By: Dori Radi – WAVIT Managing Director

In today’s world of content proliferation powered by massive social media penetration and high-bandwidth, the game of brands’ connection is taking a completely different path. This is an era where audiences are no more just recipients of the brand’s message, they are playing an essential role in building a dialogue relationship within the world of communication. They are self-powered with means and tools to generate and filter the type of contents they are interested in without the third party’s influence, they are ignoring ads, cutting cable cords and downloading ad blockers like never before. This transformation has dramatically influenced the advertising industry, and major reshuffling has taken place in the line of powers. Established communication groups have rushed to reposition their service offerings in a desperate move to save the ground, new players have emerged from the dawn of this new era, even cats are taking a chunk of the advertising pie from those conglomerates “Grumpy Cat”. The days of traditional agencies’ models, which have historically leaned on paid media to focus on the top of the funnel (awareness) and the bottom of the funnel (conversions), are over.

Having said this, the same forces that are disrupting the advertising industry are also creating incredible opportunities (according to PQ Media, brands are forecasted to spend over $300 billion on content marketing in 2019, almost double that of 2018). These opportunities are driven by the numerous possibilities enabled by the major online media players and the dramatic shift in the content consumptions habits from the traditional TV screen to consumption on-the-go. However, capitalizing on this new opportunity will require a new type of thinking backed up by new type of skillsets combination. At the core of this combination sits the “data mining” and “intuition” where the secret recipe lies in the perfect mix between these two ingredients.

While, nowadays there is no shortage of data mining solutions, there is definitely a lack of data validation by the intuitive minds. And most of the marketers fall faulty in differentiating between fact and knowledge during the process of brand’s story-telling, I would say that a piece of data is a just fact, but knowledge goes further by aggregating facts in a dynamic and multilayered reservoir of analysis and observations in order to turn on that light bulb, we should not look at the new digital data flow generated by the machines with an automated mindset but put it under the disposal of our human “wisdom” in order to establish meaningful and value driven relationships with our consumers.

In the age of AI and the 4th industrial revolution, everybody is talking technology and machines. Marketers stand at the fork of balancing technology with human communication, and as consumer awareness, choice, and empowerment is at an all time high – we stand at the challenge of how content marketing should ride the wave of this new era.

Are you ready for the wave?
Contact us on: info@wavit.ae