From smartphones to augmented reality, there is no shortage of emerging platforms out there screaming for your attention. The trouble is, the emergence of each new bright shiny object makes it harder for agencies to convince their clients to experiment on a particular platform.
For one thing, budgets may not increase as fast as new platforms become available for advertising opportunities, which means that in some cases the money simply won't be there after all other advertising needs are met, no matter how willing the client is to push the envelope. That's a challenging dilemma, but it's likely one that will have a budgetary solution.
The more difficult situation -- for the agency -- is when the client can't, or won't, understand the importance of getting in on the ground floor of a new platform.
Think back to ancient times for a moment. Really ancient. You know, like when you saw your first Super Bowl ad for a dotcom. Remember when your mother asked, "What does dotcom mean?" Remember when people said the internet would never make it, and that brands that advertised on the web were just throwing good money down the drain? Yeah, those people were wrong. But they also represented the conventional wisdom of the day, and if you were working at an agency back then, trying to convince a client to embrace the web, you were fighting a pretty hard fight.
These days, the challenge is still there, except it's broken into smaller channels. Mobile has been the longest running next killer app. In fact, it's been the next killer app for so long that people can't help but predict that next year will be the year for mobile without smiling a little. But the truth is, mobile has come a long way -- it just didn't do it during the last five years when pundits, myself included, said it would. And the brands that were able to make the most of the iPhone when it came out on the market were the ones that had experimented with mobile when it was a punchline at industry cocktail parties.
Twitter was everywhere a year ago. But in the months before Twitter's big breakout, it was nothing but a wonky platform for the uber-geeky. At least that's how many brands and agencies viewed Twitter, and anyone who was trying to sell the platform as a branded communication tool was, well, out there.
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