To The Future Fast — with COVID as Digital Accelerant

For Lions Live over the summer of 2020, Scott Galloway talked about the acceleration of digital transformation and trends due to the magnitude of the Covid disruption. He said we’re seeing “years happening in weeks.” He pointed to a hockey stick increase in retail and ecommerce adoption.

Here’s the video via YouTube

Since then, we’ve seen major shifts in telehealth, ecommerce, omnichannel retail (non-binary clicks and/or bricks), and more. Lots of proof of concept in our real lives beyond Galloway’s specific sources of proof.

Now, McKinsey is on board with its own take — called Digital Fast Forward. Their premise is that Covid-19 has “pushed companies over the technology tipping point” and there’s no going back.

Brief article is here (1 min read)

In-depth article is here (~10 min read … plus charts and graphs)

At advertising agencies, we should see the effects of this acceleration in a few ways —

We should see the demise of “above” and “below” the line as a working vocabulary; what happens when all “mass reach” vehicles are addressable media?

We’ll likely see a real shift in how people access the Internet. What happens over the next 2-ish years as 5G potentially challenges in-home ISPs and potentially wipes out the cable TV business model?

We will need to redefine the medium we used to call television. What happens when the next Golden Age of TV (which, btw, I believe we’re living in already) happens mostly on every screen except the one we used to call a “television”?

“We’ve got nothing better to do // Than watch TV and have a couple of brews // Don’t talk about anything else // We don’t want to know // We’re dedicated to our favorite shows”

— from “TV Party” by Black Flag

Here are 3 things I think we can do to prepare

Get smart about content that truly addresses unmet needs and unrealized desires

Shift the advertising supply chain to flex with personalization at scale

Completely embrace DCO (dynamic creative optimization) as a creative imperative

Get Smart About Content

Use unstructured data to identify and understand audience interests and intent. Beyond asking people to report on their intent, which has serious shortcomings (like, y’know, election cycle polling methodologies), look at the data we all reveal by ourselves about our needs and desires. It’s the building block for being the best answer with content from a brand.

Flex The Ad Supply Chain

Advertising adheres to a waterfall process. It’s tried and true. But it’s also terribly slow and inflexible. You can easily set up a creative idea that is off base or out of sync with the times by the time it goes to market. The work takes months to make. And it goes through several rounds of validation research before being released. Instead, a rapid insights cycle at the front end can at least verify the relevance of a creative idea, then as it’s running in programmatic media with inherent versioning baked in (see the next bullet about DCO) we can refine the idea in market. The point should be to use advertising to be the best answer to the audiences’ unmet needs and unrecognized desires (i.e. when they don’t know what they don’t know what they want).

Embrace Dynamic Creative Optimization

At the risk of diminishing craft in the making of advertising, we need to run general market, mass reach campaigns with the flexibility of personalization. We need to premeditate the variables in the creative product — headlines, body copy, images, edits, casting, calls-to-action, offers, sizes/shapes, formats and more. So we need a system for doing that in market at the speed of programmatic, addressable media.

Bottom Line: Screens and Surfaces

Ultimately, people experience advertising on a limited number of screens and surfaces. That’s why we need to produce advertising that propagates smartly across that media system. And the speed at which our own digital transformation needs to adapt is just as pushed by current events as every other sector of business.