I was working on a post on my other blog about how digital allows brand management more freedom to be creative and innovative. It occurred that there are two main reasons I would suggest: firstly budgets go a lot further in digital than traditional media. This allows for the ring-fencing of a little ‘mad money’, and also, despite digital now being a mature medium, it is still running very fast and new techniques and technologies are becoming available almost daily. Experimentation is almost inevitable.
When I first got involved in digital in the 1990s, it was in its infancy. For a jaundiced old marketer who thought he he’d been everywhere and done everything it was a revelation. Fortunately that excitement has never waned: it is still working on frontiers and a lot of lateral thinking is required to turn the torrent of technological opportunities into meaningful tools. But above all, it is still fun!
As ex boss of Avis, Robert Townsend said in ‘Up the Organisation’ – ‘If you are not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing there?’ We’d all like the profit… but I’d settle for a little fun also.
Sincewriting my last post, I’ve been musing on what characterises a big idea. One feature is discontinuous change. It is not just another link in a chain of small ideas. On that basis, such things as the Internet and the mobile phone would I suggest qualify as big ideas – so would Communism, space travel and nuclear power.
While discontinuous change characterises big ideas, it is a necessary but not sufficient feature. Scale and impact upon humanity are also important features. Hence, the iPod, good idea that it is, is hardly up there with nuclear power and the Internet.
Working on a digital strategy brief with a client, I was told we need a ‘big idea’. Driving back from the meeting, I heard Tim Berners-Lee, ‘inventor’ of the Internet being interviewed on the radio and I thought, ‘Now that’s a big idea’. But since then how many big ideas have there been? Very few I would suggest. What we have seen are chains of little ideas. Good little ideas that agglomerated into something much bigger. Search engines were a little idea to help academics. Visionaries saw the potential and one good little idea built on another until we have phenomena such as Google. Not a big idea but a chain of little ideas done very well.
I’m not suggesting we don’t keep searching for a big idea, just don’t wait for it. All that will come are whiskers. Build those chains of great little ideas.
Back from holiday and the first thing I hear on the BBC Today programme is a discussion as to whether Internet publishing will kill off paper publishing – traditional printed media. Scary stats were quoted on the circulation figures, especially of regional daily papers. There has been a lot of discontinuous change in the print industry. I started my working life creating ads to appear in newspapers that were changing over from letterpress to litho: ‘It’s just a fad’, we were told. Like phototypsetting, all colour newspapers, desk top publishing, digital photography. Change goes with the medium.
Yes, a great deal of what paper publications once provided can now be delivered better digitally. But there will be a place for paper publications. Whether this will be in forms we recognize today or whether new forms of print media will emerge remains to be seen. I think it is an exciting time for entrepreneurial publishers to be looking at how digital will present new opportunities for print media.
For those of us not directly involved in publishing the biggest impact wil be upon our promotional activity. Will all our advertising spend be directed on-line? How should digital communications be integrated with print as part of a communications strategy? Where do we place our PR emphasis?
Perhaps the most important decision is how we harness the power of social Internet. It’s easy to look at the world of publishing in terms of just the commercial media, but with an estimated 50 million plus blogs, we are all publishers now.
