Yesterday, my vote was to kill the term eMarketing and start using Digital Marketing as the proper nomenclature (see eMarketing – Can We Please Kill This Term?).
Here’s what Parth Shukla – Client Strategist – TV & ISP Portfolio at Bell.ca had to say:
“My vote is for ‘Interactive Marketing.’ To me, Digital marketing denotes a media. We don’t hear of ‘TV Marketing’ or ‘Print Marketing,’ so why restrict what we do to digital media?
I think what we are doing is experiential vs. other types of marketing. ‘Interactive’ denotes how we touch the consumer, it’s not a one way street like TV, where we send a message, let a consumer react, capture his reaction and hopefully make the messaging more relevant next time we interact with him.
We use the Internet pages and email as a medium today, but as we are seeing it will expand to podcasts, videocasts, integrated with TV and many more mediums. There will be a time when the personalized marketing that we do moves into other interaction points in a consumer’s day.
I am personally looking forward to the day when billboards have personalized messages like in the movie Minority Report. It’s not the intrusiveness that piqued my interest, but the relevance. I would be more than happy to let Coke know that I only drink Coke with pizza, so don’t spend all of your ad dollars on me during the Super Bowl, just give me a coupon I can use every time I order pizza and you have my loyalty.
All the fun we are having online today is just a pilot, to learn how the consumer wants to ‘interact’ with us the marketers. This will soon encompass ‘all’ the interactions with the consumer. Why will it encompass all interactions? Because it will be relevant to whom it matters the most-the consumer.
So, today the one medium… tomorrow the world. Hail to ‘Interactive Marketing’.”
Martin Pilote – Internet Strategist for Desjardins Financial Security had this to say:
“I’ll add ‘experience’ marketing to your list. Actually, when I think about digital marketing with all the Podcast, Blogs and Web 2.0 applications, what I really see is a ton of new experiences for the customers and, to me, that’s what ‘eMarketing’ is all about.”
UPDATE: On May 25th, Mark Goren – Copywriter at Zoum Armada added his thoughts:
“The beautiful thing about ‘new marketing’ is that it gives people the ability to touch each other and control exposure in ways they never could before. Of the terms put forth, none have the warmth to express these benefits. Interactive? There’s still too much of a gaming connotation. Digital? I agree with Parth Shukla’s comments. eMarketing? Too 1990s. Online? Same. Internet Marketing would probably be the closest, but it remains cold, impersonal and distant, like the others.
That’s why I like Martin Pilote’s thought. ‘Experience marketing’ shifts the focus from marketer to consumer, right where it should be. Another way to express this idea would be to call new marketing ‘Touch Marketing.’ The notion of experience is in there, as well as the idea of being able to feel (both physically and emotionally), meet others (one big community) and affect outcomes (decide what you’re exposed to).”
The battle rages on… what do you think?