My first marketing column at The Drum is live!

Throughout this month, countless marketers will write clickbait articles listing all of the ways that marketing is destined to change this year. Most of those pieces will be unoriginal, redundant and uninteresting.

And now for something completely different: what ignorant practices, intentional deceptions and grandiose delusions will continue to occur in the digital marketing world in 2017?

1. A digital marketer with no education in marketing will unknowingly take a traditional marketing practice, apply it to the internet, invent a new name for it, and then proclaim that “marketing has changed”.

2. People will say “native advertising” when they mean “advertorial.”

3. Internet marketers will focus on direct-response campaigns and their associated metrics while they ignore the other 90% of marketing.

4. “Marketing communications” will be the creation and transmission of marketing collateral over channels to an audience through a predetermined promotion mix.

5. Online marketers will unknowingly refer to “marketing communications” as “content marketing.”

6. People will use the word “hack” as though it is a good thing rather than a word that means a quick, crap job that does not address the underlying issue.

7. Everyone will confuse “public relations” and “publicity”.

8. People will say “influencer marketing” when they mean “influencer relations”.

9. People will call themselves influencers and will therefore not be real influencers.

10. Marketers who are jealous of the high-tech startup R&D world will apply software development terms to marketing practices even though the two are completely different things.

What are the rest? Read the piece in The Drum!