Digital is not about digital at all

Last weekend I have run into one more interpretation of good, old idea that I strongly believe. This time it comes through the lenses of British public services and was prepared for 5th National Digital Inclusion Conference by one of participants, paraphrasing great election campaign by Bill Clinton in 1992 based on "It's economy! / It's economy, stupid"):

 

(via Neil Perkin)

The same applies for the world of marketing communications and could easily be rewritten for advertising industry. 

The phrase "Digital is not about Digital at all" (exactly in these words) is one I has been using quite a lot in my presentations and discussions. But - as a small provocation to stress the importance of (a) not getting blinded by technology and (b) keeping the focus on people, their lives, challenges and aspirations.  

Putting emerging technological opportunities (now called digital, fifty to ten years ago - TV, a century ago - radio) as the entry point of campaign creates temptation to look to the communication challenges from technology perspective or to fall in passion of playing around with new features and new formats ("what can we do now technologically?" or "what cool feature of platform X or platform Y could we use in our campaign?"). In so many cases it ends up with the solutions that are focusing "Technology for the sake of technology" and has little relevance to what does it mean to customer.

From the perspective of creative process it creates the temptation to focus on one format of communication as a central one (e.g. TV commercial or multi-media webpage or Facebook community, for example) and when the idea for that is ready - to adapt it for other formats. That kind of adaptation was "a-kind-of-possible" in the world of one-way communication and limited number of choices (so called "Mass-Media Age" - TV, radio, outdoor, print). Not anymore in the world of abundance of information and most importantly - "two-way" communication platforms and increasing involvement and participation.

Still one thing is clear -  also in fundamentally changing world of communications great and successful campaigns will be be about big, format-neutral ideas; ideas that has emerged from great insights about (a) customer, his needs, wants and challenges; and (b) broader social and cultural trends and impact of these on our customer needs, wants and expectations. And it increasingly will be about ideas that executed create value for customers - rational, irrational or rather mix of both. 

And if idea is big enough, not only it "should be so big that it fits in SMS" (Andrew Robertson, CEO, BBDO Worldwide) but it also has to be adaptable to three fundamentally different pillars of modern communications:

• the very challenging world on new, "two-way" communication platforms enabled by digital technologies (social networks, blogs, video services) that demand consistent adaptation to different situations and formats, participation, listening, constantly providing new content and value and going to them, not inviting them to us. A challenging, unknown and in many ways unpredictable but rich with opportunities; 
• related communication activities in old, evergreen "mass media" (TV, radio, outdoor) - "one-way communication" vehicles that still are effective if used properly and taking into account their rapidly changing role in the landscape of opportunities on maintaining conversations and delivering messages; 
• in the "real life" - from variety of touch-points in the retail and service environment to the events and other real-life experiences whose importance in the age of information abundance and media fragmentation also will be increasing.

Therefore in most of the cases putting any kind of format in the center - would it be old-fashioned ones or trendy and emerging - is a limitation to what we can do to our customers. Moreover, there should be focus on what will be changing or going on in real life rather than around any kind of media or in virtual environment. 

To summarize there is a quote (by Paul Isakson) that I am using quite often in my presentations. A quote that can be generalized and used as a metaphor not only for social media but for everything we do in communication nowadays. 

Comments

[Uzarins]

Or, as I told in my speech during a presentation of a digital book, there's no digital library - whatever format the resources are we are still doing library functions, which is storing the written culture and providing access to it.