The year ahead in marketing and digital: Part 3 - digital - Marketing Week

Every year I pick out digital and marketing trends and developments which I think will shape the industry and its planning and thinking in the year ahead. There is an increasingly blurred line between'digital marketing' and'marketing' but the following trends focus on the digital elements of marketing. In part 1, I looked at broad macro trends affecting brands, and in part 2, marketing-specific trends. Econsultancy's recent research on'The New Marketing Reality' with IBM highlights the many challenges facing digital marketing: fragmentation, complexity, challenges in understanding the customer journey, challenges with organisational and data silos, confusion around metrics and what good looks like, managing both generalist and specialist agencies and vendors at the same time, lack of capability in areas like data and customer experience, faltering attempts to be more agile, lack of clarity in strategy and leadership. There is nothing particularly new here and there will not be in 2017.