"I am just going outside and may be some time"

It has now been well over a month since my last posting. A record I hope never to repeat. It turns out that as well as being a source of low level background guilt to myself my lack of blogging has also been a mild disappointment to literally tens of other people around the world whom I’ve never met. In the last week alone I’ve received three emails checking whether I’m okay/ alive or simply berating me for my otiose blogging practice.

I am alive and well and have at last forced myself to face the tyranny of the blank page. I’m putting my faith in the act of enforced writing in the wilful belief that it may kickstart the brain into a short and (hopefully) coruscating burst of flow. I propose to adopt Pascal’s famously mis-attributed remark to his friend “I didn’t have time to write a short letter so I’ve written you a long letter instead” as my modus operandi. Rather than depositing one enormous brain coprolite onto said blog I’m planning to break it into several smaller chunks over the coming few days…think of it as a few pebbles rather than one monstrous cable ahem!

This last month has been a peculiar time, one characterised by short-term project involvement at work and a growing commitment to personal projects outside of work. In the process I’ve inadvertently discovered that I’m most productive und happy when my work life balance is 60:40 rather than as previously imagined 50:50….who’d of thunk it? I’ve found that unless my free time is in some way ‘endangered’ I never fully make the most of it when it comes around. A perception of scarcity and thus fear does wonders to focus my mind.

My last hurrah at work so to speak has been the delivery of an annual digital strategy for a leading gin brand. The client’s brief was clear from the outset, which in turn led to a clear and logical creative recommendation that all parties are delighted with. What really interests me however has been the realisation of just how far ‘digital’ ad agencies have come in the last four years, and more importantly still how far clients and many traditional creative agencies have come in recognising and valuing the contribution made by digital to the wider marketing mix.

Four years ago all my meetings were prefaced with a few slides outlining key metrics such as how many people were online or owned a mobile phone or what age they were etc.…this was before any of the actual ‘thinking’ was shared. A couple of weeks ago I sat in a meeting during which a senior media strategist stated in unequivocal terms how few given target audience members would be watching television relative to those actively engaged online. Now this in itself isn’t especially revelatory or ground breaking for that matter- media planners have always best understood where and what the nature of consumers’ relationships are to different channels. Instead I was impressed by the media strategist’s willingness to make a decisive budgetary recommendation against this data and the client’s willing complicity in an approach that effectively turned her previous year’s budget allocation plan upside down. It is as if everyone now knows it, and everyone now gets it. In my mind this raised the question what drum has digital left to beat?

I haven’t fully pieced the answer together yet in my own mind. Unsettlingly though I do believe I’m seeing evidence of digital agencies unknowingly sliding into a trap more commonly levelled at traditional agencies. In a climate were all clients now want you, want your talents, and crucially are sufficiently digitally literate to know what is possible for their brand then one’s focus as an agency under conditions of opportune profitability might become swayed in favour of commercial expediency. My contention is that under such circumstances agencies inevitably (but mistakenly) devote more time and expend more creative energy trying to develop different coloured and shiner wheels rather than as they once used to trying to reinvent the very spindle and framework around which the wheel revolved in the first place. Now I apologise for this somewhat unwieldy and dyspraxic metaphor but the point I believe is a valid one. The delight of being a digital planner or a creative for that matter I have always felt was the permission to invent the means of message distribution as well as the message itself. This was a privilege TV agencies could never know. We never started with “fill this 30 second hole”. Instead we first tried to crack what the desired emotional and physical interaction consumers might want to have with our brand/product only then moving on to craft the message specifics towards this or another given end. I wonder whether today digital agencies too often start with the questions; “what shall we put in the microsite? What is the widget going to do? Will it work with Facebook?”.

I believe that in these boom years some digital agencies have become lazy. They’ve focused upon how executions co-operate with the web’s wider real estate at the expense of the former concern that of innovation in the realm of solution itself. The longer we let this go unchecked the harder it will become to rediscover the very innovation credentials with which we built our reputations and carved out our specialist niche. Instead we’ll find ourselves production houses churning out derivative solutions to similar problems…what is more we’ll be prey to traditional creative agencies.