Rank Video Views (Millions) Most Viewed Videos 1 Psy: Gangnam Style 2,600 2 Wiz Khalifa: See You Again 2,000 3 Mark Ronson/Bruno Mars: Uptown Funk 1,900 4 Justin Bieber: Sorry 1,800 5 Taylor Swift: Blank Space 1,800 Music videos routinely dominate the top views-per-video chart. This is because music is consumed via free media and streaming services. This doesn’t represent the triumph of a few great artists so much as it does the total disruption of the music industry. Overclaims for social media give the (mainly academic) critics easy game to shoot 3 4 out. It’s damned as “hoopla” ; or as “a bullshit wagon”. Fair enough. But blanket criticism would be as misplaced as the exaggerated language of the ghettos and silos. Amplification and advocacy are real gains for any marketer. They happen not to be simplistically measurable in views. Here’s the nub of the issue, for digital apologists and digital detractors alike. Both use the language of advertising, and tend to think in advertising terms – reach, frequency, creative, consumers, advertising, brands and so on. It’s hardly surprising: the title of this book also perpetuates the use of the term. But advertising in the digital world is no longer advertising. The disciplines (and the very word speaks to a controlling desire to keep them as separate as possible) of advertising, public relations, direct marketing, sales enablement, and others, too, are truly collapsing; they no longer live apart. Much of advertising is public relations; much of public relations is direct marketing; much of direct marketing is advertising. Yet the debate is couched in advertising terms, while the real battle is about how well you integrate and the extent to which, by treating digital and traditional media as additive, you can be a better communicator.