This Future of Marketing Briefing covers the latest in marketing for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Friday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →One quick note before the main event: as a Digiday+ member, you get $200 off passes to the Digiday Publishing Summit, Sept. 14-18 in Miami. Use code MEMBER200. Prices go up Aug. 3, so lock in your rate before then.Marketing has a new favorite argument: is it still smarter to talk to a million people at once, or to find the thousand people they already trust?
The debate has been simmering since Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez stood up at an investor conference earlier this year and declared big brand advertising dead. In its place, an army of 300,000 creators, with social spend rising to half the company’s digital marketing budget. Trust, Fernandez argued, can no longer be declared by corporations — it has to be borrowed from people consumers already follow. Cannes turned that into a full-blown argument last month, with plenty on both sides ready to die on this hill.
As with most things in marketing, both sides have a point. Here’s the case for each.
The case for
To understand why Fernandez said what he said, it helps to know what he’s reacting to. The big TV ad didn’t get killed. It got stranded. Fragmentation did that. Not one platform, not one trend, but the slow scattering of a mass audience into a thousand smaller ones, each with its own feed, algorithm and trusted voice.
