The irony of Australia doesn’t get digital..

Time to get off the burning platform and take an innovative leap to new thinking.. 

An interesting lunch time conversation today ended up in the subject that many marketers and advertisers still don’t grasp .. The consumer is now dictating the medium, they have the control and they are far more advanced than you are.

For the naysayers out there, I should probably temper this with the fact that there is still a lot of ‘old school’ out there in medium world, but I won’t because I don’t believe it. The world has changed irrevocably, technology has changed the way we absorb the world around us. Everything is, and has been for a while and will become increasingly more digital.

So digital is not a thing, it’s the world we live in.

Take this to advertising world where clients think that a 25% spend on this thing called digital is ‘innovative’, well simply put, it isn’t. But I don’t blame clients side marketers entirely (they should be bolder, braver, stronger). At least 50% (or more) is in the hands of the ‘big’ globally aligned agency groups, who are so big,so stuck in their ways, they can’t change, adapt, adopt or flex.

They make money in certain ways, they attract certain types of people and find it quite easy to sell there wares. They are monolith dinosaurs that are actually incapable of change. As Joseph Jaffe say ‘How do you kill a dinosaur? You don’t evolution does’.

The consumer revolution isn’t actually a revolution, it’s an evolution. They quite unknown to themselves have adopted choice, technology and channels, without any knowledge they are doing it. This isn’t some big revolution, it’s just life, they are just moving on. Smart business & brands are giving them access to choice, making their lives more exciting, more entertaining and in many cases simpler.

The issue for marketers and advertisers is that they are all stuck in a cycle, a process that doesn’t match current or future behaviour, they are planning for the future based on success in the past. No other industry will or us going to survive doing it that way, so why should we?

Marketing is surrounded by bullshit lip service to a thing called ‘digital’. It’s time to wake up and realise that everything is digital, consumers are digital, life is digital and it’s only going to get more and more interactive, more always-on, more choice. This is a statement of fact anymore, it is just common sense.

The future for advertising may not actually be mass, maybe the future for advertising is less, macro ideas with micro executions. As a good friend of mine Kit said ‘The big game changer for advertising is when marketers realise that the future is less than last year, not more’.

I sit here in a small creative organisation, smiling at the fact that we have a better chance of ‘winning’ than anything that currently sits out there in the market.

It’s a lay down for the monolithic globally aligned creative agencies, we can out manoeuvre you, we can adapt quicker, we can adopt faster, we can employ the people you can’t and if the truth be told, we can do what you do, better, more creatively, more efficiently and with an entrepreneurial spirit that breeds innovation.

If you are a client in Australia, do you want stand on the burning platform until it crumbles? Or do you want to be an innovative, entrepreneurial marketer who creates the future as the past burns.. Time to stand up and be counted.