A Guide to Digital Failure

Summary

The Digital Marketing Podcast

Episode: A Guide to Digital Failure
Hosts: Daniel Rowles & Ciaran Rogers
Date: May 15, 2017

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Episode Overview

In this engaging and insightful episode, Daniel and Ciaran mark the podcast’s seventh anniversary and celebrate one million downloads by tackling a subject every marketer dreads but must understand: failure in digital marketing. Leveraging years of experience and training, the hosts present a structured, practical guide to the key reasons digital initiatives stumble, and how to address them proactively. Using humor and real-world anecdotes, they break down a “capability framework” of ten critical factors, drawing on industry data and their own hands-on insights.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Celebrating Milestones & Anecdotes on Failure

• The episode kicks off with the hosts sharing a lighthearted backstory of their first meeting, revealing an (until now) secret mishap involving Ciaran falling into the sea—but saving an expensive camera in the process!
• Notable Moment [02:39]:

  "I'm obviously concerned about you, but what happened to the camera?"
  — Daniel
  "The camera was safe ... I saved the camera, but I'm sort of balancing precariously on the boat."
  — Ciaran

2. Introduction to Digital Failure and Transformation [03:56]

• The hosts recount their early discussions on digital transformation (as early as 2015) and introduce the core episode theme: why digital projects fail, and how to avoid typical pitfalls using a ten-point capability framework.

3. The Ten-Point Capability Framework [05:51]

Daniel methodically walks through ten factors that determine digital marketing success or failure. For each, he provides practical context:

a. Leadership Buy-In [05:51]

• Senior leadership support is foundational for digital change.
• Older, experienced leaders may not have grown up with digital; it's often up to digital advocates to tell the story in relatable terms.
  • Quote [06:32]:

    "If you've got leadership buy-in, pretty much everything else is fixable."
    — Daniel

b. Team Ability & Continuous Learning [08:45]

• Skills need to be constantly updated; organizations should foster a culture of ongoing learning.
• Ciaran offers a tip for maximizing event ROI: require team members to summarize and apply learnings post-conference.
  • Quote [10:15]:

    "You can go [to a conference], but I want to know what you've learned ... and what the key things are that you're going to change and put into action as a result of this."
    — Ciaran

c. Market Readiness [11:23]

• It's vital to understand whether your target audience is using new digital channels—never assume.
  • Quote [12:22]:

    "Things do change. And I'd give you Facebook as an example. When Facebook really exploded, it was very much a youth market thing. But actually ... it's a much older demographic that you can reach quite successfully there now."
    — Ciaran

d. Resources [13:02]

• Do you have the people, time, and money? Know where you have shortages and seek efficiencies.

e. Strategy [13:10]

• Digital strategy should be fully integrated with business and marketing strategies, not siloed.

f. Governance [13:38]

• Strong processes, policies, and clear accountability are required—especially in larger organizations.
• Includes escalation policies and clear reporting lines for digital operations.

g. Infrastructure (IT/Systems) [14:07]

• Integrated systems (like CRM, content management, and email platforms) are essential for efficiency and a “single customer view.”
• Cross-disciplinary teams (tech + marketing together) are increasingly vital.
  • Quote [14:37]:

    "There's this whole problem at the moment that marketers and techies don't really communicate... Cross-disciplinary teams become really important."
    — Daniel

h. Measurement [15:09]

• Know what you're measuring, and why. Avoid vanity metrics (e.g., likes, engagement) unless connected to genuine business impact.

i. Financial Connection [15:42]

• Can you clearly connect digital activities to financial performance? Too often, organizations struggle to link online behavior with bottom-line results.

j. Innovation [16:20]

• Does your organization have a “test and learn” culture? Are you budgeting or allocating time for experiments?
• Don’t wait for case studies—especially in conservative industries, be bold about trying new channels.

