iMedia: Where can digital fill in the holes that traditional often leaves behind or completely ignores?
Norman: Digital fills holes in a couple of ways. The first thing it does is it helps by replacing the reach that's lost by the somewhat diminished use of other channels. But what digital really does is break the relationship between cost and duration. One of the reasons why the structure of the market was positioned the way it was in the old world is because it was limited either by the number of pages the magazine publisher could use to print and distribute and carry around on trucks, or the amount of spectrum that was owned by a broadcaster, and so forth. So the industry was capped before. When I think about advertising, I think about it in two ways. I think part of it simply pushes visibility into the market, and another part is much more directional. And what that direction is doing is taking people from a fairly superficial form of contact into the opportunity to engage much more deeply with that content.
iMedia: What will it take for the digital mindset to overtake that of traditional?
Norman: What we do now is look at every one of these challenges and say "OK, how do we get reach in a fragmented market, and how do we get the maximum engagement from reach that we've managed to get our hands on?" That's part one, and part two is how do we create things that are engaging and scale those back up to reach numbers that move the needle for a brand? When you talk about digital, the ink is in the water, and you can't get it out again.
iMedia: How can you sell or position digital campaigns to traditional folks?
Norman: It may be a glib thing to say, but I don't have that problem. If my whole notion is predicated on the need to create social relevance for brands, I need all of those traditional, big-reach channels. If I did get anyone vaguely naysaying that approach, which I don't see so much these days, I go to them and say "Look, what I want to do is take the thing that you're doing and the thing that you're an expert in and the channel that you know and understand, and I want to extract as much value as possible from it."
iMedia: Can you take a traditional marketer and make them shine as a digital marketing superstar? What skills or characteristics are needed to make that happen?
Norman: I think the first thing to say is that we have a mix of people in our business, some of whom are experts in a narrow funnel, and some of whom are generalists. I don't need them all to be able to dance. Some of them I need to march, some of them I need to fight, some of them I need to dig -- it is what it is.
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