The word 'digital' has no place in marketing

16 July 2009 | By Nigel Walley

I received a flyer in the post from the Institute of Direct Marketing the other day outlining the curriculum of its Complete Digital Marketing Course. What was remarkable about the flyer’s grandiose claim was just how incomplete the course was.

In a week when AudiTV On Demand launched on Virgin Cable’s Showcase and HondaTV’s web-TV service moved to the front page of the BT Vision EPG, there was nothing about digital TV marketing. In a week when DAB is firmly back on the radar thanks to Lord Carter, there was nothing about digital radio marketing. And in a week when I stood in Victoria Station watching coverage of the Tehran rioters on the big screen, there was nothing about digital outdoor.

It was a course on web marketing with a bit of mobile thrown in. As you can see, though, it wasn’t the pompousness of the word ‘complete’ that struck me but the redundancy of the word ‘digital’.

Back in the mid-1980s, before all this new media nonsense, I was working as an architect for a trendy company in Soho, designing bars and restaurants. In those days, we didn’t call them architectural practices, with the fusty connotation that brought. We worked for ‘design practices’. These were made up of architects, furniture designers, graphic designers and other assorted visionaries who were slowly repackaging the world, in a festival of Philippe Starck-inspired enthusiasm.

However, towards the end of the decade, something odd happened to the word ‘design’. It was stuck in front of anything vaguely unusual, or contrived. It gradually transmogrified into ‘designer’, which slowly became a word of derision, like ‘estate agent’. Architects started calling themselves architects again.

Even before the arrival of the IDM’s ridiculous flyer, I had been thinking about the similar demise of the word ‘digital’. This was mainly because of Stephen Carter. For the past few weeks he has been addressing an assorted rag bag of unrelated issues under the title of Digital Britain. This phrase has the same amount of credibility as Cool Britannia. It initially sounds good but then its overwhelming vacuousness creeps up on you. It’s the kind of thing your dad dreams up. If that weren’t bad enough, marketing people have even started using ‘digital’ as a noun, as in ‘we’re going to use digital’. The minute a word shifts from adjective to noun you know it has had its day.

In Decipher we’ve been saying for a long time that if you use ‘digital’ in a marketing context it’s because you’re too stupid or too lazy to use a more accurate word. It’s a useless word and deserves derision. As with ‘designer’, this realisation is creeping into the mainstream. In a recent column in The Times, Libby Purves wrote, “The word ‘digital’ joins a long list of adjectives too exciting for their own good.” When someone as ‘analogue’ as Libby Purves spots the ridiculousness of a technological word, you know it has had its day. I work in media.