Note: This was not the post I was originally working on, but after an afternoon listening/watching the Obama inauguration and thinking about the implications of it all, I decided to write this instead. Please note that this isn’t a political blog and I have no intention of it being one, but this seemed like the right time to write this post. Today was a day of change (even if you don’t believe it was a day of Change™) and with it will come the waterfall effect across all sectors of the economy. So where does it leave us, the happy citizens of Adland? We’re in the middle of a huge number of changes and I think its time we change our response to all of them. In the face of: shrinking advertising budgets, declining readerships, ultra-fragmented media, over saturated DVR happy consumers and a new “crazy” generation (my generation) who demand they be included in marketing conversations we know the old solutions don’t work. So we say we’re going to change (some of us even attempt to Change™) and we go back to the drawing board with the same old people and have the same old conversations about the our same old change. Sounds like a recipe for success, right? We need to throw our same old change out the window and embrace some new change (or even Change™ if that’s your thing). We need to take these bad times and turn them into innovative times, where we find real new ways of advertising on budgets that are less. We need to embrace innovators regardless their “industry pro” status. We need to listen to our growing consumer base that is demanding we talk with them and not at them. This goes for marketing managers, account people, strategy people, creatives, CMOs and mail room workers. Its not just a change in Adland, its a change in business as a whole, brought to you by Adland. Change that will “add value” to our clients and more importantly their customers. Change that will answer the accusations that Adland is a drain on business budgets with a strong “Not so fast”. Change that will be measurable in sales, RIO, and whatever other statistics that are demanded by the number people. That’s Change™ I can believe in, how about you?
