Digital marketing: Incompatibilities between performance marketing and marketing creativity

Abstract

Within digital marketing, marketing intelligence fosters two major developments. First — and even in the absence of key performance indicators — it improves marketing efficiency, as life-cycle marketing, automated price adjustment and programmatic advertising based on artificial intelligence (AI) all support the vision of fully standardised marketing automation, with real-time, optimised customer centricity. Secondly, new marketing areas such as viral marketing, social media marketing and content marketing emphasise the increasing significance of creative marketing. Looking for paradigmatic principles reveals that performance marketing is shaped by analytic, processual and lean thinking. In contrast, creative marketing depends on agile outside-in thinking as a key element in the debate regarding marketing 3.0. Thus, digitisation seems to foster paradigmatic incompatibilities within marketing 4.0. This paper argues that until Big Data and AI can judge creativity, the digitisation of marketing will continue to suffer teething problems.