I don't care if it's the in-house digital guru, the smartest sales rep you've come across or a borrowed consultant. Someone needs to educate digital strategists and planners on the basics.

Tim Hanlon, EVP of Ventures at Denuo, takes a more aggressive stand.

"Innovation in our industry won't come from hiring a 'digital czar' or building a 'new media' lab or issuing white papers -- it will only come with aggressive and passionate embracing of new solutions that are coming from all sides, not all of them obvious," Hanlon says. "In other words, restructure the organizational cultures of creative and media to not simply take more meetings, but to anticipate and even proactively solicit new approaches -- before they (maybe) come to you."

Back to a video technology education program. I'm talking as basic as the difference between a video publisher, video ad network and a publisher rep firm. No condescension intended, but we are kidding ourselves if we think that most planners even know that distinction. That's precisely the reason agencies need education -- but now it's the agency's responsibility to close the learning gap.
 
If you want to get beyond the basics you can dive into how video gets distributed by widgets, how P2P sites work and the difference between software put out by Veoh, Joost, Azureus and Bittorrent. If you want to go nuts you can get into CDNs versus ad servers, video formats and players. You can talk ipTV and digital content distribution across new screens for the bonus round.

The funny thing is that you could do a cursory overview of all of these topics in less than half a day, with lunch sponsored by any number of the video technology players who are calling on you. You'd save your organization a lot of unproductive time and energy ignoring calls, fielding calls and sorting through white papers. You'd walk away with a competitive advantage over the vast majority of digital agencies in current existence.