Digital Natives, ah! a term I had long forgotten in the advertising world....

Making an Agency Digital to the Core

Why Digital Natives Are an Essential Ingredient

Posted by Phil Johnson on 03.12.10 @ 01:36 PM

Phil Johnson

I continue to be fascinated by how agencies change and how extraordinarily hard this can be to accomplish. Regardless of the difficulty, it's an essential agency survival skill. Great agencies learn how to continually reinvent themselves to the core, while merely good agencies often only change their outward structure. In some ways this pursuit of change, particularly as agencies define their relevance in the digital world, has been the great advertising drama of the last two years.

Hard to believe, but two years ago people were debating the merits between traditional and digital agencies, as if they had to choose between blue states and red states. Jump ahead to today, and most small agencies have carved out their own path. They have found a way to be true to their roots and have also made huge strides in their commitment to digital marketing. Digital vs. traditional no longer seems like a religious war.

PJA Advertising has made this journey along with the rest, and what I've learned is that change does not come from one defining choice. You need a commitment from the top. You need to redefine processes and roles. You need to bring in new resources and talent. More than anything, if you want to make changes that go beneath the surface to the core, you need to introduce a foreign agent that will chemically alter the composition of the agency. In our case, we didn't experience this degree of change until we opened our doors to the new breed of "digital natives" and gave them the freedom to introduce their digital DNA into the agency.

Specifically, digital natives are people who have spent their entire lives using the internet as an extension of themselves, and there are some good descriptions of the attributes that these people possess. Jeremiah Owyang wrote a nice post about digital natives on his blog, Web Strategy. Without the influence of these native speakers, most of us are doomed to clumsily translate conventional ideas into a digital format, rather than creating original ideas unique to the digital medium. We may master the outward forms but not the soul of the digital world.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating hiring some kid that spends 80 hours a week leveling his "World of Warcraft" character. I'm talking about a specific set of traits and insights that help transform an agency into an innovative digital marketing organization. Here's why every agency needs these people on staff.

They understand what happens under the digital hood. They see beneath the user interface to the underlying technologies. This gives them the ability to assess the true capabilities of a tool or platform and often manipulate it to their own purposes. They can define the digital experience on their own terms and not let it define them.

Digital natives have the skills to conduct their digital lives across many digital platforms with the ease with which an international traveler moves across continents. They can jump from platform to platform depending on its utility. This means that when planning marketing campaigns they can leave the beaten path to create more highly customized online experiences for consumers.

Digital natives treat their identity in the physical world and online as one entity. This makes their online personalities multidimensional and gives them better communications skills than the occasional visitor to Facebook and Twitter.

Because they conduct so much of their lives online, digital natives have a rich collection of experiences with brands in the digital world and a solid understanding about what kinds of communications are effective. With this fluency, they can expand an agency's vision for what is possible when developing strategies and campaigns.

Above all, digital natives get gaming. It's in their blood. As advertising and marketing agencies continue to adopt more of the principles and psychology of online gaming, all of us will need digital natives to help lead us through the maze of opportunities.

Agencies don't just need digital natives working in technical functions. We need them working throughout the agency in planning, media, account, and creative. They need to be allowed to experiment and explore and not be forced to work within old job titles and structures. If you're really serious about a digital transformation, these are the people who can shake up the organizational structure and push senior management to see the world in a fresh way. We're in a business that encourages clients to take big risks on change. We should be willing to do the same for ourselves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phil Johnson is CEO of PJA Advertising & Marketing with offices in Cambridge and San Francisco. He's as irritated as everybody else that the iPad won't support Flash. Follow Phil on Twitter: @philjohnson

via adage.com

An art director, a flash artist or HTML person doesn't a digital make....when will agencies learn to go core! Maybe they never will with all the traditional foilks at the helm.

Posted via web from An idea, a day!

Social media's a party, but you gotta keep it low!

Social media as Google rightly puts it is a giant party; and to put it lightly it’s turning out to be a wankfest of immense proportions.

So called social media agencies and fad hunters are creating a state of near paranoia in pushing for growth by numbers. Hey hold on! Is social media about large numbers? Or is it about the likeminded coming together to communicate, share, work for a shared passion and create something in its wake?

I would tend to agree with Seth Godin’s of the world (read his take on social groups in his book Tribes), that it’s the latter. And the key to any social group is communication, so to that effect how can communication channels work when it starts emulating broadcast media formats of one ->many?

 Let’s take a look at our own social habits. It’s great to add new friends grow numbers and engage in fruitful communication with a group of likeminded people. But all this changes after we cross a threshold limit, 100’s for some 1000’s for others; somehow the communication channel begins to crumble beyond a size, the intimacy is lost and we find it difficult to keep track of the diverse set of comments, member movements, activities etc. While there are celebrities do have lists that runs into millions ( Shahrukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra etc) but you really have to ask yourself if they are really creating cohesive groups or using the social tools to broadcast? Can you imagine SRK responding to your critical analysis of his last movie and explaining his stance?

So here’s my plea to number hunters, get off those blinkers, take a step back and re-visit your strategy. Delve a little in the amazing world of obscurity in existence across the multitude of b/boards that are as old as the internet and definitely much older than the social fad. Maybe you will find your answers, I for one have always believed in my closed groups, its time you do too!

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