Velkommen til Lorn.Tech – en læringsdugnad om teknologi og samfunn. Med Silvija Seres og venner.

Silvija Seres: Welcome to a Lørn Masterclass. My name is Silvija Seres, and my guest today is Ida Serneberg. Program leader in digital marketing and social media at Noroff School of technology and digital media. Welcome, Ida.

Ida Serneberg: Thank you.

Silvija: I’m just going to say a few words about this different style of chat that we have started doing with Lørn. So, traditionally Lørn conversations are about reference cases in innovation, but we have found that our listeners also wish for a little bit more theory, so this is one of the 50 masterclasses that we are creating where the intention is to give people just the basic set of concept models and examples in a particular subject that we have reference cases within, and the topic today, Ida, is digital marketing. Sounds good?

Ida: Yes, very good.

Silvija: Excellent. Ida, just tell us very briefly. Who are you and what do you do that relates to digital marketing?

Ida: Yes, I’m the program leader of digital marketing and social media at Noroff School of technology and digital media, and I’ve been working here teaching the future marketeers digital marketing for the last three years. Before that, I was 15 years in the industry working as social media manager for Nordic Choice hotels and web manager for several big projects in Sweden. I’m originally from Sweden. I’ve lived here in Norway for 10 years, but I also have an international background. Studied in South Africa and worked in the finance industry in Switzerland, so yeah. That’s me.

Silvija: Very cool, Ida. And I know from social media that you’re very proud of your students. You celebrate them and encourage them to go for more. Tell us a little bit about Noroff and in particular, your part of it.

Ida: Yes. So, Noroff is a vocational school, and vocational school means my responsibility and social responsibility. The mission I have from the government is to enable students to go straight to work without any further educational actions- That’s actually the law. I often say that in my program, which often is a one-year program, is a full year of a job application. So, it’s not just about getting a job after school, but I observe school as the job world that you need to prepare the students for the future work-life. And in our case, we teach a lot of different programs. We have graphic design, 3d design, frontend development, and cyber security, and I teach at the digital marketing program. If you’re my student, you will most likely end up as a performance marketing specialist, content producer, or even head of marketing for instance. So that’s what my students do, and as I said I’ve had classes now, and actually, 80% of my students entered the job market, and specifically the digital marketing industry before or right after the exam, so I’m very proud of them, yes.

Silvija: They’re very, very good. I know from experience. Ida, tell us what is digital marketing and how is it different from what we traditionally think is marketing?

Ida: I think it’s a really relevant question because in today’s world we put digital as a prefix on everything and the question is what is digital and what is not digital? So marketing, in general, is a field that goes back to Aristoteles. It goes back to the act of persuasion, so if we look at marketing as such, it’s about having your intended audience or a potential customer making an action, for instance, a purchase, in accordance with your goals. Then we put that digital on, and all of a sudden it becomes so complicated. And right before, I talked about performance specialists. We have all these buzzwords in today’s marketing world, and I think it’s important to think about it in the way that what technology made to marketing is that each step of the process can be used with the support of technology or digital technology, so I often talk about The Three P’s. The Three P’s are Position or Placement, Price, and let me come back to the third one. But the funny thing is that we often think –

Silvija: Product?

Ida: No, it’s not product. I’m going to be there in a minute, but the funny thing is –

Silvija: People?

Ida: No, so that’s the classical Four P’s. So, we talked about The Four P’s, that’s also important. That’s good old Kotler. He’s one of these guys that you still talk about. He talked about The Four P’s like Place, Product, Price and Promotion. And the funny thing is very often when we talk about marketing, we only talk about promotions. When I ask my students what digital marketing is, they say it’s social media ads at the beginning of the year. I always ask people that. It is an advertisement through Google. Advertisement online, so we very often think about marketing as an advertisement. That is only promotion, so marketing is the whole set of things around it. When we went online, the big major shift was that we could talk about the search corridor. You can say that you have two types of marketing. Either it’s inbound, which is that you have people searching for something, they have a need, and your job as a marketer is to make your company as visible as possible in that search corridor. So that’s one thing. The other one is interruption. Back in the day it was knocking on the door and selling your hover, right? Nowadays interruption marketing is the TV ad. The commercial TV ad, but it’s also what’s pops up in your feed while your scrolling looking for what people just recently did, meaning that you as a product, you’re not only competing with other competitors, you’re competing with people’s grandma, people’s cousins and so forth. And back to my P’s again. If we look at placements for instance. What digital made to marketing is that the placement became digital. You can place an ad on a whole variety of new kinds of placements, and when I say placements, it’s typical placements like in the back of a magazine. But it’s also on VG.no, like in a big newspaper. It’s what covers all of it, right? But then you also have something that’s called outdoor marketing. Outdoor marketing has increased immensely in the last couple of years, and what do we see in outdoor marketing? They’ve gone from those papers to those big…

