As the ad industry’s annual Advertising Week gets underway in New York City, many marketers still feel in the dark when it comes to digital know-how, according to new research from Adobe. More than 80% of professionals are still receiving their digital training informally on the job and only 9% feel fully confident their digital efforts work, the poll of 1,000 U.S. marketers found.
No one hands you a playbook on how to make it all work, but the opportunity for marketers is too great to let uncertainty slow them down,” Adobe chief marketing officer Ann Lewnes said in a statement.
The poll results reflect the rapid pace of change within the sector: more than three-quarters of respondents (76%) said they believe marketing has changed more in the past two years than the previous half-century.
The industry is also still unsure how to measure success. 68% of respondents said they felt pressure to demonstrate a return on investment for their budgets and even more believed that measurements are important for tracking digital performance. But only 40% believed their companies were doing an effective job and even less, 29%, had faith in their own measurement approach.
Such uncertainty isn’t new to the industry—it’s these kinds of numbers reflecting a knowledge gap that explain why large and small marketing companies alike are pouring money into new digital solutions.
Big boys like
Other shops focus on providing tools to better engage with digital content over specific social media. Percolate makes it easy for brands to customize messages and images for different social platforms and quickly reach an audience base. Taykey scans the social chatter of the internet to figure out what topics are getting buzz and to help advertisers inject themselves into such conversations.
And the most recent cottage industry popping up to may be user-generated images. Startup Olapic recently raised $5 million to help brands like New Balance solicit content from users to then appear on the company’s websites. Last week Curalate, a company that already helped brands manage their presence on visual sites like Pinterest and Instagram, also jumped into the user-generated content party with a new product, Fanreel, that does the same thing for Urban Outfitters,
“I’ll be honest with you, it’s super hard,” says Moira Gregonis, senior marketing manager at Urban Outfitters. “You have to go with the flow, and you have to be more authentic.”
Reaching customers is still the top concern for marketers, Adobe found, with 82% of responses. Knowing if work is effective was marketers’ next biggest concern.
Two numbers to also keep an eye on: how marketing dollars are affecting overall company efforts. While 60% of respondents in the poll said they expect their companies to spend more on digital marketing, less than half said marketing has a large influence on their corporate business strategy.
Adobe commissioned its study from Edelman Berland, which surveyed the 1,000 marketers online between Aug. 26 and Sept. 11 with a 3.1% margin of error at a 95% confidence level. You can see the full report with all the numbers and angst here.
Adobe’s report calls the situation a “crisis” and the study’s positioning is clear from its title, “Digital Distress,” but the results merely reinforce what many in the industry already know: digital marketing online and over social media is moving too fast to have a formal playbook that works, and many teams are being built on the fly out of necessity, not prior expertise.
That doesn’t mean the industry should panic, though—just that there’s still a ton of opportunity should advertisers continue to better figure out what works, with plenty of room for the small solution providers to move in to help.
Have anything on your radar for Advertising Week? Know any interesting companies looking to help close the gap that Adobe found? Let me know in the comments and follow me on Twitter: Follow @alexrkonrad
