During the past few years, the game of marketing and advertising has changed profoundly. No matter how talented the creative team is, an agency relationship is suboptimal if it does not include high-impact digital media in its advertising mix. Digital must be a fundamental building block of the brand and advertising strategy; it can no longer be an add-on or an afterthought. Digital also performs the vital function of keeping a closer touch with consumers, even as many of the old-style media and retail channels diminish or disappear.

The industry is now at the beginning of a consumer-centric digital age in which the traditional approaches to marketing products and services are no longer viable. Consumers are in control; they have greater access to information and greater command over media consumption than ever before. The emergence of a host of new media — the Internet, DVRs, iPods, mobile phones, and other devices — has sharply constrained marketers’ ability to use analog media (TV, radio, and print) to shape brand preferences and consumer behavior. The corporate demand for marketing accountability and return on investment has reached a crescendo, and the traditional relationships between marketers and their ad agencies are being refined.

The new environment is “always on” because the consumer is always present: constantly seeking opportunities and value, taking advantage of multiple media, and at the same time being bombarded with ever more media in ever more forms. Marketers are “always on” as well: the rapidly changing nature of their audiences — and the means of connecting with them — requires continual experimentation, innovation, and shifts in strategy. Instead of being satisfied with knowing how many people are exposed to their brand messages, some marketers are working hard to determine how well their messages are received, whether they are powerful enough to generate a customer response, and exactly what those responses are. They have learned a primary lesson from the always-on media environment: it does not matter how many people are watching; what counts is whether they are paying attention and responding. With knowledge of this kind, marketing is being reborn as a consumer-centric craft.

There are forces holding back progress for many national advertisers. Marketing metrics and agency economics are still built around TV, and TV is still the easiest way to get retail and trade partners excited. Also, metrics are still not comparable across media. Even in digital media, where metrics are a compelling part of the value proposition, they are rarely standardized and not well understood. Marketers still lack the number-crunching skills needed to determine return on investment, and many companies still think of new media as an “experiment” rather than as a core component of brand building and sales.

Advertising grew as a faith-based initiative; with ad agencies and marketers alike believing it worked best when it raised awareness of brands and products across a large swath of a target population. Success was based on gross rating points, print circulation, or total share of voice achieved — in sharp contrast to any measure of advertising’s true impact on consumer behavior. It was not until the 1990s and the rise of the Internet that the accountability revolution commenced. CMOs would no longer be satisfied with campaigns that merely built awareness. They would demand campaigns that lead to action, and insist on analysis and insight that could substantiate an ad’s influence on consumer preference, purchasing, and loyalty, pushing ad agencies and media companies to go beyond reach and frequency to more tangible and quantifiable evidence of returns on marketing investment. Determining the best marketing mix for any brand requires a great deal of experimentation, networking, innovation, analytics, and risk taking — qualities associated more with start-ups and smaller companies. Major marketing companies are engaged in a worldwide hunt for skills, insight, and the combined analytic and creative power needed to make the most of this new media and advertising environment.

The exploding availability of digitally-driven consumer data has transformed marketing into a new frontier application for business mathematics. Just as mathematics has revolutionized finance, it is reinvigorating marketing, as new models and algorithms extract value from consumer and business databases, enabling more precise targeting of messages to each consumer. One of the new marketer’s key skills will be the ability to marry fluency in higher mathematics and computer modeling to marketing flair and creativity.