We often think of digital as fulfilling specific roles, yet new roles are emerging continuously. Underscore Marketing's president describes the institutional inertia our industry faces.
"Think outside the box." We were sick of that one 10 years ago. Really sick of it. That there ever really was a "box" in the first place, though, is the truly annoying thing about this cliché, if you ask me.
It's human nature. We become accustomed to new things by likening them to old things. You might ask someone: "What is Loopt?" And they might answer: "It's kind of like Google Maps and Twitter rolled into one thing on your phone."
Whether or not that's an accurate description really isn't the point -- the point is that we have a shorthand for understanding innovation. We do need this -- can you imagine how quickly your brain would explode if we weren't allowed to use metaphor to describe new things to people? Eek,
But there's a downside to all of this -- a big one. Our lives are unquestionably becoming more complicated. We have more time pressures. The rate at which new innovations become available to us is increasing all the time. And thus, we're under pressure to stick things in boxes, grouping them together. Our way of understanding new things becomes limited by what we understand about old things.
Too much of this makes our brains lazy. We might mentally group together two companies in the online video space because they both sell video ads, even if one sells pre-roll on premium sites on a targeted basis and the other sells untargeted video banners on a big ad network. It makes it a bit difficult for those companies with truly innovative solutions to break clear of the pack. We tend to group things together according to the roles they play for our business. Once we do that, it can become difficult for a player to fulfill a role other than the one we originally assigned it.
To fail to be able to see things in different roles is simple intellectual laziness. But when institutional inertia gets behind intellectual laziness, watch out.
One of the reasons the digital revolution is so disruptive to businesses is that they have trouble figuring out where digital "lives" within their organization. What does it do? What is it good for? Who should be responsible for it? Some organizations go down a very specific path. For instance, lots of retailers used to believe that digital media were good for direct response advertising only. The responsibility for digital initiatives thus fell to marketing, and they either hired a digital DR agency, hired someone internally, or retasked an offline DR person to meet the need.
For a short while, the organization learns to keep digital in the same box occupied by DR advertising. It might even work for awhile. But then here comes social media…
What does that organization do with social media? Institutional inertia leads it to treat social media like DR, and the next thing you know, you have a disaster. Smart organizations realize that digital innovations can fulfill new roles (and often multiple roles as well). They'll ask themselves what each innovation is and what it's good for, rather than using old lenses to view the world.
We live in interesting times. The innovations keep coming. And they're now crossing major organizational lines within companies. Remember when it was as simple as showing that digital could fulfill multiple roles under advertising? Now, we're fairly certain that digital doesn't always live under advertising, and we're starting to think that certain applications of it don't even live under marketing.
How do you get an audience with a CEO to tell her that digital, which has lived reasonably comfortably under marketing for more than a decade, needs to be thought of as a larger entity with its own director that reports directly to her? It's a big deal to try to make such a case. Yet it might be necessary if we ever want to think of digital media as something that delivers something other than an ad message.
Tom Hespos is president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.