Silvija: Billboards.

Ida: Billboards, right. And they’re also digital, so that’s where you have the placement. Then we have prices, and think about back in the old days where you had the sales management around your magazine, and they would call different potential customers, and they would say “Okay, you want to advertise in our magazine. We can offer you this and that, this and that” If you were advertising for a longer period, you would get a discount. The whole process nowadays is automatic. It’s made through the usage of technology and that gives us a whole different variety of new, hard, difficult words that we can predict the price. We can predict the behavior of people, and we can then have a much smarter algorithmic price model than back in the day. And then there’s the third P that I can’t remember, but it will pop up in my mind soon. 

Silvija: So basically, digital marketing is placement or visibility of your products, pushing your products through technology that’s helping you with each of these steps that you’ve mentioned?

Ida: Yes.

Silvija: And technology is making everything in a way easier for creators and distributors, but at the same time there’s far more competition. Is the nature of the subject changing? Could you tell us the basic history of the subject, and is it harder or easier today?

Ida: Oh yeah, that’s such a good question Silvija. Is it harder or easier? So that’s also in my second lesson in digital marketing. What’s different from old media to new media, or old marketing to new marketing? And then the students will write different notes, and then you often have contradictory answers. It’s easier to target people and it’s easier to reach out. You can reach out to a global audience within the next minute, which you couldn’t back in the day. So, is the nature different? But then someone would say it’s harder because the volume has changed, so you can think about marketing from that perspective that every day when you open your Facebook feed or your LinkedIn feed, you have among 1.500 to 15.000 messages waiting for you. You’re only to get a selection of them. The algorithm will decide the selection of what you see in your feed. You’ll only see approximately 80 messages, so my job as a marketeer is to become the top 80 in the right audience, so for that matter, it’s harder, right? But speed made it easier on the other hand. The reach was all of a sudden higher, but then again, you’re reaching everyone and no one. Then we also have the concept of context collapse. Context collapse means that all of a sudden, you don’t know where your message will show up and that makes it also harder, then someone would claim that was also the issue with marketing. That the context collapse is always there, so yes and no. The concepts of marketing are still the same, we just have this technology that amplified parts of it.

Silvija: What are the most important concepts in your area? If we are to teach people five words that they can use to bluff about digital marketing, what would those five words be?

Ida: I would talk about the five qualities. To begin with, searchability. So, all of the sudden you’re searchable, so with the whole idea of a search engine, me as a customer, I can go online and I can start making a lot of research about vacuum cleaners and then I create needs along the way that I didn’t know that I had. So searchability is number one. Then you have that constant connectivity, and that creates a whole lot of problems for us. I think this is the issue that is being addressed more and more, that constant connectivity means I can reach out to my customers 24/7. They can reach me and that requires that we are online 24/7, but now we see a shift in that. “No, we don’t want to be online all the time”, but what if a client posts something about you on Twitter at 11 clock in the evening, and you don’t see it because that’s outside your opening hours, and when you wake up in the morning the next day, you all of a sudden has a big PR-problem. So that’s another thing. Persistence is also important. What comes online, stays online. So here you see your reputation. And again, going back to good old Kotler and his four P’s. And if we say that “Okay, that’s only advertising. That’s what marketing is. That’s a promotion”. And Kotler actually said this in his late years. Kotler, professor in marketing, is over 90 years old and is still active, and he says that there’s too much one P-marketing in today’s world, but marketing is also about the product and what you could offer the people. If it’s not a good product then the internet will tell you so, so that’s the persistence that you need to think about marketing as a whole. The whole organization and everyone in your company is a marketeer. That’s the third one. The fourth one is scalability is what I already touched upon It’s the fact that you can reach a global audience in one click, and you can reach an audience that wasn’t an intended one. I remember that the government in the Netherlands created this fantastic website where they wanted to show how to get easy access to the demography of the Netherlands, and you could just walk into your area, and it pops up like a really nice graph. This is your demographic in your neighborhood. This is the average age. Most single households, and also how many immigrants and where they came from. Then someone picked that up. Someone from a right-wing party, or even extreme rights, and used it against the purpose. They used it to show “Look how our country is going” and so forth. Sometimes you have a message and it will be misused, and it’s so much easier in today’s world to have misinformation. There we have the concept of fake news and so forth. That’s the fourth one.

