I was struck by a recent Marketing Week poll that 65% “believe older marketers are being edged out by digital natives in the job market.”
The terms “Digital Natives” and “Digital Immigrants” were coined by Marc Prensky in 2001 to define a generational divide of those born before and after the advent of digital.
As technology continues to impact every aspect of marketing, the terms are used more and more frequently to categorize how adept marketers will be based on their age. The labels discount experience in favor of youth. They eschew traditional marketing in favor of the new, new thing.
The Marketing Week article includes the story of an experienced marketer named Jan Gooding, who had been head of strategic communications at BT and owned her own consultancy. Yet when she tried to look for an agency management position in her mid-40s, she faced a block:
“I was told by two top head-hunters that I was too old and wouldn’t even get an interview – it was that blunt.”
I think it’s a false dichotomy. It’s less about technology than it is about mindset. As Diageo CEO Ivan Menezes put it, “It is not about doing ‘digital marketing’, it is about marketing effectively in a digital world.”
I liked Russell Parsons’ assessment of digital natives in a related Marketing Week editorial:
“A good marketer puts strategy first. Thinks customer, before thinking product, service or campaign execution. Being customer orientated, therefore, trumps the fact that they haven’t grown up with Snapchat, WhatsApp and Uber. It pays to be curious and questioning, of course, but that should be the case regardless of age. Overlooking someone because of their age risks losing out on the strategic and business nous that comes with having been around the block. You don’t have to be digital native to understand the advantages of digital and you don’t have to be pushing 50 to understand the basics of what you do.”
Here are a couple related cartoons I’ve drawn on this topic:
“Growth Hacking“ March 2014
“Digital Transformation“ November 2016
Themistocles Papassilekas says
April 13, 2017 at 3:27 amThat.
My first (freelance) jobs were designing eshops and online campaigns back in 1995 or 1996, but I consider myself a traditional engineer (albeit with an emphasis on digital) since I was educated that way: Economics, MBA, Diploma in Marketing…
What I find, time and again, is that those ‘digital natives’ may be very good at optimizing a campaign or promoting a post or running A/B tests or benchmarking your SEO or analyzing your funnel at sub-atomic level; but they usually lack basic marketing knowledge, common sense, something about what *drives* the whole thing.
Let us not forget, Digital is a *channel*. It’s just a sub-group of marketing activities. Why are we talking about digital marketing and not about ‘TV marketing’ or ‘radio marketing’ etc? Think back to the Mad Men era, when TV started coming out on its own as a marketing channel – did the rest of the world stop (r)evolving? Did all marketing outside the UHF (or was it VHF back then?) crawl to a stop? Were the marketeers doing print or outdoors or radio fired?
Of course not. I think the whole dichotomy is a symptom of people always thinking they’re living in the most exciting era ever when the most things happen, and suffer from a sort of backward-looking myopia, forgetting all that led to the moment.