Digital
isn’t just a disruptive change agent anymore — it has emerged as the dominant economic and cultural force shaping society today.
That’s according to Nigel Morris, CEO, Dentsu
Aegis Network Americas & EMEA, who spoke at an Advertising Week session Wednesday.
While digital convergence has been talked about for years, Morris said that “digital and the rules
of digital have become the dominant force in the last 12 months.”
That dominance has unleashed a battle between “incumbency and new entrants in every sector,” Morris added.
As a result, he said, just about every company that isn’t a startup “has to think like a turnaround.”
“Innovation at scale,” he said, “will be vital to the
success of the economy as we evolve over the next three to five years.”
advertisement
advertisement
And achieving scale is more complicated now. “We used to be able to see it,” in the pre-digital world,
Morris said, when the number of factories, fleets of trucks, inventory and other tangible items defined scale. In the digital world it’s harder to see and more difficult to measure. It’s
less about “what we have” and more about “who we reach,” he said.
The new digital world, Morris said, is an interconnected, “demand-led” world. Unmet
consumer needs and numerous insights about consumer mindsets can be deciphered by parsing Big Data. The problem for many big incumbent businesses, he said, is that they aren’t structured
“to take in or act on Big Data.”
And marketing can be at the center of that interconnected world, orchestrating ties between consumers and businesses. “More and more
it’s happening through media,” he said.
Most of the capital being invested in the economy today is going toward digital technologies. That said, a focus on the human touch is
critical. Product development has to be “laser focused on people and how technology has changed them” and vice versa.
“Behind every data point is a real live person,”
Morris said. The implication for marketers: “No black box will tell us what to do.”
As the industry becomes more precise in reaching the right environments, the more critical it
becomes to develop messaging that keenly resonates within those environments. “People are emotional,” he said. “The message has to be helpful and relevant.”
Digital
media has narrowed the space between the points of engagement and transaction, said Morris. Success requires planning for an interconnected ecosystem in real-time. That requires much faster
decision-making. Many more “kill or go” decisions have to be made in a matter of days, and sometimes hours, he said.
