Some of us forget what we’ve learned at university – mind you if you remember maybe you weren’t really there? Or was that the 60’s? Regardless, let’s go back to marketing 101 for the discussion on the is it digital, online, analogue, intergalactic broadband marketing confusion? There are only two ways of marketing:
1. The direct way where the marketer's activities are designed to create an immediate transaction with the customer be it a sale, exchange of information, click-through, store visit, phone call, download or some other immediately measurable response.

This often involves personalised messages delivered in various media directly to individuals, or responses received directly from individuals. This way of marketing is known as direct marketing and is the hardest thing to do in marketing.

That's because you have to get the customer or prospect to do what you want them to do, when you want them to do it, rather than what they were going to do prior to receiving your message.

2. The indirect way where a marketer's activities are designed to position a brand in the mind of a customer, so that when the customer is eventually in the market to buy, they'll consider the brand.

This is the traditional form of marketing known as mass marketing and usually involves broadcasting non-personalised brand messages to segments of customers rather than to individuals. Usually this type of advertising has no measurement criteria related to its performance.

It is the easier type of marketing to execute and often the weight of the media spend is more influential on the outcome than the creative content within the advertisement. The media used for both types of marketing can be analogue or it can be digital – it doesn’t matter. They are just channels for delivering the message either directly or indirectly. End of story.