4. How to Use the Framework & Benchmarking

[16:44]

• List the 10 dimensions and score yourself (or your organization) out of 10 for each; total your score out of 100.
• Daniel reveals that, based on hundreds of facilitations, most organizations fall between 57–63.
• Lower scores highlight where to focus improvement and are more common in heavily-regulated or risk-averse sectors like finance or pharma.
  • Quote [18:20]:

    "A really low number is not the end of the world, because you can change each of these things. But the lower the numbers, the more work you're going to have to do."
    — Daniel

5. Final Reflections & Humor

• Ciaran cleverly loops the opening story back, closing with practical advice—and a joke.
  • Quote [19:20]:

    "You can't boil the ocean, Daniel, but you can, as I've learned, fall into it."
    — Ciaran

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Notable Quotes

• “If you've got leadership buy-in, pretty much everything else is fixable.” — Daniel [06:32]
• “You can go [to a conference], but I want to know what you've learned ... and what the key things are that you're going to change and put into action as a result of this.” — Ciaran [10:15]
• "Cross-disciplinary teams become really important to make this stuff work." — Daniel [14:37]
• “A really low number is not the end of the world, because you can change each of these things. But the lower the numbers, the more work you're going to have to do.” — Daniel [18:20]
• “You can't boil the ocean, Daniel, but you can, as I've learned, fall into it.” — Ciaran [19:20]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening & Sea Anecdote: 00:00 – 03:43
• Digital Failure & Framework Introduction: 03:56 – 05:51
• Leadership Buy-In: 05:51 – 08:44
• Team/Learning Culture: 08:45 – 11:22
• Market Readiness: 11:23 – 13:02
• Resources to Governance: 13:02 – 14:07
• Infrastructure (Systems): 14:07 – 15:09
• Measurement & Financial Connection: 15:09 – 16:34
• Innovation: 16:34 – 16:44
• Using the Framework/Benchmarks: 16:44 – 18:18
• Final Reflections & Close: 19:20 – 19:39

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Tone & Takeaways

• The episode maintains a friendly, candid, and practical tone throughout. Daniel and Ciaran mix humor (“You can’t boil the ocean... but you can fall into it!”) with transparency about their own experiences.
• The practical ten-point framework offers listeners a self-assessment tool they can use immediately.
• Underpinning the advice: improvement is possible, and digital failure is rarely terminal—if the right strategies are adopted.

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For more resources and the framework tool, visit the episode show notes at targetinternet.com/podcast

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This summary brings you the core ideas, wisdom, and wit of this landmark episode—a must-listen (or read) for digital pros looking to turn failure into future-proofing.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.

[B]

And I'm Daniel Rolls.

[A]

And today, Daniel, we're talking about a guide to digital failure.

[B]

We've just reached a million downloads, which is fantastic. And actually today is the seventh anniversary of when we started the show. So seven long years ago we started the show so we thought what better time to talk about failure? Slightly, oddly so fundamentally we're going to go through, we're going to talk about the key things that lead to failure in digital digital marketing and then we'll try and look at how we avoid them and some of the solutions. But because it is the anniversary and we on a million downloads, I just got told an anecdote by Kieran that I didn't know about. Our first ever kind of meeting and recording. So do you want to tell people?

[A]

Yeah. There was a whole thing going on that day that you didn't know about and. Oh, wow. It's probably about eight years ago. It was probably about a year before we started doing the podcast. What happened? At the time I was working at UKSA as the digital marketing managers the UK Sailing Academy in Cowes and part of my job was actually getting photography because we're non profit and budgets were tight. So I was given a camera and got to go out on the water and shoot boats and stuff. Amazing, amazing fun.

[B]

And a very expensive camera.

[A]

It was a very expensive. Yeah, it had like a 1200 millimeter super zoom noise reducing lens on it. It was incredible. Very, very heavy, grey, long, heavy thing, but did make even a mediocre photographer like myself actually look quite good. So I was out on a rib shooting the 67 foot yacht at the time and had to transfer onto the boat.

[B]

So those that don't know RHIB is a small boat.

[A]

It's a small boat, yeah. A small little rubber dinghy with a.

[B]

Big outboard and the other one is a massive boat.

