This article is by Scott Redick, director of strategy at Heat, an independent advertising agency.
Things change pretty quickly in the marketing industry. Just take a look at any help wanted ad. An ad executive from the 80s would struggle to understand the need for a person to “ignite a brand’s social ecosystem, and increase brand engagements across multiple channels, as well as empower consumer evangelists, create affinity and build community.” That is a real job description.
At Heat, we now have a social media strategist, an innovation strategist, a creative technologist and a video drifter. None of these titles would have made much sense 10 or 15 years ago.
As the consumer, media and technology landscapes evolve over the next decade, marketers and agencies will continue to create new roles to address these changes. So here is our prognostication for positions that marketers and agencies will be scrambling to fill over the next decade.
1. Transcultural Anthropologist
Broad demographic categories like “black, white or Hispanic” will continue to lose relevance. Researchers will be more focused on understanding pockets of global culture that influence and remix with each other. Expect to see more briefs aimed at hybrid audiences like “LGBT b-ball fanatics” or “Latina K-pop enthusiasts.”
2. Truth Engineer
As profitability for media properties continues to rely on driving down the cost of content production, news writing will increasingly become the domain of automated software programs. PR firms will hire technical experts to manipulate code on content farms, search algorithms and copywriting bots. After all, as a boss of mine once observed, the truth today is “whatever Wikipedia says it is.”
3. Mobile Marketing Jedi
Mobile marketing today is about thinking in terms of space and time: Where is our consumer at a given point in time? Mobile marketing tomorrow will also need to take into account an added dimension: the behavioral and social data attached to people and their mobile devices. Like “The Force,” this cloud of information surrounds us and binds us, and is already inspiring innovative ideas like the crowdsourced traffic and navigation app Waze. Smart brands will seek out visionary thinkers who can wield time, space and cloud data to create contextually relevant mobile campaigns and socially connected experiences.