Silvija: We talked about replicability and scalability.

Ida: And searchability

Silvija: And instant connectivity and persistence.

Ida: Yes.

Silvija: So, there are pros and cons, but really, there’s not an alternative. We cannot undo the digital. What should we be most careful about and what does successful implementation look like?

Ida: Really good question. If we go back to 2004. I think that’s a really important year, so let me give you a brief history lesson, not on digital marketing, but rather social media which is really essential in this universe. So, in 2004 that fall, there was a huge conference in California. It was called the Web 2.0 Conference, and it was here this concept was coined. Web 2.0. This social outbreak of the internet. It was actually the code html5 that was invented at that time. Then a few months there was a little webpage that was created that was called YouTube, and YouTube marks the shift of Web 2.0. Until that time, the internet was kind of static. You had information there. You’ve had forums where you maybe shared things, but in 2004 we saw the big companies coming up. From Facebook to YouTube and so forth. So that was the Web 2.0. So fast forward a few years until 2013, or actually 2012 marks a shift in the history of Facebook. That’s the year where the feed is invented, and the feed is one of the most important inventions in Facebook history. Up until then, you didn’t have your own feed, and that’s why if you go back on your Facebook page, Silvija, and it doesn’t make sense. You were writing messages back and forth, back and forth then. Because we didn’t have that feed. We went into the profile of each person and we didn’t really understand that other people can see this. That’s the scalability again, and in 2013 the feed came. The feed made it possible to commercialize. That’s the year we started the commercial aspect of the internet, and especially of social media. Where you started with programmatic ads, to a larger extent you could start target in a very diligent and intelligent way in 2013. 

Silvija: The idea is that you could program your ads to go to a particular group, by age, by sex, by location etc.

Ida: Exactly. So that’s also the era where the usage of cookies. The fact that when you entered a webpage, you leave traces and information about you and this is being used for marketing purposes. This created a slight awareness about the fact that “Okay, what about privacy?”. In 2018 in June, we got the GDPR. I mean, it was a process of many years. They started to work with it in 2015, and GDPR was a callout to our industry. Every time you entered a webpage, you broadcast your identity and your personal information to the rest of the world. “Hey, marketing industry. You need to do something”. And that to me marks the shift to the next one, Web 4.0. And if you google that, you’ll find a lot of “Okay, so what is Web 4.0 going to be like?”. Web 4.0 is the era of regulations. I would call it the ethical aspect of the internet. There is going to be a massive change the next year with cookies. Google are phasing out their cookies. We talk about “The cookie death”, meaning it will not be that simple anymore to target people just like that. We will see that in the years to come, I always say to my students that the regulations that you need to know, they’re not even invented yet. I think as a marketeer, one of the core skills you need to know these days is to be reactive to regulations. I think it’s so interesting because of what we’ll see next year. We will always have the need to market ourselves. To make ourselves visible, everyone is asking me “Well, how’s this world going to be like?”. I have a very dear cousin who works with these kinds of issues in Stockholm, and she always says “Next year, we’ll have a new internet”, and that sounds very dramatic, right? It’s an exaggeration I would say, but still, what we will see next year is that we will have first-party data. We will work with the login function on our web pages like you and Lørn.Tech do. You have your own, we call it Walled Garden. That’s a 100$ word. Walled Garden, that’s your platform, or your webpage, and you own the data. You have the right to talk to your customers in that secure garden. That’s going to be the future of marketing, and that’s why we marketers need to work with creating secure platforms like back in the day. You know your customers. You’re the owner of the corner shop, and you know that every morning at 9, Silvija comes to pick up her bread. Every day at 12, Linda comes and buys her lunch, for instance.

