Is the gold rush to digital marketing finally backfiring?

Digital marketing is growing rapidly with expectations that digital advertising reached $299 billion of annual spend by 2021 – ~50% of marketing budgets. Companies and marketers have been moving quickly to try to capitalize on the digital trend and stay ahead of the curve. However, as this article points out, there may indeed be some downsides and marketers need to be careful with how they approach these digital strategies. Procter & Gamble recently suggested they have been distracted by new methods and trends, leading to poor ad placement and wasted money. Other companies are suggesting the same and that they need to better refine their strategies. Additionally, the rush to digital may also have other unintended consequences. Programmatic strategies, for example, may unknowingly place adds on sites that do not support the company’s brands and may actual have negative unintended consequences, like funding extremists sites, supremacists, pornographers, etc. I think this raises an important point as we think about developing digital marketing strategies. Effectiveness of strategies needs to be well measured and gauged and unintended consequences need to be monitored whether for “brand safety” or just to avoid in appropriate activities.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/14/is-the-gold-rush-to-digital-marketing-finally-backfiring.html