Marketing agencies have completely missed the potential of digital

  |   21 October, 2014   |   620   |   3980

"Rather than just supplementing existing systems, digital should be seen as transformational to maximise its possibilities"

We sit here in 2014 and we think we’ve “got” digital. We’ve been talking about it forever and we’ve introduced new processes, expressions, agencies. We’ve acquired, hired and rebuilt. What more evidence is needed? How could it be in an age where Unilever has a YouTube Channel, Oreo can put tweets on cookies and where we make TV ads out of recycled vines, that we’re not on top of it?

I believe we’ve accomplished nothing with new technology in marketing. We’ve missed the entire point of it all; we’ve taken the revolutionary power of digital and found a way to adapt it to what we had.



It’s always been this way because paradigm shifts are hard, be it the onset of the steam age, or the beginning of electricity. We tend to view the future through the mirror of the past, unable to start afresh with what the new technology means. We become fixated on embellishing what we had, instead of attempting to transform the status quo with what’s now possible.