One of the great things about redundancy is that it forces you to open your eyes and see more of the world around you. New opportunities present themselves, and silver linings float in on apparently grey storm clouds.
The opportunity that I now find myself exploring is that of roving global reporter, travelling around the planet to understand the direction in which the marketing and advertising world is heading over the next decade of its evolution.
My project – entitled #worldview – will be focusing on certain key themes, namely: the shift in how consumers interact with brands; the evolution of the creative process; the impact of recessionary forces; the progression of organisational structures; how the big agency networks are adapting to change; and key trends to look out for.
I will be asking searching questions in every city I visit, eliciting perspectives and opinions from some of the most respected voices in the industry, and hope to be able to start painting a picture of the shifting landscape that we find ourselves in.
Having purchased a OneWorld Explorer round-the-world ticket, and had what feels like a hundred jabs, I am ready to set off on my journey. The cities I plan to visit as part of the #worldview project, in addition to New York and London, are Mumbai, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, Auckland, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Lima, Sao Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro.
In addition to blogging on campaignlive.com and brandrepublic.com, you can follow my journey on twitter (
@nicka77 or search:
#worldview), and on my personal blog (
nicka77.wordpress.com), which will be some parts travelogue, some parts anecdotal, some parts work that inspires me, and some parts totally random.
In the spirit of a real-time, open-source ethos, it would be great if people can suggest some questions online or on twitter for me to ask interviewees. Hopefully, by exploring the themes listed above, and by bringing perspectives from a wide variety of industry leaders to the table, I will be able to stimulate some interesting discussions and foster some healthy debates on this forum.
One of the key things I’ll be exploring on this trip is how the combination of technological progression and the recession are impacting different regions in different ways.
Are the fundamental changes happening at a local and regional level universal? Or are there significant differences, market-by-market, in terms of the rate and shape of progression, the interdependency of structural and organisational relationships, and in the nature of creativity itself?
Why, for example, is it that we are increasingly seeing exceptional creative output from developing markets like India and Argentina? How are the big network agencies adapting to the socialisation of the internet, and how will they adapt to the semantic web? How are agencies of all sizes managing the increasingly complex nature of value exchanges between brands and consumers? What does the future look like for the big holding groups as the quest for reduced costs and truly integrated thinking leads to question marks over the multi-P&L silo structure that the industry has created for itself?
I’ll be trying to unearth answers to these questions, and many more, and hope that you’ll join me on the journey by engaging in dialogue and debate.
I’m currently in Mumbai, so if there’s anything you want to ask about the industry in India, then do get in touch, and I’ll make sure I pop your questions to those I get to speak to.
