In small companies, this is not an issue that ever comes up–traditional marketing, digital marketing, and possibly cleaning the break room are all merged–that’s Victor’s job. But at big companies, the kind that I work with, folks continue to wrestle with whether the old-style marketing organizations ought to be merged with the new cool digital folks.
Traditional marketing goes by different names in different places–many B2B companies have Marketing Communications (MarCom) and Event Marketing groups, while B2C companies often have Advertising (often through an agency) or Direct Mail teams. But the issue is the same. Do we take the people doing the old-fashioned work and group them with the newfangled social/search/local/mobile mavens?
The companies that I have seen go the merger route seem happier to me than the silo proponents. Here is what they have told me happens after they merge:
- Skills transfer. Every marketing organization is dealing with the tremendous change in skills required, so merging the groups and actually moving people’s responsibilities around can only help grow the overall skills of the organization.
- Better analytics. Digital can be measured much more easily than traditional, but when you merge the organizations, you can run tests in digital that inform your budget and creative decisions on traditional.
- Better focus. If you aren’t dividing the team between traditional and digital, that allows you to organize around more interesting splits, such as geographic or product lines or market segments or something else that makes sense for your business.
None of these benefits accrue to companies that adhere to the status quo of traditional-digital divide. Merge your organization and start making real money.
