What’s Your 4G Marketing Plan—Interruption or Disruption?

Chris Baylis of Tribal DDB Amsterdam issues a strongly worded challenge to the ad industry: Agencies need to innovate far beyond current models and marketers need to ditch their marketing departments.

You can skip this ad in 15 seconds. Your article will be ready to read in 5, 4, 3, 2…1. Welcome to the world of advertising, a world of endless interruptions where brands, at best, try to borrow your attention for a few moments, and at worst, steal your time.

The result, the clock is ticking for the ad industry. Most agencies have been trying to innovate around their own business model for years--but have they been asking the right questions to allow them to innovate? Let’s use the analogy of mobile phone networks: you could say that a lot of agencies are stuck with 2G thinking--traditional teams, linear processes that result in linear output and at best, cool videos for the internet. Let’s call it interruption advertising. So agencies ask themselves, “How do we move from 2G to 3G? How do we innovate?” Like most sectors they look to their nearest competitors and ask, “What are they doing? Ah, they’re doing digital!” So now all agencies think innovation = digital. As a result, we’re not seeing genuine innovation; instead we’re seeing more interruption, in more places, on more devices. Read More...