Build the system before you have the idea

Why digital keeps winning the budget

Doug Bird founded Wild Air and spent five years as head of sports marketing at Red Bull, so he has no reason to talk down digital. His explanation for why it keeps taking the budget is not about effectiveness at all. It is about the meeting afterwards.

Marketers build around what they will have to defend, he says — "how am I going to be safe in the next board meeting?" Digital hands you the numbers for that meeting: the engagement rate, the comparison against the category average. The split between channels, in his account, comes from "what is going to enable me to deliver the best reported outcome, as opposed to what is going to best connect with my consumer."

In-person is measurable, when the plumbing exists

The claim he will defend is that this is a systems gap rather than a measurement impossibility. "It's often as measurable as digital is, if you have the systems and infrastructure in place." At Red Bull the job was getting as many cans into the hands of the target market as often as possible, and everything was built up from what happened on the ground: interactions counted at each point of sale and activation, leads captured where there was a real reason to hand over details, and a Red Bull Mobile offer that traded free connectivity and wi-fi on site for first-party data.

Which leads to the line most likely to annoy a creative team, and most likely to be right. "The ideas are almost the things that you start to work on last. You start to focus on systems and what you need the outcome to be, and then you reverse engineer that against what you're going to do."

Go where people already are

His example of the model working belongs to a brand with no budget to fight the category. Saucony could not outspend Nike, Asics, New Balance or Adidas, so it went to run clubs with a trailer, 25 pairs of shoes to try on, music and a camera crew. For a 50K budget, that produced a lead list of around 50 people per execution plus a stream of genuine reactions to push into digital, and "that whole flywheel starts to turn."

The failure mode is the opposite instinct: a brand builds its own playground and wonders why nobody comes. Customers "are playing in this park, having an absolute jol, but the brands over here are going, well, we're going to create our own."

There are no easy wins without preparation

We asked him for the quick wins available to an overwhelmed marketing manager, and he declined to pretend. "An easy win is an easy win if you prepared and you're able to take advantage of it." If the digital side is still being figured out every month, the in-person opportunity that appears next week cannot be taken.

Tshiamo Maremela of A Very Cool Studio arrives at the same place from the culture side, which is a useful cross-check: a healthy dashboard can coexist with a brand that matters less every month. Both are saying that the reporting layer decides what gets funded, so the fix is to build the layer that can see the thing you believe in.

Doug's own anchor for all of it is older than any platform: "In the most successful brands that I've seen in real life, it comes back to word of mouth," and everything else is there to serve that job.

Try this week: take the next in-person thing on your calendar and write its measurement plan before its creative brief — what you will count, who captures it, and what the number has to say to be worth repeating.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.