[A]

Massive, Massive, yeah, boat. They used to train people for careers in superyachts and we had to transfer the camera over onto the boat and I had to hand it to one of the training students that were on board. Now when you've got like a 3,000 pound lens or whatever it was worth, then you are kind of careful with it when you're out in the water because I didn't want to explain to the organisation that I trashed it. So I had to check that the student had it before I Handed it over. And the student froze. And in that split second, a wave passed between the rib and the boat and knocked the rib outwards. And I ended up dangling off the side of the challenger, dragging in the water.

[B]

So I'm obviously concerned about you, but what happened to the camera?

[A]

The camera was safe because I had to check, have you got it? Have you got it?

[B]

And he just didn't say anything.

[A]

I got knocked into the water. Yeah, I've got it. So I saved the camera, but I'm sort of balancing precariously on the boat. And I'm really grateful to the Academy because they are very into safety. Unfortunately, I was wearing a safety harness, so I was able to be hauled on board. But I'm quite heavy anyway. But when I'm wet, I'm even heavier, I'm told. It was all. It all happened in a flash and it was very cold and I think it was kind of in March, April time. So, yeah, not the time you want to be completely in the drink. But I had to meet Daniel later on that afternoon because he'd arranged to meet me in a hotel at Southampton to talk about this gig that he wanted my help with for some of the campaigns that we'd been working on. And I didn't have a spare pair of shoes, so I'm literally. I'm wearing soggy wet shoes and wet socks and actually had to squelch into the. Into the hotel lobby where we met. Unfortunately, it was quite noisy in there, so, Dan, you didn't hear me squelching, but, yeah, I remember that meeting well. It was. Had cold feet.

[B]

So this was the meeting where we decided we'd do the podcast together. And I had no idea Kieran had just been thrown in the sea, nearly drowned and was soaking wet.

[A]

And I was too embarrassed about it to really mention it, so. So, yeah, it's kind of seven years on it. I've come clean about time, really.

[B]

So from one disaster, let's carry on and talk about digital disasters or digital kind of failure. So back in 2015, we went through and we started talking about digital transformation, so we were quite ahead of the curve, I would say. Digital transformation is a big thing now, as a lot of you might know. I wrote the book Building Digital Culture along with Thomas Browne, and that came out recently.

[A]

Have you written a book?

[B]

I've written a few now and I never mention them, though. That's why no one knows. And essentially, as part of that, and a model we've used previously was this kind of capability framework. So essentially, this looks at what capabilities you need to be effective at digital. And there are 10 things, and those are the 10 things that you need in place to do digital effectively. And they're not digital things, they're general kind of business process, all those kind of issues as well. And these tend to be the things that make us fail or cause us the biggest kind of headaches in digital now, they're all fixable, they're all things that you can move forwards. And the idea obviously, with digital transformation is you look at where you are with these things now, but then you look at where you need to be with these going forwards. But I've done this in lots and lots and lots of training sessions. Just going through the 10 points, which we'll do in a second, and then getting people to score themselves out of 10 for each of these points and you end up when you add them up with a number out of 100. And I know anecdotally from speaking to, I would say getting on for a thousand people now, having gone through this exercise, what the average organization scores themselves out of 100. And basically what this is going to tell you is the lower the number, the harder your life is generally going to be in terms of doing what you're going to do. So we'll go through the 10 points and then I'll give you the averages of what you can expect to get and we'll talk about the key kind of challenges.

[A]

So we could call this do you suck at digital marketing?

[B]

Yeah, we could also call it that as well. Or does your organization and how hard is your life and how miserable are you going to be?

[A]

I like that.

[B]

Bit less catchy.

[A]

I don't know, it's got a bit of a ring to it.

[B]

So, first, one, most important one, and remember, these are all fixable, is leadership buy in. Do the senior people in the organisation get the importance of this stuff? Are they committed to it? Because if you've got leadership buy in, pretty much everything else is fixable. That may be most senior leadership. It could be different tiers of leadership. Now, obviously, the bigger the organization, the more complicated that is. So for a startup or a very small business, it's quite easy. You get kind of immediate buy and the type of organization will make a difference as well. E commerce tends to be leadership buying. We get that digital is important because that's what we do. Whereas if you're a B2B or pharmaceutical or you work in financial services, there's a bit more. Yeah, I mean, it's more risk adversity. And there's quite often a bit more resistance to these kind of things as well.