Silvija: I think this is super interesting. I have just to ask you for a couple of explanations, Ida. One of them has to do with knowing the regulation. Also perhaps knowing the algorithm. I remember there was no end to the discussion on how does Google do this or that, nobody wants SEO, it’s terrible. But on the other hand, what you saw was as soon as you published information about, let’s say search optimization, people would look for tricks. Invisible text, especially text related to pornography and hidden ads. My take on that is that I always thought that if you can’t make your content compete on its own strength, then you might as well not do this at all. So rather than looking for dirty tricks or finding holes in the regulation in the future as well, I believe we should make sure that we have the product and we have good enough content for the placement. What do you think?

Ida: So, one of the main foundations in marketing is that you always have an objective. You always have a placement and then you have a creative. Those are the three fundaments and you kind of find that even in rhetoric’s, so this is an old theory. Very often, the trick is to be finding the placement. It’s about “How can I hack the algorithm?”. “How can I make sure I’m at the top of these search results?”. “How can I understand the algorithm so that I know exactly how to be the best?”. But what we know is that 80% of all marketing activities fail on their creatives. Creatives are the content you’re talking about. That’s where you have the gold. You can’t trick yourself out of that, and the most typical question people ask me is “What’s the best time to post?”. There is no such thing as a best time. Again, we have the algorithm, but still. If your story is worth sharing and if it’s this wow-effect to it, that’s what matters, not time. I believe that what we need is marketeers who know the regulations. We know that we need to know some technology and understand technology well enough to be able to at least hire the right people to create the right platform that we talked about, but finally, we need good storytellers.

Silvija: So, we in Lørn believe in the marketing of knowledge and innovation through stories. What I find is that there is respect out there for good content creation. I just want to hear you on that, because there is also this belief that AI is going to scraping up other content and creating our own automatically creative content, but somebody is going to give some text-seed to the machine. Somebody needs to create some new content and has some new ideas for the whole automated machinery if you want robot-journalists, programmatic ads, or everything else to work. How do you inspire people to create good content? How do you inspire them to experiment with different content creation platforms? I’m looking for somebody who will make us a really good TikTok for every good case that we have in our library. Some people are too young and simply don’t care for the topic, and the people who care for the topic don’t dare to touch TikTok. How do you boost that content creativity? 

Ida: That’s one of my favorite challenges. I think about it often because that’s what really makes the outstanding marketeer an outstanding marketeer. There are a lot of things here to take upon. To begin with, what can machines do? I’ve heard about and read about some of the storytellers that we have in our society. Journalists like you said, but also priests. I’ve heard someone “Okay, so what we have an AI make the preaching for each Sunday”, and that’s totally possible actually. Then we stand with this idea of “Okay, what can humans do?”. In terms of creating novelty, that requires human intelligence. Novelty is to create something new, and new requires using your senses. What I try to do is to create all these kinds of activities where we share stories using all our senses. Tactile, and not only visually. It’s a very visual culture we have right now, but as we’ve known from this pandemic is that we also need touch and we need tactile. So that’s one thing. Secondly, it’s also about inspiration. I try to encourage my students to read a lot. Read many different things, but at the end of the day, observation. What we use with our human eyes. That’s also incredibly important, and how we smell the world. Robots of today cannot connect the dots, so the activities that we have to work on are connecting the dots. Secondly, you’re also into that “Okay, TikTok”, so what we need to know is to understand and explore the different functions of each medium, so you have a variety of possibilities in TikTok that you have in this medium, this podcast-medium. Then you need to go out and explore and observe. How are people using that, TikTok. Secondly, how can we use those functions in a relevant way, and that’s really exciting because every time there’s a new medium, there’s a whole bunch of functions connected to it. What I encourage everyone to do is to go out and explore. With that said, everyone doesn’t have to be on TikTok, but we need to do is to at least explore the possibility. Another one is Clubhouse. Clubhouse is really linear to begin with. You need to meet up at a certain point. It’s kind of like the instant connectivity and a response to that. It’s not instant connectivity, you actually have to meet at a certain time, and it’s also about to back to the near and the dear ones. It’s affinity-based. It’s based on interest. You can go out and find people that are also into knowledge and technology and find those peers. To explore is the answer.

