• by Seana Mulcahy , March 10, 2008

I don't know if it's because I didn't have nearly enough time to get what I needed to done this weekend. Or if I've been in writing mode as I gear up for OMMA Hollywood speaking gigs. Maybe it's due to a couple of guys that asked me to potentially partner with them on behalf of a really cool technology client. I don't know. I guess I'm not in my traditional mode of Spin blogger today.

In fact it seems we are in the age of let's-do-nothing-traditional-anymore. We rarely send cards in the snail mail; we send them by email or make posts to someone's "wall" in social media. We ditched land lines for cables through modems aka voice over ip (VoIP).

We want our screens to be flatter. Our mobile phones are the central nervous center of our lives; a hybrid of technology. Not only are they a lifeline -- but an accessory. We don't have the time to email or pick up the phone to say we will be home late; we send text messages instead. In them we don't write full words, we abbreviate. Few savor the art of penmanship, prose and proper grammar. Instead it's shorthand, acronyms and emoticions. Lexicons are sound bytes on some sort of screen where we forget we hear about them. We are sound bytes at best with time-starved lives. We have an on-demand mentality and expect to get what we want when we want it: news, information, entertainment, weather, scores, etc. And that's just when we are being consumers.

As advertisers and marketers, we don't want to be traditional, either. We look for untraditional ways in which to advertise. The digital media space has catapulted away from just using traditional ad units to a whole host of new formats, sizes and placements.

We scratch our heads at the warp speed adoption of sites like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. Yet we want to tout our wares to them. We fear what we don't know: How videos almost instantaneously manifest from screen to screen, from person to person. We wonder why the heck everyone loves the little status bars that let you type in your mood or what you are doing -- and furthermore, wonder why people check them constantly.

We know it's more than life beyond the click; it has to be. We want to engage users and to be able to monitor, track and optimize their engagement. But we don't know how. We like the lack of standards from research methods to ad formats to metrics. However, so many people won't buy media unless they can cover off on impressions, clicks, and click-through rates. Some delve into clickstreams yet still have to use deductive reasoning to find out the "why" of it all.

In our world, time-to-market was yesterday at best. There never seems to be enough time to plan the way we want to plan, negotiate with those we want to negotiate, implement all the bells and whistles, and dot our "i's" and cross our "t's." It's not unusual that budgets can be use-it-or-lose-it -- or given to us simply because there wasn't enough time to produce offline ads. We're used to squeezing a dollar out of a quarter.

We want to build awareness, to spawn positive word of mouth, lengthen brand chatter, have others endorse our brands -- then create demand, build affinity and loyalty... the list goes on.

As consumers or advertisers and marketers we want it all in this world -- offline, online, everyplace else. How do we keep up with the speed of it all? Can we really cut through the clutter?