If we are talking about airplanes, then yes changing your route mid-flight might be somewhat tricky and nearly impossible. That is unless you are the pilot. What if you are a digital marketer, however? What does changing your “in-flight” plans really imply?

Agile Marketing…What Is It?
With the advent of 2014, we welcome a year of new and innovative opportunities. Leveraging flexible technology, marketers can now make agile decisions to change the direction of their marketing campaigns for increased optimization and greater end results. Gone are the days of setting up your campaign once, letting it run its course and hoping for the best. Technology is leading the way in providing actionable insights to provide marketers with analytics to make metric-driven and informed decisions. With real-time reporting, we now have the ability to view a campaign's performance at the most granular level during the course of a campaign to determine its effectiveness.  If it is performing as it should, great, keep an eye on it and continually leverage all of the digital channels available. If a campaign is underperforming take immediate action to improve its course.  Consider optimizing your creatives, maximizing your channels, or retargeting it for greater results.

How Do You Stay Relevant In An Agile Market? 
Don’t fear the unknown and stay away from the status quo! CEO and Co-founder of Econsultancy, Ashley Friedlein outlines his approach to agile marketing using the 70:20:10 rule. 

“70% of your marketing is the planned ‘marketing as usual’ activity. 20% of your marketing should be programmatic… 10% of your marketing is purely responsive Oreo-style.”

What does “Oreo-style” mean?  Ashley recalls the 2013 Superbowl power outage where during the outage, Oreo created an entire twitter campaign around the theme of “You can still dunk in the dark.” This campaign was created and executed during the power outage and completed by the marketing team after their normal office hours. Agile marketing at its finest! Capitalizing on the current state of events, the Oreo team was responsive, agile, quick, creative and welcomed the opportunity to associate their brand with the Superbowl, which garners incredible reach across the entire country. A genius move that resulted in maximum exposure.

In an imperfect world, it is impossible and naïve to strategize a marketing campaign and think everything will run according to its route. Stay relevant, leverage flexible technology and get creative!