Silvija: I’m fascinated about how often we create technology for a particular idea or purpose, and they end up solving a different problem. The people that understand that hidden value or that hidden problem that they actually solved. There is a story about messaging, SMS, that was created without many expectations, but eventually managed to create this very requirement of connectivity solution for people independent of the quality of their networks. Almost indifferent. I’m fascinated for example by Clubhouse. It went up like a rocket. It has sort of come down now. I don’t miss the hype, but I miss the service. I very much enjoyed having Clubhouse-events because of the possibility to pull the audience up to the stage and give them some real participation opportunities. I’m sure you can use a chat function in a conference, but that might not be seen by most people. Here they are on the stage, and they’re actively participating. I love that. I think that many of these media like TikTok with its filters. It creates a new medium. It creates a new format, and it takes time for us to figure out the real value of that format. It’s the people that manage to combine these formats that are going to get to something interesting over time. But basically, if I summarize. If I make a bumper sticker of what you were talking about now in terms of successful implementations, what I hear you say is to focus on the creative. Make sure that you know the technicalities of the placement, create realistic, ambitious objectives, and then go creative. Don’t stop. When we came to pitfalls, you were saying that it takes a lot of work, but also that it might be too much data?

Ida: Yeah. I couldn’t have said it better, I liked your sticker there. It’s very well said. One thing that I noticed is that we get very caught up in data in today’s world. We end up having too much data and at the same time I have so many of my students saying “Well, the companies that we work with, they don’t have data”. And that’s very often not the case. They often haven’t structured their data well enough. But also, we’re just overwhelmed by this data and we all start to measure very irrelevant things. Likes, clicks, and so forth. What you should measure is over a long period. So, when you have a campaign and an activity, even if that activity only lasts for a month, you should look at and be attentive to the consequences for a long time. I also find it very important to address that creating content is time-consuming. I think you in Lørn know that creating good, qualitative content requires much more time than people think. Investing time when it comes to content.

Silvija: Time well spent. And there are no real shortcuts, I think. You mentioned three examples for me, and I’ll like you to basically explain them to us. You talked about the Marshmello concert live in Fortnite, Rema 1000, and SKAM, the show. Why do you like them?

Ida: I guess I took really odd examples, but it was what popped in my head. To begin with, Marshmello. The gaming industry is one of the most undervalued possibilities that we have in marketing. Think about how many gamers we have. The gaming industry is not only for kids. It’s for everyone. I’m sure that everyone listening is having a distraction app on our iPhone what we do when we just want to relax. Gamification is such a big part of today’s world, and Fortnite is probably one of the biggest games that we have and one of the most money-making games. Epic Games is the company behind Fortnite. They had a few years ago, and I know this because my nephew talks about it. I don’t play Fortnite, but I listen. And that’s also one of my number one tips. Ask your kids. Try to follow them, and my nephew William, he’s a big fan of Fortnite. Marshmello is an artist, and he had his first-ever live concert within the game. That’s really something that we will see in marketing. It’s already implemented in the gaming industry, but it’s going to be in a very sophisticated way in the years to come. This is one of the examples that I always take at the beginning of the year because it’s so fascinating. Go search for Marshmello concert on YouTube. I think it has about 25 million views. That’s one of the examples. Then Rema 1000 which is probably more known to us. Rema 1000 is probably one of the strongest brands that we have in the Norwegian market. If we go to their YouTube channel, you will see that they have this series about a man and his neighbor. They have that slogan that the simple life is always the best life.

Silvija: It’s the one where he’s had the tooth operation and he can’t unlock his door because his voice recognition doesn’t work.

