A newly report by ADMA has predicted Australia will soon follow other overseas countries where over 50 per cent of all ad spends are now in the digital space.
However, the marketing association warns that many agencies and marketers themselves are falling behind in terms of understanding the latest marketing technologies while failing to recruit and retain appropriate tech-literate staff.
The report is titled The Digital Transformation Of Marketing and you can download a copy here.
It found that digital already accounts for close to 40 per cent of total advertising spend in Australia and “it will not belong before it represents the majority of the advertising spend”.
However, the report predicted “disruption ahead for the contemporary CMO”.
It noted: “CMOs are now increasingly expected to act as the customer voice in their companies not only fighting for that voice to be heard but actively engaging at a design level for product and service evolution.
“Budget remains the biggest impediment to faster development of digital marketing platforms and programs. The most successful marketers are likely to be those who can win such battles internally, probably as peers in the C-Suite, and eventually as contributors at board level.
“It won’t get any easier. Technology solutions are still emerging rapidly even as marketers try and make sense of current solutions.”
It warned of a skills shortage and companies would need to invest heavily in staff training and retention.
When it came to skills and training, the report noted the following five major points:
• People need to re-skill much more quickly.
• Employees leave when they are not challenged so you have to keep them engaged.
• Millennials change jobs so frequently that skills often just walk out the door, which makes the company skeptical about training.
• Often the best approach is to find the best person for the role and then commit to training them up.
• New employees often come into an organisation knowing more than the people in the department which is the reverse of what happened it the past.
