(Photo courtesy of Will Lion.)
I doubt anyone at the height of the first dot.com boom back in 1999 would have assumed that within the next 10 years we would be knee deep in our second recession. Like the first time round this is certain to mean a period of intense and difficult transition. The next 18 months aren’t going to be easy for anyone and many of the changes that will be forced upon us may well turn out to be painful and unwarranted, but one would hope there may also be a few silver linings.
We could of course just hunker-down, pull back and retreat to the tried and tested methods of old. However anyone who went through this the last time should be confident that the best way to approach the months ahead is to embrace the opportunities that will be thrown at us with open arms.
I would suggest that there are three huge and related opportunities for us to transform the structure, capability, reputation and substance of our industry; namely our relationship with digital, image and sustainability.
Firstly a rapid increase in the adoption of all things digital from all corners of the advertising industry. By this I don’t mean some tedious debate as to whether ‘traditional’ or ‘digital’ agencies will come out on top, rather a wholesale re-evaluation of how digital really does change everything.
A recent report on ‘The Digital Services Your Clients Really Want’ for the AAAA in the US suggested that; “The idea that there can be a divide where the old world can operate in the same way it has been and only the digital world is different is simply not going to work. Everybody needs to wake up to the idea that it is all different. Digital changed everything.” As the precision, accountability and economics of the digital world are forced on to the traditional world, the digital marketing principles learned over the past 10 years will come to dominate all media.
We’ve of course heard this a million times before, but we’ll need to confront this reality once and for all before next year is out, and without a doubt the strongest traditional agencies will prosper just as much as the leading digital agencies.
What this means in practice leads to the second big opportunity, the disposal and dismantling of our obsession with image based advertising. What we DO is just as important, if not even more important than what we SAY. We’re being forced to reconcile the conflicting needs of the stories, attractions and diversions we use to create desire within our communications, against our inability to hide the facts behind artifice and hype. If the credit crunch effects the advertising industry in any way, it will be to further accelerate the retreat from big-budget, mass market, hope for the best media. What this means for the creative world is a difficult but exciting and hopefully liberating challenge.
Thirdly, and probably most importantly, the financial squeeze will force us to finally address the role marketing has in the rush to develop a more sustainable future. The internet revolution accompanied and accelerated the spread of our understanding of these issues. This in turn has been a key component in the unmasking of image over substance. Faced with the reality of the impact our work has on our clients and their customers, the opportunity now is to turn this process on its head and ensure the hugely powerful communications skills and techniques that have latterly been part of the problem, instead become part of the solution.
Its impossible to cover all of these topics in one column, but the message to take out is that if nothing else there is a great imperative to use our time wisely in the months to come, and to repeat the success of the last downturn whereby the industry emerges transformed, stronger and a more inspirational place to be part of.