Ida: Exactly. And I want to know how they came up with that idea, but I’m sure that they just created that one-shot advertisement and it evolved into this series. And seriality is also something that we haven’t talked about, but seriality is also a very big thing in marketing. Not only like Netflix, but creating a story that continues over time and over channels, even. That’s why that’s a really good example. SKAM. Why am I picking something like SKAM? SKAM is not a marketing activity, to begin with, it’s a series. But in SKAM, you have all the components of what I mean is a useful marketing campaign. To begin with, they started gathering data. They asked 16-year-olds “What would be themes that you would be interested in?”. They really understood their audience before they created the content. Then they created this piece of content and it lives on multiple channels at the same time. You can walk into their Instagram stories while you’re watching the play, there’s a whole webpage about it, and then they broadcasted at the times it was meant to be set. It really felt real. If the show was happening at 12:08, that’s also the time they published it. Then you had this whole fanbase that was created around it, and a fanbase that was broader than the intended one. Broader than just the young ones. Some of us were quite old, so there you have the scalability again. And I think it’s massively interesting that the last words of the SKAM series is from the feed. It’s from the chat, and it’s like all we need is love. And that’s not from the series, it’s not from the production, it was from one of the fans. That’s how they decided to end it with the audience. There you have an interactive audience as well which was also a key component in this world. I feel like I’m adding these key components all the time.

Silvija: I think it’s a really good way of adding them as well, because we look at concrete examples, that most of us have some associations with and then we can steal good ideas and try to see if we can translate them to our needs in digital marketing. And that brings it to the final questions, Ida. Where do I go to become a better marketeer, and you have recommended some books. You’ve said you’ve read 50 books only this spring, but you recommend “The Flow Book” and “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. Both of these books have been mentioned previously in the series, but say very briefly what are, and I like you to go a little more into digital minimalism before we end.

Ida: Oh yeah. To begin with your first question, where do you seek out information? Lørn.Tech is a good example of today’s world and how you can always learn new things, so I think you should have some go-to spot like that. You can of course always apply for a year at my class, but other than that, there are so many certificates. We have HubSpot. It’s actually a tool, but they have a fantastic resource where you can seek on content marketing and you can even take really good certificates. I mean, we’re all on this lifelong journey of learning. I find it so hard to say what you should read because I really want to know my audience if they’re my students or whoever. What’s your interest? And try to start with things that you really enjoy, but then I have these three go-to books that if you really need the basics. So, to begin with Kahneman. “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. There’s a scientific article by Kahneman and Tversky, 1979. It marks the shift in how we think about human behavior. And it’s so basic understanding the system A and system B, how we think the fast and slow at the same time. Having a sense of understanding as a marketeer that we need to talk to the whole brain when we talk to people and it’s very often cited. If you’ve read that, then you will bump into him everywhere. I’m such a fan of Kahneman and Tversky that I’ve read almost everything about them. There’s also another book, “The Undoing Project” and it’s about their friendship. About Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The psychologist really changed how we think and understand human decision-making. This is at the end of the day what we want to do as marketers. We want to change their behavior in some way or another. So that’s why I always say that’s it’s a go-to book. The same with “Flow” by Csikszentmihalyi. Csikszentmihalyi is also a psychologist, so both these books are psychology at the bottom. It’s also a book that’s widely cited. It’s really trying to understand creativity. Where does creativity come from and how can I reach that stage of flow into my life? That’s why I find that a really good book. And then I have my favourite author Cal Newport. Cal Newport wrote this book in 2019 called “Digital Minimalism”, and it’s really about the black sides of marketing and digital media in general. I just find that an important read.

Silvija: Very good Ida. I will actually go and read “Digital Minimalism”. I haven’t read it and I keep thinking both me and my whole team need to do it because I think we get kind of lost in the details and creativity untamed is also a very dangerous thing. I guess the discipline of focusing or the courage of prioritizing that we need to bring back into many of our creative processes. We’ve been through the basic concepts of digital marketing. We have talked through three really good examples, and we have also talked about further reading and some pitfalls. I think that people can look up both your course and other content from Lørn as examples, and I’m hoping actually that we’re going to work with your students on testing out some more of these new modularity’s of content creation, but also perhaps content distribution.

Ida: Yeah, for sure.

Silvija: Ida, thank you so much.

Ida: Thank you.

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