Andrew Dubber has an excellent blog post on the state of EMI, the record label, and on the departure of their latest top executive Douglas Merrill. Douglas Merrill used to be the CIO of Google, then the Head of Digital for EMI. Andrew has gotten his hands on the internal letter of EMI through the All Things Digital website and analyzes the restructuring in the company – which I have to agree fully with, it is scary.

In short, EMI has done some restructuring in the company (it is not clear from the letter if it was before hands or after Merrill left the company, but I’m guessing its the latter). The person replacing Merrill, Cory Ondrejka, will be titled as the Executive Vice President of Digital Marketing. Even though in the start of the mail EMI CEO Elio Leoni-Sceti states very clearly that “with digital now comprising over 20 per cent of our revenues and growing fast, and with the progress we have made in integrating all of our digital operations fully into the business, we will no longer operate a standalone digital function”.

When you have that large a stake coming in from digital channels – it’s ludicrous to have the top position in the company in charge of that business area titled VP of Digital Marketing. How about someone take care of business development or are the models flawless? I feel very passionate about this topic (as you may have noticed), due to the fact that this is something very close to heart. When I launched the “Olen Rikollinen?” -campaign a few years back, our mission was to stop the government making short sighted laws that would not do anybody any good. Since then, if you look at the large music companies – more or less everyone is selling DRM-free music, something which we thought would be the dominating way to share files in the future (hence making the law unnecessary).

I hope the title does not serve the man’s position justice. I just cannot see anyone in as shaky industry as the music industry, only referring to marketing when they are perhaps facing the biggest issues in their corporate lifecycle. These are much larger issues and go extremely deep into the core business model – where is the value from their practice created for the end user?

This is something we think about on a daily basis at Gyllene Skor for our clients. This is also one of the reasons we are very careful not to talk of us as a digital marketing agency – there is so much more we do and corporations should look at, when they do business in the digital channels (and with the help of). Corporations should consider marketing as an enzyme – it speeds up what you’re set out to do in the first place. If your business model is not on the spot – you’re losing more money from daily business by increasing your marketing budget.

Photo by Darren Hester