IAB chairman, Richard Eyre, made an impassioned and
thought-provoking speech at Google’s Marketing Summit this week. He argued that
the media industry was still trying to make sense of the digital world by
wheeling out old-world narratives
I certainly share this view. When new digital
innovations are born – seemingly out of thin air – the industry’s reaction
always seems to be along the lines of “Oh, this is like the thing that was
happening with TV in the 80s,” or “this is a bit like radio for the web” and so
on. But such is the pace and growth of the web, the old scripts need to be
ripped up, the sepia-tinted lenses need to be dropped (and my nagging clichés
can be dispensed with…)
What I’m getting at is there is so much insight available,
and consumer behaviour is changing so fast, that everything happens in
real-time – such that we often make sense of these things as we go along. How
outdated does it sound now to run a television test campaign in the North East of
England, then test against this in the South East, compare the results and
finally roll out nationally 12 months later? Today the brand would have a dozen
online copycats before it made it to the High Street.
No, Twitter isn’t (yet) mass market, but it, along
with search engines and social networks, are ready-made focus groups that can
give instant feedback on products and services. Historical narratives, tried
and tested methods and old-school tools just don’t cut it in the digital world.
As my historian colleague Phil Miles tells me: History
is a continuum, but this digital thing seems to have broken the space-time
continuum and created its own big bang. The new universe cannot be made sense
of in an old world narrative, but must be engaged with in real time. Back to my
Tardis...
