In the world of marketing, digital as a separate specialism is going to become obsolete. We’re moving to a post-digital world where digital is everything and everywhere and we’re going to get there sooner than you think.

If your future is in marketing, then digital marketing is your future.

The reality in MENA is that this is right around the corner. Just over 10 years ago, the total digital media investments in our region totalled less than $1 million. By this year, we estimate this to grow to $1.5 billion, or over 30 per cent of the total media investments.

At this exponential growth rate, digital will represent over 50 per cent of the total in just two to three years. Such a transformation will have a significant impact on marketing practitioners and we see four major shifts that will change the way we approach marketing.

New technologies, new specialisations

This movement of digital from the fringe to the core is already giving way to a wealth of sub-specialist roles, attracting new types of talent for jobs that didn’t even exist two to three years ago. At Omnicom Media Group, we’ve now employing people with backgrounds in computer science and engineering to come up with creative solutions for our clients.

This trend will continue as we anticipate we’ll need analysts, psychologists, developers and more to fulfil the growing and evolving needs of our clients. It will force agencies to rethink the distribution of expertise in our media and marketing teams.

Organising people around traditional media versus digital media disciplines will lead to new dividing lines. Experts will have to be focused on manual media buying versus programmatic or algorithmic marketing disciplines.

The challenge to the data duopoly

For the past 10 years, Google and Facebook have dominated in the data and technology space. They have undoubtedly led the way by marrying data and tech, giving birth to ad-tech solutions so effective they have spawned whole new industries.

They are at their heart, however, closed systems or walled gardens. Money goes in, data doesn’t come out. It’s a pay-to-play model and they own the learnings.

In our post-digital world, we see advertisers and agencies building their own ad-tech, unlocking the data that they own. This will be the key to achieving new levels of marketing effectiveness, not only rivalling these digital giants but also potentially outperforming them.

How will this happen? Companies and agencies need to collaborate to build data strategies that work for them.

Combating fraud in a digital space

Just as it enables, technology also brings new challenges. Over $100 billion is wasted globally every year through ads that were never seen by humans, but by machines or robots, or to fraudulent activity.

In the post-digital world, marketers will be fluent in ad verification and familiar with fraud technologies, because it will save them millions of dollars of investment. Smart marketers will deploy them as part of an ever-growing technology stack underpinning all their marketing efforts.

There will be big rewards for companies that play the long game, embrace new technologies and define their data strategies.

Digital meets physical

New tech is about to proliferate into physical retail environments, which will bring a level of measurement and targeting that once was the sole domain of e-commerce. We are already building bridges between consumers’ e-commerce behaviour and their retail shopping habits thus giving brands one total, holistic view of each customer. This integration of data is set to transform retail and e-commerce in ways we can barely imagine today. The announcement of Amazon Go at the end of last year shows that we’re moving to this new world faster than you think. The company announced that it was opening physical grocery stores, but with a twist: there will be no checkout lines.

Basically, you can walk into a store, pick up what you want, walk out and then you get charged automatically. How does this work?

According to Amazon, a combination of in-store sensors and machine learning (to track customer movements and stocks in store) as well as an app (to tie an individual to their account) will allow them to build the grocery store of the future. Again, building stores like this will just allow us to better understand customers and market to them accordingly.

As a business, embracing and staying on top of these trends is critical otherwise you risk falling behind more agile competitors. So the question is: how ready are you for the post-digital world?

The writer is the regional Executive Director — Specialist Companies at Omnicom Media Group MENA.