[A]

You have to remember that the people at the top, they've been there for a long time, right? They've got the experience, but digital's come out of nowhere and probably existed and has grown up, you know, since they've got to the level they have in many instances. That's the challenge. You know, a lot of people kind of whinge and moan, oh, the senior management don't understand it. Well, that's your job, guys. You got to. You got to find ways of telling that story. But unfortunately you've got to do it on their terms, not on yours. And that's the challenge. That would be my advice to anybody. Think from their perspective and walk in their shoes to help them understand it. Don't just tell your own story.

[B]

Yeah, I think the challenge is if you're very senior in the organisation, potentially you are one of the older people in the organization that haven't grown up with all this stuff. But also not only that, if you're in a senior position, it's quite often embarrassing to say you don't understand something fully. So taking people on the journey, organizing separate training sessions, we do a lot of this stuff. So organizing separate training for senior leadership teams, take them off for two hours somewhere and try and brief them on something.

[A]

And I've got another challenge because I'm imagining that a few of our audience will be potentially in the position of the experienced wise ones making the decisions. And I'd throw the same challenge out to you guys if you're sat there and listened to this nodding, yeah, that's me. You've got to do what you can to walk in the younger whippersnappers shoes and see it from their perspective, not just from your own kind of level of metrics and understanding of the world.

[B]

There's an interesting one now, if you look at how the youth market are using Instagram and all the kind of memes and all the kind of comedy stuff that a lot of the people are looking at, lots of brands are looking to that, to kind of replace tv and it gets really complicated because as you look at it, you just don't even really understand it to some extent. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. So I think there is even. Even if you're not all that old at all, comparatively. But you haven't actually used this stuff as a kind of kid, as a teenager, because we all know when we were teenagers, we were into very different Things to our parents were and so on. And the reality is it's culturally very different.

[A]

Thank God.

[B]

Yeah, exactly right. So essentially it is changing constantly and I think even if you're not at the most senior levels, you can make this very easy assumption that you get it. And I've been guilty of this as well. And then luckily enough, having a 15 year old daughter makes that a lot easier. What on earth is that? I don't even understand the context of this. So yeah, I think it's easy to kind of get into that. So yes, leadership buy in massively important next one team ability. Do you have the skills across the organization to do all these kind of things? There needs to be a culture of ongoing learning where people take responsibility for their own skills. Because yes, sending people on for training courses is really, really good and that's really important. But, but also we need to be learning constantly. Listening to podcasts, very good for that. But the whole blogs, every other different form of learning and that being seeing culture is an important thing and actually measuring people on that. When you have like a personal development plan actually challenging people and saying, well, what have you been learning? How have you been learning? How do you learn on an ongoing basis as well?

[A]

And I'll give you a tip that I sort of flow through with my own team. We all get the chance sometimes to go to conferences and hear speakers and what have you. And it's very easy to go along for the jolly and it kind of goes in, you feel like you're learning lots and then the weekend happens and come Monday you've kind of forgotten it all and actually you've not really captured those key learnings. So one of the things I do when I go to conferences and things, and I encourage my team to do this, in fact give them homework on it is okay, you can go, but I want to know what you've learned. I want a quick summary of what you learned and what the key things are that you're going to change and put into action as a result of this. And this is great because it means that all that money that you spend on getting them to these places and putting them up and enjoying, they can have fun as well. But you are actually keeping a record of what it's learning and then applying that within the workplace to drive results. So yeah, that would be my top tip.

[B]

We do a similar thing a few organizations we work with where after any training or conferences, people commit to changing at least one thing or trying something or doing an experiment or something else as well. And this concept of workplace experimentation, we are going to try something and see what happens. But getting them to commit to it on a platform, platform where it's recorded and then having quarterly webinars or review meetings where you go through and say, right, what do we commit to? Have we done that yet? And it just becomes part of the process because therefore there's accountability and it is just part of the day to day. So it doesn't just get forgotten as you go through it.

