive message in front of you and me, time, after intrusive time. 

Even if you, the marketer, doesn't buy the existence of ad fraud or think that it is under control already, consider the portion of your dollar that goes to what is known as the "adtech tax." Multiple studies over the years from different organizations have shown that 40, 50, 60, 70 percent of your dollar gets extracted from the supply chain by adtech companies (for their own profit); that means only a small portion of your dollar goes towards "working media" - i.e. placing the ads on the publishers' sites. 

Today the wasteful advertising budget era is no more - savvy marketeers need to go back to basics and find ways to 'connect' not intrude with the consumer

How about revisiting some of the thinking that went behind many of those great ads from yesteryear?

The creative was pretty awesome because the really good ones did something we can all relate to, they told a story, which is something that now sadly lacking in this machine gun, shoot them out fast mentality of ad tech.

Content Discovery via Social Media is one of the ways you can open up new conversations, find groups of 'real' people who are genuinely interested in you, your brand, your employees, and your company.