The Online Marketing Institute has identified the most the largest talent gaps and most in-demand digital skills of 2014. The 'State of Digital Marketing Talent' study consisted of interviewing 747 advertising and Fortune 500 marketing executives to find out what skills their teams possessed and which were most desired.

The Missing Skills: It's striking that talent is perceived to be a 1/3 short of where it should be. This could have a detrimental affect on performance, identify your talent gaps within your company and address them. As an individual, look where the gaps might be in your team and gain a greater understanding of these skills (making yourself more valuable to the company).

With BMW officially signing up to be Medium's first advertiser, the blog publishing platform has been pushed back in to the public eye. But what actually is Medium and how can it benefit you?

From the co-founders of Twitter and Blogger, Medium is a platform for sharing content. We're all aware of the importance of content and Medium believe theres more to it. They are firm believers that words are the most important factor and theres much more to come in how we use them on the web.

Data Translator

With the current wealth of data available to brands and the huge emphasis placed on analytics it has created a demand for individuals that can connect these 'statistics' to 'decisions'. Without these middle man companies can find themselves overwhelmed with raw data, the 'Data Translator' utilises their strategic understanding to help form ideas and make relevant decisions as oppose to just sharing information.

Mike Bugembe, Cheif Analytics officer at JustGiving, highlights the lack of these candidates who can work with data and also find the “nuggets of gold” to help a companies strategy. “The difficulty is finding one individual who can cover both spectrums,” he added.

Examples: Diageo and JustGiving

What you need: Ability to analyse marketing and other data and then clearly explain to a business what the findings mean. Have a background in analytics combined with a more ‘human’ role, such as school governor.

Digital Media Planner and Buyer

BIA/Kelsey, media advisers, forecast that advertising revenues for social media platforms will reach $17 billion by 2017. Although the demand for app developers is obvious, its the digital media planners which is also seeing huge growth. While the traditional media planner is somewhat a one-person department (or just a name on a list of approved outsource vendors), the digital media planner and buyer might be part of a department in the making.

Examples: iCrossing and Honda

Master Storyteller

Content, Content, Content! One of the buzzwords of the last 18 months, the focus on content as a marketing tool has created a number of roles; one of which is the "Master Storyteller". It is becoming more and more common to see brands trying to immerse their customer in brand stories. The role of the Master Storyteller is to create a consistent story that represents the brand and its values through multiple marketing channels.

Example: Cystic Fibrosis Trust

What you need: Be a great content strategist and know how to execute it across multiple channels. Former journalists who can apply their experience to a business will do well.

Digital All-Rounder

Digital experience is becoming an essential part of all marketing roles now. Although having a specialism is still very important, we're now seeing more brands demanding a general understanding of digital practise as a minimum requirement. This is not surprising when Accenture's recent study forecasted that digital will account for 75% of marketing executives budgets within the next five years.

Martin Riley, CMO of Pernod Ricard, agrees that digital experience and understanding should be integrated into all marketing roles. “As we define the marketing roles of the future, we can take general roles and specialist roles as a basis but we need to encourage specialists to gain a broad understanding of the business and the commercial aspects of what marketing is seeking to achieve overall, and to encourage generalists to gain a deeper understanding and hands-on experience of generating insights, innovation and creativity,” says Riley.

It's been less than a week since Germany were crowned World Champions in Brazil. Can you remember any of the adverts though?!

Preparation

Adidas' 6 month Pre-Planned Campaign 

"We want to be the most talked-about brand at World Cup," says Tom Ramsden, brand marketing director for Adidas Football, who oversees communications across advertising, PR, social and retail. "We knew we were going to do something real-time, that isn't completely brand new to us, but it is at this scale."

"The spin-off would be to be the most talked about in terms of how much traffic you can drive to retail, use of things like the hashtag and everything else," Mr. Ramsden adds. "But that simple goal is what is keeping the train on the tracks."

We Are Social has been flying across the globe to gather content on over 100 Adidas players that can be assembled on the fly regardless of who wins. This information was collected into a "Content Bible" of 1,000 images and 160 videos primed for use in reaction to game play, "It's basically spread betting," Mr. Ramsden added.

Nike's sponsored teams and players had a relatively unsuccessful World Cup performance in comparison to Adidas, but despite this it's World Cup campaign continues to raise the bar in engagement. Their “Risk Everything” campaign, which consists of several videos, have had over 400 million views, and over 23.05 million actual engagements. The brand’s Pixar-styled “The Last Game” animated short  leads the way with around 65 million views.

That Semi Final


It'll be hard to look back on this World Cup without mentioning the collapse on Brazil in their own backyard. It became the most talked about sporting event in the history of twitter racking up an impressive 35.6m tweets mentioning either #BRA or #GER. This smashed the Superbowl's previous record of 24.9 million tweets.


As a result brands took advantage of this opportunity in a variety of ways. From mocking to congratulating, below of some of the stand out responses.



The Suarez Bite

Were brands prepared for this incident or just responding in real time?

McDonald's, Nando's, BetFair, Listerine and Trident all used tongue in cheek adverts on social media and print.



However, it was Adidas's response which stood out. As oppose to jumping on the trend, they dropped Suarez from all World Cup marketing activities. "“Adidas certainly does not condone Luis Suarez’s recent behaviour and we will again be reminding him of the high standards we expect from our players. We have no plan to use Suarez for any additional marketing activities during the 2014 FIFA World Cup.”

Adidas's prominent role as a World Cup sponsor meant they didn't have to use this incident to raise brand awareness like many other brands did. They instead showed a responsible approach and limited long term damage to the brand.

Endorsement

With such a huge event looming and so much potential coverage, brands often associate themselves with potential stars. This can make it even harder to stand out? Yet mischief makers Paddy Power once against went against the grain. They managed to sign up Paul Scholes exclusively to front their World Cup campaign.

They started in October 2013 by asking "who would NEVER work for Paddy Power?".

"The company wanted someone to provide genuine insight to readers in this disruptive media landscape. Somebody who was really exclusive. Somebody who hadn’t done the rounds on the TV sofas" said Paul Mallon, editorial manager for Paddy Power.

"The results of this content deal have been exceptional. In terms of social media, our #AskScholes hashtag was trending organically for more than two hours with more than 30m potential impressions. These things normally get messy on Twitter (and they did with ludicrous questions) but we were confident Scholes’ clever answers would disarm any doubters." Paul added.



Failures

Obviously there was always going to be a couple of fails! 

 

The team at Chrysalis have come up with our predicted trends for the digital sector in 2014. Regular interaction with some of the leading digital agencies has given us a great insight into what they believe will be huge this year.