[A]

And it's so easy to forget it. You know, even when you do these processes, the chances when you get to that review point of everybody kind of looking at the floor and saying, you've caught it, then it's okay, let's do this. Yeah, absolutely.

[B]

Next one is market readiness. So this is a slightly more complicated one, but this is basically. Is your market using all this stuff? So are they smartphone adopters? Do they use Instagram? Do they use Snapchat? What channels they're using? Are they using LinkedIn? And the biggest problem is if you are very, very niche or B2B or something like that, you might find that actually they're only using very limited channels. They might use LinkedIn and maybe a bit of Twitter. Whereas actually if you're targeting youth market, they might be on a very different set of channels if they're on Snapchat and Instagram and so on. So the reality is just understanding your audience and just kind of saying, where are they? But really importantly, this stage, not making assumptions because it's very easy to assume, oh, well, we're B2B. Instagram's not for us. Actually, we've just done a B2B advertising. Instagram, it's been hugely successful. But also Snapchat, not dismissing it because you might say it's not for us, but it might be in a year and it's changed so much. You might assume Snapchat is important for your youth based audience. That could shift. It does look to me to be shifting a little bit already. So actually trying to understand and benchmark.

[A]

Where you are, things do change. And I'd give you Facebook as an example. When Facebook really exploded, it was very much a youth market thing. But actually, I think any marketer worth a salt would see that over the last five, six years, the demographic has grown enormously. And actually it's a much older demographic that you can reach quite successfully there now and I believe continues to do so. It's one to watch for the future.

[B]

Yeah, completely. I think Facebook has changed the way we're using is changing as well. But actually if I was targeting youth market, as you said, I wouldn't actually start with Facebook at all. People have Facebook accounts, but it's not actually they're engaging in the same way. So we can't make any assumptions. We have to look at our market readiness.

[A]

It's MySpace all the way for me.

[B]

Yeah, I love a bit of MySpace. Resources. Do you have the people? Do you have the time? Do you have the money? We've never got enough time, people or money. But we need to kind of judge where we are with it and if we are under resourced, how can we fix that? What are the solutions? Are there efficiencies we can look at? Then we move on to strategy. Do we have a digital strategy? Is that aligned and part of our marketing and business strategy? It should not be an entirely separate thing. You should never have a digital strategy that's got nothing to do with your marketing strategy. And you see that a lot. But a lot of organizations don't have any strategy at all for this stuff. So do we have it in place? We just shoot from the hip, follow works? That's basically. You say that as a lasting point. That's happening in an awful lot of places still. Governance is process and policy. So do we have things like social media monitoring? Do we have an escalation policy when things go wrong? Does everyone know what everyone else does and who's responsible for what? Are there clear reporting lines? All those kind of things? The larger the organization, the more complicated this can get as well. But is all that stuff clear then? Infrastructure it? Do our systems join up? So does for example, our email service provider speak to our CRM, our customer relationship management system? Is that in turn connected to our content management system and our stock control systems and all these kind of things. All really boring stuff, generally speaking. But it's about joining up data and it's about creating that single customer view. So I can be more agile, I can move more quickly, I can interrogate my data and work out what is it really telling me?

[A]

Do you make it sound like a dance? I guess it is, isn't it?

