Digital Marketing & traditional Marketing - How do I get the best of both worlds?

How do I organise my marketing department in the wake of the digital revolution?

This question is increasingly being asked in the client side world. Over the last eight years I have seen the online marketing evolve, or snowball, through the following stages;

The handful of pseudo techno geeks playing at building websites in the corner of the office

The ‘smart’ high-flyers of the organisation who joined the pseudo techno geeks to try out some ‘new business models’ with a newly acquired bucketful of cash

The bruised and battered eCommerce people who emerged from the dot.com boom licking their wounds, but still believed that what they were doing was valid and vital to the future of the organisation they were working for

The digital specialists who grew from the eCommerce people and began to demonstrate results in their medium through the application of common sense, analytics and the sheer accountability that’s built into the channel

The Digital Marketers who budgets are approaching parity to offline channels and who are driving up to 70% of the new business in some bricks & clicks business

 

In most industries the growth and importance of Digital Marketing is not up for question. The change is no longer something ethereal that will happen ‘in a few years’, it’s here. Right now.

Why then does it feel that traditional businesses are not tackling this issues head on? To me there are some things that are fundamentally broken, that are preventing businesses from evolving further, and they are ;
 

• The Digital Marketers, despite their successes, are still metaphorically sitting in the corner of the office.
• People  working in offline roles understand the shift, but don’t seem to be interested in learning new skills and making the transition
• Senior management have gaps in their knowledge about strategic opportunities online and there is no program in place to help them bridge the gap
• In many cases front-line staff know less about their online proposition than the customer they’re talking to.

 How do companies get past this? What is it we have to do to get out of this trough an up the other side? 

I love new media. I love the fact that we are so excited about the opportunities open to us at the moment. We are genuinely in the middle of a revolution, and it’s very cool. But we have to realise that to some extent we are in an echo chamber. Soon we will have to work out how we bring our offline colleagues into the conversation.

This is not a issue pertaining only to clients. I think that many traditional agencies are suffering from the same problem, how do they in corporate their digital offshoot seamlessly in to the rest of the company? In a way that comes across as integrated to the client?

Interestingly I was talking to the Strategy Director of my online media agency, and he felt there is an inverse corollary here to some issues experienced by Digital Agencies. i.e. they often lack some of the skills of traditional agencies particularly around media planning, client management & the ability to demonstrate skill in aspects of offline business and how it complements digital.

I really feel that the businesses that will win in this area are the ones who learn how to cement these two worlds together. So that the combined skills in both areas become the ‘normal’ way of doing business, and not exclusive to the geeks sitting in the corner.

Do I have my early adopter glasses on, or should I wait for everyone to catch up? This is a massive issue and I would appreciate your thoughts?