An industry stuck in Neverland?

In response to Nick Manning’s “Blueprint for a new business model” article, Vic Davies, senior lecturer and course leader at Bucks New University, and former board director at The Media Business (now known as Mediacom), explains why the industry shouldn’t worry about ending up in South Wales – when in fact, it is much more likely to find itself in Neverland, being “a Peter Pan industry that never grew up, whilst those around it did”…

Change has come to the industry but it often appears the industry will not admit that the implications of change will impact as equally on it as it has on the consumer and the client.

Back in the mid 1980s when Nicolas Negroponte created the model of media content, computers and telecoms convergence that launched MIT’s Media Lab, the model was a thing of wonder, to some of us, even if back then you had to get out of the ad industry to find people who thought the same!

Now digital and its manifestation in behavioural targeting or social media are often seen as the next ‘magic bullet’. Show you can understand this and both the client and the agency problems are solved. This conversion to the apparent omnipotent power of digital ignores the fact that many clients, for example Tesco, were discovering the real power of technology and data, long before agencies were still trying master the lower slopes of SEO.

You may have read ‘Nudge’, but try reading ‘Scoring Points’ if you’re to understand what I mean. The growth of client side technology in b2b marketing, coupled with an increasingly sophisticated consumer armed with more and more first person singular media access in an increasingly post modern society, is challenging not just business models, but the underlining theories of marketing communications and the concepts of what is meant by the basic vocabulary of ‘marketing’ and what we mean by ‘brands’.

As a relatively new university, our view at Bucks New University is to embrace this challenge, and teach for today and tomorrow. Our new masters in marketing communications course will not have silo PR or advertising media modules, but a media communications and content one, with a very strong underpinning of IT and consumer technology and a large amount on that elusive creature, the consumer.

We know that the web is still a teenager ‘parent’ – our own students its children, and neither conform. We know that what digital is today is not what it will be tomorrow as it’s fed continuously by Gordon Moore’s Law and by the dynamic that exists in relationships as they grow and mature.

We also know that the audience for many products and brands do not have high speed broadband and the latest igadget, but that the shops they buy from are ‘tooled up’ when it comes to data collection that does not need a clipboard researcher, whilst having an ability to crunch the universal numbers in real time, before the sample size BARB overnights are even processed.

The logical outcome of that MIT model of convergence is that one day the position of companies like Apple, Google, Tesco and BT in that converged space would always impact on agencies and other suppliers to the marketing communications industry, who occupy the ground between the client and the consumer.

The industry now needs to be honest with itself, and embrace the light and dark of constant change in today and tomorrow’s much more complex world, and stop pretending that whilst clients and the consumers and others are pulled into the vortex, that it can somehow remain untouched. If it does not then I do not think it will end up in South Wales.  I think it may end up in Neverland, a Peter Pan industry that never grew up, whilst those around it did.

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