Despite digital and mobile, the marketing rule book remains the same

Imagine being a marketer in 2014. Every day another venture capital backed mobile startup is attracting the media's attention, the existing mobile behemoths announce their latest hyper connected wearable device, a mobile ad network is reborn as a demand-side platform and another conference leads with the "mobile first" theme. What does this mean? Well surely it means you must need a new agency to do this, you need to build an app that will do that, the list goes on.

Every day you are bombarded with new figures that seem to tell you that marketing is no longer what it was. Digital is now bigger than TV in the US in terms of consumer time according to eMarketer. Mobile will take 70% of digital spend in the UK by 2018.

There's an avalanche of facts and putative actions that give marketing and agencies a bad name. The fact is that digital and mobile have certainly introduced new realities to the marketing landscape but the principles remain the same.

So the next time you see a flashy presentation, telling you that the rule book has changed and this statistic in particular illustrates why everything you have done before is now a waste of time, take a step back. Take a deep breath and remember the simple principles of marketing. Brands need to start where they've always started, with a communications plan and media strategy built around consumer, brand and cultural insights.

There will, of course, be many variables within this, including the product to be advertised, country, time of year and target audience. All of which will affect both the strategy and execution, but none of this should be news to clients.

Yes, it's true that the media landscape has become more complex and more interconnected – just under half of US millennials were active on social networks via computer whilst watching TV, according to a recent Harris Interactive poll – and more global and more technical, but that doesn't mean starting from scratch.

For all the change that's gone on in the agency world and the world of clients, three things that have always been true remain the same:

1. Global is nothing new in media

The Economist and the Financial Times are both longstanding global print titles. TV advertising and now the likes of YouTube offer brands global broadcast audiences. While the rise of the personal computer and the internet, have seen traditional print publishers digitise their offerings alongside the global portals like Yahoo and Microsoft.

2. Specialisms are nothing new

Big agencies (and some of the biggest clients) have teams of specialists (and have always had them) be it mobile, social, search or even TV and OOH.

3. Consumer behaviour is fundamentally the same

Technology has just enabled these behaviours to happen with a speed, intimacy and on a more global scale than ever before. It's been happening for at least the last decade and we've seen the rise of early dotcom businesses like FriendsReunited, MySpace transformed into "mobile first" operators such as Facebook, WeChat and WhatsApp.

The challenge for us as businesses remains the same – to deliver our brands' message, content or promotion to the consumer in the most relevant and engaging way. What has changed are the media platforms, technology and partners now at our disposal to achieve this. Therefore we now have the additional responsibility to ensure brands navigate today's complex yet interconnected media landscape in the most efficient and effective way possible.

Mobile is certainly an important part of this and plays an increasingly active role in a consumer's life and media journey. But what's critical is that it's not something that happens in isolation. In an ever more interconnected world, it would be silly if marketers treated this as a separate silo. They certainly shouldn't look at consumer time spent on mobile and translate that automatically into a share of budget. There is a reason why TV still takes the lion's share of media budgets – £141bn globally according to GroupM. It's not just industry inertia.

The first step to knowing how mobile fits in should be an understanding of the role that mobile plays within the consumer buying journey and how it interacts with other media. This will enable you to attribute your budget accordingly.

For example, econometric research told one of our travel clients that out-of-home and mobile combined drove 8% more sales than those media channels working independently. You can't benefit from that if you treat it as a silo.

We have another client who sees 19% of global revenue coming from mobile and tablet devices – but they haven't automatically allocated 19% of their media budget to mobile as a result.

Mobile also delivers information that helps brands understand how their other channels work, the data in customers' phones is critical to success in other channels. For example, using location data generated from mobile devices to enrich first-party intent data. Going forward this information is going to be a huge part of the way brands build connected media systems as opposed to media silos. Successfully applied – a tricky task in itself – and combined with other data sets that marketers already own, it will help brands build a unified data persona of their audience.

This, of course, is only possible if you look at the whole landscape and focus on the fundamentals of media and marketing. Our responsibility to brands is to deliver media experiences that connect with the consumer via the most effective combination of media and on the screen of their choosing. That doesn't mean slavishly matching budget to media consumption or treating new channels as too precious to integrate into what we already know.

So why over-complicate this, when the fundamentals of marketing/media planning haven't changed? Lets not get side-tracked by ideological or emotive discussions around which media channel or specialism is more important.

Instead, continue to focus on delivering relevant and engaging content grounded in insight – both consumer and brand – distributed via connected media systems and driven by data.

Jon Hook is head of mobile at Mediacom.

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