A generation of marketers leading businesses today are bluffing about their knowledge of the digital landscape, according to Unilever chief marketing and communications officer Keith Weed.
Headlining the first day of the Festival of Marketing 2016, Weed argued that a generation of marketers are slipping through the net and need to act fast to ‘tool up’ for the disruptive digital world or risk being left behind.
“We have three versions of people. On one side we have the digital natives who have been born and bred in a digital world. On the other side we have people like myself in my 50s who have children in their 20s and if I didn’t engage with them on digital platforms I wouldn’t have a relationship with my children.
“In the middle we have what I call the ‘lost generation’, people in their late 30s and early 40s who don’t yet have grown up children who are digital natives and weren’t digital natives themselves. These are the very people who are leading so many of our brands and businesses, and they’re bluffing too much about digital from what they read in the Financial Times or Marketing Week.”
Weed urged marketers to ensure they are fit to lead by embracing training and shaking off the association that taking part in training is “admitting I’m not as good as I probably should be”.
Unilever has increased its training budget and the number of days employees are given to train, introducing mandatory e-modules and workshops that start with basics programmes on search, programmatic and websites, and then layer up.
Bron en volledig artikel: MarketingWeek