A predominant portion of today’s marketers are qualitative; they’re into design, they’re into statistics, they’re into psychology, they’re into understanding the strategic aspect of behavioral economics and so forth, but the world is shifting to a tech or data driven arena in a significant way. Any marketer knows that the secret duty of any marketer is to build, nature and protect the brand, “that is sacra sic”.

It is very important to get clarity on the goals of your brand, nowadays marketers now have clarity on brand safety and suitability as strategic goals of their company. There should be a clear definition, clear on the importance of protecting their brand equity and their brand reputation as well as being clear on what their true north is as marketers. I remember years back when all we marketers wanted was data, like give me all the data, I want all the data then after collecting I would go and figure out a marketing strategy. 

Which leads us back to square one; Marketers must know what the true north of their brand is? What are the governing principles and the code of conduct for their brand, that point you to the statement mentioned above around brand reputation and brand equity. Knowing that the world that we will live in 2 or 3 years from now will be very different from the world that we are living in today. 

Having a true north as a guiding compass is great and which is also the right thing to have but how do you bring the true north to life, is something else, and were most marketers fall short. This subject requires extensive training, extensive research and reading because this is by far the main responsibility of a marketer by protecting, nurturing and building their brand.

How expensive is it to enforce data driven decisions? Large brands can spend billions and billions, but what if I am a small player in the industry; a start-up maybe or a medium sized company maybe, because for this sector they care a lot about every shilling or penny spent that it must generate a visible return that leads hopefully to a sale of their product, compared to larger companies for them every penny hurts and they’re not too many pennies to count. For them that is what really counts or stand being out of business very quickly.

Things like transparency of supply path optimization that help advertisers to be able to navigate, how to optimize their inventory and also help them move away from their inventory that is not helping them yield on their ROI. More and more mid-sized firms will be leaning into this service over time and advertising will shift more to live feeds and live social media video platforms. Digital marketing will shift to more contextual targeting and another section that I have not mentioned is pre-paid TV or home entertainment platforms the likes of Netflix. It will be a situation whereby businesses can advertise on content or platforms where they find higher engagement and the likes of Netflix is where the younger generation is shifting too. 

In the fifth paradigm technology is a leveler in the competitive field, even a small company is able to effectively compete with a large company and rise. In that kind of a democratic competing field that will work in favor of any brand is trust. Trust gets endangered in so many ways and one of it is definitely data driven. So if you’re operating in a way that nurtures data then that is spot on, but if you’re inadvertently appearing on those sites or inadvertently funding those sites that can damage your brand reputation, you’re eroding the trust and your brands reputational risk.

This leads me to ask ad agencies or marketers or businesses for example, do they have the ability to post factor by looking at the type of content despite of all the controls in place, pre-bid or post-bid but then post factor after the ads have appeared to track and say look, x number of ads have gone through the filters and have gone to the wrong sites and therefore two things arise from that; 1. You need to know, how much did it cost the company? 2. What is the extent of the damage? And 3. How do you recover that money? 

As you need to compensate the brand for lack of proper safety controls, it is also about accountability and proper use of datay. If I give the agency or marketer or social media company money and I have also given you the specs of what I want as a business in terms of advertising my brand but then my brand appears in some other place (say an adult entertainment site), which is contrary to my brand’s values. Where does the accountability reside and why is it that my brand should pay for it in terms of the reputational damage. 

Businesses are investing more and more on digital marketing and shifting their brand presence more towards new social media platforms that are trending, engagement is KING!

Marketing in the near future is also shifting to live feeds, so how will this be controlled as it gets more and more difficult to regulate live speeches that could go wrong, like hate speech, racial slur, promotion of violence etc.

Let me leave this for thought and challenge those in the marketing industry on brand safety, accountability and brand trust in the near future.

Alley Mtatya (pictured) is the digital marketing specialist based in Dar es Salaam. He can be reached through Email. [email protected]