Advertising is the print industry five years ago. The future is software
Sir Tim Berners-Lee had advice the advertising industry should listen to when he spoke in Sydney last week. Jon Holloway was there.
I had the pleasure of listening to Sir Tim Berners-Lee – the man who made sense of the internet and ‘invented’ the web. He’s a man with a thousand ideas that all want to come out at once. A couple of theories that he talked about are so relevant to the advertising world that he might have been talking just about us.
Play:
And this is not gamifying stuff, this is about creative minds and technologists having the time to just play. TBL made the point that without the opportunity to play, the web wouldn’t have been invented. The start-up world has cracked this idea, that play and prototype are two things that drive change.
They are at the route of innovation.
Short fuse, big bang:
He talked about the Deloitte research on digital disruption which shows nearly a third of all Australian business will be disrupted by ‘web’ based innovation in the next few years. This is not only relevant to our clients, but to us as an industry. We are an industry that is massively focused on the past, we measure things based on the past, and we invent things based on the past. We are the print industry five years ago.
Advertising needs to quickly discover that there is no such thing as ‘the good old days’, our lunch is being eaten and those who innovate through technology are having a massive bite. Those who accept the status quo will get burned.
Developers:
The big sit-up and take notice piece was about the dumbing down of the PC. TBL talked about the PC becoming like white goods, more people now use computing technology to listen to music, browse the web and watch films than anything else. He theorized that people have forgotten the power of the program, the power of making stuff with a simple PC. He said that the future of the world sits in the hands of the developers, the people who can code things that make things easier. It’s hard to disagree with. In the advertising world we are seeing the real world to digital merge, in fact the line is no longer visible. A lot of what we should be doing is based on software that connects beyond a campaign.
It’s hard for anyone to deny that the future core of advertising will be based on something beyond digital. For an industry that is struggling to get digital right, moving beyond it to technology and platforms is a tricky task.
Not out of the realms of possibility though, I am betting a large slice of the future will be software and as such in the hands of the people who code, we need more of them and we need to find a way of building our agencies around them.
I will leave the close of this to the great man himself. When asked what is the future of the web? He said: ‘Anything you can imagine…’
- Jon Holloway is head of strategy at Sydney creative agency The Works
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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But still to this day, Apple chooses TV and Poster advertising as it’s main format for advertising.
Software is a big part of the future – but tell me one thing, how do you build a brand out of software that is not based on utility or a relationship of worth?
Sometimes in advertising we have to sell things by pure emotion, or attitude, or simply by a created sense of want.
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@ ‘I get this argument’
I do agree to an extent however, you could also argue that apple was built on iTunes, App Store and the future of iCloud etc.. The software that binds their hardware together.
Narrative will always happen, we will always create stories where there aren’t any and pull on emotion.. The problem will always be, how do you create a long term business based on that as a model? And that’s a question more than a statement..
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But imagine how much more we could charge clients for an integrated campaign when production costs can now include software development….
Giddyup boys.
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Search was supposed to be the end of advertising. Then we remembered the power of brands.
Expanding on the comments above…Apple is first and foremost a brand. There’s lots of techy stuff that does what they do. And some of it is far superior. But it’s not ‘Apple’. Human beings don’t buy ‘technology’, they buy outcomes or solutions. And these outcomes are best articulated to the mass market via advertising/marketing.
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Is there another industry that embraces change for changes sake more than the ad world? I didn’t really understand this piece but I did take out that it was another ‘change is coming, everything is changing, what we do now is redundant’ piece.
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I’ve been saying this stuff for ages but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s quite a jump to take insights and learnings from TBL and the like and bring it to advertising…
Innovation doesn’t come with fixed marketing budgets, it has to come from a deeper commitment by the client and if they’re in the mood for that sort of commitment, then why spend the money (and take the risk) with an ad agency?
Advertising is throwaway… It’s an expense, not an investment…
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@AndrewBolt et al.
I chuckled. WELL PLAYED
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If you type Google into Google it will break the internet.
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That’s pretty much on the money, Jon, but the big question is whether advertising people have the temperament and personalities to overcome decades of top-down dictating and engage consumers on a level playing field. The smart-ass comments on your post suggest not.
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Wow, this piece has really confused things.
Software is quickly becoming a commodity, and soon it will have less and less to do with advertising. This isn’t a ‘advertising vs software’ or ‘past vs future’ debate.
All you’ve done here is point out how crucial software will be in the future. I mean, you could have picked out refrigerators and blabbed on that we’ll need them to keep our milk cold, and that advertising cannot ever do that.
Software (or ‘innovation’ as people like to smartly say, but there will always be innovation. The pencil and paper was once innovative) is a platform that will shape tomorrow. Of course. But what’s that go to do with advertising.
Let’s say your car client comes and says, ‘we’ve just received 500 limited models that have extra shiny mirror hangers that our brand enthusiasts are gonna love. I’ve got to move all of them within 3 months, or my jobs on the line. They’re going for $40,999. I need you to get the message out.’
Or let’s say your Software client has just upgraded their Server offering to the Enterprise to include never-seen before speeds of analytics. But the problem is, the old version everyone has is still pretty good, and no one sees the value in forking out extra dosh to upgrade.
Or maybe your client has a new limited edition deodorant called ‘Super Shame’ and the need to just create awareness going into the summer period when deodorant sales start to peak.
You think creating ‘software’ is the answer. You think whatever stupid ‘innovative software’ you can create on a tiny budget for a 3 month campaign will entice consumers to make it part of their everyday life, like their favourite bit.ly link shortener Google ext. that sits to the right of their URL bar?
Software doesn’t replace advertising, anymore than the smart phone replaces advertising. Software will shape advertising, obviously, purely because advertising will always ‘fish where the fish are’, and new innovations will draw the fish.
I give this piece a D-.
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