[B]

It is a bit. I mean, there's this whole thing of actually going through your process systems, joining things up and understanding what it really means. And it's not necessarily an easy thing to do. And there's a real problem at the moment that marketers and techies don't really communicate. And I think there's two solutions. One is that marketers should be more techie. And I think we should take more responsibility for learning about this stuff. But I also think that where it sits in the organization, having it over here and marketing over here and it doesn't make any sense. So cross disciplinary teams become really important. And when we talked about agile working in previous episodes, we've talked about that, but I think cross disciplinary teams become really important to make this stuff work. Then measurement. Do we know what we're measuring digitally and why we're measuring it? We're going to talk about that again in a future episode as well. But we can measure lots of stuff. For example, we for a long time spoke about volume in social media. How many likes have you got? And then we went, oh, we're not silly, it's not about volume, it's about engagement. And now you measure engagement. Oh, look, we've got loads of volume and loads of engagement. And then you suddenly realize that doesn't mean anyone's buying anything. So we've got to join the dots and we've got to work out what we're measuring. And that brings us on to the next point, which is financial or financial performance. And that's not saying have we got enough money? It's saying, can we connect what we're measuring digitally to our financial results? Basically, if I tweet more, will I make more money? Can I actually make the connection between those two things? And that's not necessarily an easy thing to do, but the systems and processes we put in place will fix that. And then final of the 10 points is innovation. Is there a culture of test and learn? Do we commit time or budget to trying new things out? Because if you say to me, oh, well, you know, Snapchat's not for us at the moment, but we, we work in financial services. Find me a case study of a financial services institution using Snapchat. There won't be one because either no one's done it or they're not going to tell you about it if it was successful because they think you're going to steal it. So you have to have a culture of trying these things out.

[A]

Those last two points go joined hand in hand, don't it? It is really interesting. And actually that's both of them individually can be quite boring. But put them together and my goodness, you can have some fun.

[B]

That's it. Because what you need to do with this is you can't, can't boil the ocean. You can't do everything at once when you're trying to transform or change an organization. So my general approach is to work out what we're measuring make a connection to that between our financial performance in a small way and then test something out. So if you can go look, we did this and it led to this financial result, we should do more of this and we should spread out through the organization. That's when you get buy in, you get leadership buy in. So you need some strategies for joining these kind of 10 points up. We've got a model, a kind of framework for this. So we'll put this up in the show notes. So as normal, if you want to go to the show notes, it's targetinternet.com and if you go forward, slash podcast and you'll find all the show notes and things in there as well. But little thing for you to try out. Now go through those 10 points and give yourself a score out of 10 for each one and then you add them up and you end up with a number out of 100. Don't be disheartened if it's a relatively low number. Now, having done this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times with lots of different organizations, the average number that comes out is between 57 and 63. So if you're in that kind of ballpark vicinity, you're doing fine, you're not doing terribly. If you're an E commerce organization, you'll end up probably with a very high number because a lot of these things you should be doing because by nature of the organization, it should be joined up in the first place theoretically depends how big that organization is. If you are very slow moving, risk adverse. So we are talking financial services, pharmaceuticals, some B2B.

[A]

Oh, so harsh, so harsh.

[B]

That's the way the industries have developed. You will probably have a lower number. A really low number is not the end of the world because you can change each of these things. But the lower the numbers, the more work you're going to have to do. Now the ones I always look out for, low numbers in low numbers in leadership buying are the biggest concern because if you don't have that, everything else is difficult. So if you start at that point you run a project to improve your leadership, buy in and try and get that very commonly you'll find that infrastructure and it is a low score for a lot of people because it's a big IT project and it's not the end of the world, but it will slow you down significantly. So you need to try getting those things moving in the first place. And then the other one is the kind of financial measurement ones which is actually working out the connection between what you're doing and what it leads to. So go through the 10 points. If you have forgotten them and you want something to kind of write them down, go to the show notes for the episode, which is targetinternet.com podcast, and you can get them in the show notes there, add them up, see where you are, and we'll put in some other kind of supporting notes to help you out with that as well.

[A]

And just to have a final word on this, I just want to pick up on a point that you made which I felt was relevant because you can't boil the ocean, Daniel, but you can, as I've learned, fall into it.

[B]

What a beautiful segue.

[A]

You can, you can. And so therefore always wear a safety harness. And if you're meeting Daniel afterwards, bring a spare pair of socks and shoes.

[B]

And I think we'll end it on that beautiful point. Thank you very much for listening. We'll see you again on the Digital Marketing Podcast.

[A]

Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mentioned, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to help.