I’m thankful for a lot of things. Family, friends, health, being first and foremost.
But I’m also extremely thankful that I rather accidentally fell into digital marketing back in 2002. Back then, I was a sales guy making my first go at being an entrepreneur. The product was Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, and my partners tasked me with figuring out how to sell the stuff online (in addition to more mainstream sales channels).
Fast forward to November of 2011, and it’s amazing to see how digital marketing seems to be infiltrating every facet of business landscape, including holy grails of traditional marketing such as TV and brick-and-mortar retail. The shift is so pronounced that even behemoths like Walmart are changing the very way that they attribute store revenue in order to keep pace with the ever-expanding digital wave.
For the enterprising online marketer, this shift in marketing priorities (from traditional to interactive) has created what I believe to be a recession-proof job market. In fact, even as the US and World economies have faltered or outright collapsed over the past few years, I see digital agencies and departments growing at break-neck speed, seemingly hiring on a weekly basis. And for those not interested in being bound to the corporate world, few industries are more entrepreneur-friendly than online marketing. This is comforting knowledge for all of us interactive marketers that are out there trying to support a family or simply make a mark of their own in this world.
And what’s perhaps most exciting is the fact that digital marketing is still in its infancy. Think about it. We are still in the midst of the first generation of internet marketing. In fact, we’re still in the first generation of the internet. Moreover, whereas today’s top marketing and advertising posts (CMOs, SVPs, etc.) are occupied by old-school, offline, traditional marketers, it’s only a matter of time before that old guard is replaced by today’s digital marketing thought leaders.
Soon, all marketing will be interactive marketing.
And that fact makes me very thankful. I give thanks because digital got me out of my dead-end sales career. I give thanks because digital allows me to support a wife and son. I give thanks because I rarely have a boring day of work. And I give thanks because the future is bright, and it’s overwhelmingly digital.
Happy Thanksgiving!
