THE DIGITAL Marketing Institute (DMI) is seeing such demand for its training courses that it has launched a second postgraduate diploma just weeks after the first.
Although it only ran its first course in January 2009, over 1,200 people have taken its 12-week part-time diploma course.
“This is as far removed from academia as it’s possible to be,” said Anthony Quigley, managing director of the institute. “We use industry experts as lecturers so you are getting it straight from the horse’s mouth.”
Mr Quigley said he is seeing “huge demand”, and believes digital marketing in Ireland is at a tipping point. Trade body IAB Ireland and business advisers PwC estimated the online advertising market in Ireland was worth about €97 million in 2009, giving it a 10.3 per cent share of the total advertising market. Mr Quigley said the experience in other markets was that once online reaches such a stage, it starts to overtake other forms of advertising such as cinema, outdoor, print and TV.
Although the courses are not independently accredited, Mr Quigley said this had not been an issue to date. “It means we can react more quickly in terms of the content,” said Mr Quigley. “Twitter wasn’t on the radar two years ago and it might not be in another two. By the time you accredit the content, the world has moved on.”
The course is deliberately wide in its scope, he said, because a lot of digital marketing courses focus on a single area. “Executives in a large company don’t want to figure out how they can get to be number one in Google – but they do want to get an idea of what they can achieve by moving their marketing spend online.”
To date the institute has run its diploma course in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Galway and London. In 2011 it will add Limerick, and plans to expand into Germany.
