David Feldt, managing director of the Toronto office of Organic – a leading digital marketing communications agency with other offices in Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco – is MiC‘s penultimate new year’s pundit. Here’s what he terms ‘a snapshot of Organic’s view of interactive in 2008.’
• ‘The Rise of the Modern Digital Agency: Everyone has been grappling with the right agency configuration to properly align digital and traditional advertising. [We] believe that we need to stop focusing on our own internal disciplines and start focusing on consumers. Agencies need to move away from ‘offline and online’ and more toward consumer mindsets and personas.
• ‘Time-shifting, place-shifting: Simply put, brands should drive less traffic to brand destinations and allow customers to encounter the brand in the course of their ‘online tasks and travels.’ This will require brands to get more comfortable ‘living’ in the other brands’ environments. All of the Facebook and MySpace campaigns we’ve seen aren’t just fads – they’re brands responding to this new reality.
• ‘People’s Choice: Individuals will increasingly realize that they have unprecedented opportunities to be heard – and that their opinions have weight. Social computing will move ‘online influencers’ into the limelight. People used to aspire to the coolest and most desirable brands. Now brands must aspire to the coolest and most desirable people.
• ‘My-dentity Management – me, myself and I: As people increasingly turn to the social web, some will want to manage a set of distinct identities they can assign and adjust at their whim/discretion. Others will simply want greater control over a single identity they plug into different ‘spaces,’ showcasing some characteristics and downplaying others. Either way, people will be managing their personal brand through my-dentities.
• ‘Social Mobility: 2008 promises to be a collision of mobile services, local search, social networking, location-based services and personal relevance. This combination promises to be the next big thing in interactive marketing.’
