How to fail in digital

"1. Pluck a C-level exec from a successful company. 2. Surround them with entrenched management teams that stand more to lose from change than they have to gain. 3. Mimic the ethos of successful 'disrupter' brands, even if those brands are unrelated to your company. 4. Create some confusing brand campaigns that normal people are puzzled by, but management loves. 5. Zip around the conference circuit and talk about your philosophy on building a "new kind of business." 6. Make broad comments about tech like "mobile is the future" and "the rate of change is accelerating." 7. Kickstart an innovation initiative to build out "capabilities" that fit into a trend that everyone agrees is important, like AI. 8. When it comes to what you actually do in digital, spend a lot of money on ads. 9. Put them on all of the "it" apps. Verify this by asking your kids and administrative assistants what apps they use. 10. Finally, create lot of content, spray it out around the internet, and hope that all of this can somehow add up to meaningful change, or at least incremental improvement."

"By this point we're usually a few years into this strategy, nothing has changed, and folks in the C-suite are getting antsy for results. Agencies provide a pretty good scapegoat for failure, but it only buys another 12-18 months before the cycle starts all over again. This is how to fail."

"How we got here When examining why this happens so often, it's tempting to conclude that it's because the people in charge are incompetent. Yet most of these decisions aren't actually wrong on their surface. Rather, they only reveal themselves as wrong when the underlying assumptions behind them are identified and questioned. And this is the central problem companies face today: too many decisions are made without considerin"

A common ten-step pattern leads companies to waste time and money on superficial digital efforts. Executives are hired and surrounded by entrenched teams, while organizations mimic unrelated 'disrupter' brands and produce baffling brand campaigns. Leaders perform at conferences, make generic tech pronouncements, and launch innovation initiatives tied to trending capabilities like AI. Execution focuses on heavy ad spend, placement on popular apps, and mass content distribution. Agencies often become scapegoats when results fail to appear, extending the cycle. The root problem is that many decisions proceed without questioning the underlying assumptions that make them ineffective.

Read at The Drum