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Has digital delivered on its promise of letting marketers put the right message in front of the right people in less time, while delivering results?

It’s a question that Ivan Pollard, SVP Strategic Marketing at the Coca-Cola Company, North America, recently dissected during the Global Marketer Conference in Toronto.

“Digital… was supposed to show up like a T. Rex and cause an extinction event to things like magazines and television,” Pollard told the room of 400 Canadian and international delegates from more than 35 countries. “But instead of a Tyrannosaurus we got a chipmunk with a sweater on it.

“Admittedly, we got millions and millions of these chipmunks… that’s the world we live in today, mico-targeted and segmented,” he added. “But what I want to know is, are they worth the cost we are paying for them? The cost is unclear in this digital world and for (fast-moving consumer goods), the businesses we work in, the case is still unproven about the ability to build brands in the long term.”

Pollard made a strong case for his company’s need to strike a healthy balance between marketing in the real and the digital world, arguing that digital cannot achieve the scale necessary to build the Coca-Cola brand.

“The problem we as marketers have to tackle… each individual chipmunk is great but we have to get those all to add up,” he said.

Coca-Cola is attempting to make that math work by reconsidering how to maintain ubiquity and presence in both digital and the real world, by focusing on the “I” in ROI (“because if you don’t understand where your investment is going, how do you understand what’s coming back?) and by challenging the “means and models” of how it spends its money.

Pollard was one of the keynote speaker at the conference, which featured some of the world’s biggest brand marketers, such as Lisa McKnight, Senior VP & Global Brand General Manager, Barbie, Mattel; Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, MasterCard; and Mark Adams, Senior Vice President and Head of Innovation, VICE. Emerging technologies like AI and VR were also discussed by Ian Chapman-Banks, co-founder and CEO, Sqreem Technologies and James Milward, founder and president of Secret Location.

The pros and cons of ad-tech were also debated during a lively session featuring Antonia McCahon, Global Digital Acceleration Director, Pernod Ricard and Dan Burdett, Head of eBay Labs EMEA, eBay on one side versus Bob Hoffman, The Ad Contrarian and David Wheldon, CMO of Royal Bank of Scotland and President of the WFA.

If you missed the conference, you can view the day’s highlights in this photo gallery, read up on the big issues covered throughout the Global Marketer Week with reports from Warc or hear what some of the Global Marketer Conference attendees had to say in this conference wrap-up video.

ACA Members can log in to view videos of the day’s presentations.