I had a call last week from an old colleague from
BTLooksmart. Five years ago, after we’d all been made redundant, he got a touch of the “Monty Pythons” and decided to leave the online industry for something completely different....
Half a decade on, he was courting the idea of re-entering the digital job market and wanted to know how much it had changed.
My immediate thoughts on this were that it was totally different world. Overture had been bought by Yahoo! Google was getting into the ad serving game having bought DoubleClick. And a lesser-known company in this arena – Microsoft - had turned up and bought up a dozen technology companies and was becoming a serious player in the space.
If you add the huge dimension of social networking and user-generated content to the fray, the landscape has evolved through consolidation, with a few new kids on the block vying for some architectural focus across the emerging digital skyline.
Although things had changed from a brand and technology aspect, the principles that we worked towards back then haven’t.
Publishers seek to use technology to generate relevant advertising that monetises their pages in a non-intrusive and engaging way whilst yielding as high an income as possible. Search engines seek to improve algorithms that produce relevant search results that enable advertisers to connect with consumers in a direct and cost-effective fashion. And advertisers are still growing their engagement with the channel through increasing numbers and spend, proving that the accountable nature of the digital medium is proving a more and more popular, and successful way promoting products and services.
The principles are the same, it’s just the data and insight we now have has grown more actionable, and the technology has improved many-fold.
I think he was worried that leaving his digital desert island would be fraught with massive change and having to learn a whole new vocabulary.
He needn’t stress though, but I do wonder where we’ll be in another 5 years!
