ITV’s Gary Knight: Where’s the connected marketing?

In 2016, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever catch a consumer offline (unless their battery’s run out, or they’re underground). However, doubts have been raised over whether current connected marketing strategies mirror this increasingly connected, ‘always on’ group of people.

ITV’s commercial content director, Gary Knight, doesn’t think so – and has called for a more “holistic” approach he believes was lost around 15 years ago – where marketing is driven around human beings, rather than silos.

“Is there any connected marketing at all in this supposedly connected consumer world? Increasingly, I’ve come to believe that’s not the case at all,” Knight told Newsline at Mediatel’s Videoscape 2016 on Tuesday.

“What’s happened is we’ve built lots of isolated commercial islands with data here, technology here, and then content sitting over here…and that’s really odd because in theory technology and data are supposed to allow us to connect that up holistically.”

Knight, whose commercial TV career spans almost 36 years, says that to overcome these silos, marketers will need a new agency model that combines the best of distribution, data and tech.

“That’s where we need to get back to,” he says. “And yet the industry seems to have walked away from it.”

Listen to Knight’s full call to arms in the video interview above.