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burgeoning data availability to develop high-quality insights
• Finding, retaining, and investing the right amount in human and technical resources that better address the complexities of the digital mediums
• Linking efforts such as social media seeding strategies to firm performance measures
• Accommodating simultaneous decisions by a focal user and others in their reference group
• Identifying the optimal balance between tactical and strategic metrics with respect to level of investment, synergies and complementarities, and their role as part of a marketer’s dashboard.
• Understanding the firm contingencies under which digital media strategies can exploit their full potential
• Moderating effects of context variables, such as competitive pressure, or consumers’ data privacy concerns, to determine the metrics’ efficacy in varying contexts
Technological progress. Technology continues to play a crucial role in furthering the digital age. In marketing, it has played a crucial role in the creation of a new body of knowledge – digital marketing, and continues to present exciting possibilities and challenges. Technology in the DME is being adopted for communication, commerce, and interaction through several means such as electronic data interchange (EDI), email, telephone, internet, intranet, extranet, voice-over-internet protocol (VoIP), audio/video streaming, web servers, cloud computing, intelligent agent technologies (IATs), RFID, QR codes, and web-enabled devices, among others. These avenues have brought rms and consumers closer than ever before.
What we know: Over the years, technology has displayed four important laws that continue to govern its growth and in uence in the marketing eld. First, the Grosch’s law (1965) about pricing computer services states that the computing performance increases as the square of the cost. This law introduced the price- performance to technology ratio, and implied that in order to do work twice as cheaply, the work would
have to be performed four times faster. Despite several questions related to its applicability today, especially to advancements such as cloud computing, it continues to have relevance through its conceptual linkage of cost
reduction to the speed of computation. Second, the Moore’s law (1965) about processing speed states that overall computer processing power doubles every two years. Despite being one of the driving forces
of the semiconductor industry, rapid advancements
in computing technology has pushed the limit to the maximum, and the law is not expected to hold true inde nitely (Dubash 2010). Third, the Metcalfe’s law (1980) about network capabilities states that the value of a network is equivalent to the square of the number of nodes. That is, as more people join a network,
they add to the value of the network nonlinearly. Whereas this law was used to illustrate the value of telecommunications network using fax machines, it is equally applicable to social networks (Tongia and Wilson III 2011).Finally, the Gilder’s law (1993) about the communication bandwidth states that the availability of bandwidth doubles every 12 months at no more than the same cost (Gilder 1993). This implies that over time, telecommunications can grow in complexity while declining in cost for the volume transmitted. These
laws have profoundly in uenced technology growth and digital marketing practices.
What we would like to know: The ubiquitous nature of technology has found its place in nearly all digital media, and is as a game changer. The rapid pace of change also raises several questions that include:
• Technology convergence – With the interplay of multiple technologies (mobile, phone, Internet & TV), a high degree of substitutability of devices to do a specific task is being achieved. For instance, it has been found that 70 percent of Americans (Rainie and Cohn 2014),and 40 percent worldwide (Luckerson 2014)have access to the Internet through computers and mobile phones. In this regard, what are the future implications for technical design of new devices, information collection, and e-commerce patterns?
• Workforce management –Technological advancements also impact the way companies design their processes. What implications does this hold, if any, for minimum technical knowledge of the workforce, management of non-technical staff, measurement of value creation for the
firm, and the level of value dissemination to the stakeholders of the firm?
• Competitiveness – With firms incorporating technology into their practices, they will have to evaluate how they are placed vis-à-vis competition. In this regard, we need to know
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