Speaking at ad:tech New York the other week, he came out with a particularly journalist-friendly soundbite. Explaining the fact that digital adspend is still relatively low, he commented: “The people who run agencies tend to be of an older vintage - to put it politely. They tend to be resistant to change.”
It’s a story we picked up and ran on our site, media.asia . It proved so popular, we followed it up with an online poll, and now in the issue with our Off The Fence piece.
For once, general opinion seemed very much to support Sorrell. The poll received more than 200 votes, with 74 per cent agreeing with the statement (though that 3:1 ration was reversed in the piece for the magazine, when people actually had to go on the record).
On a superficial level, Sorrell’s comments make sense. In a world of digital ‘immigrants’ and ‘natives’, the more ‘immigrant’ you are, the more baffling this whole new media world will seem. Digital is marketing’s equivalent of rock/pop/whatever-the-kids-listen-to-these-days. You are either part of the ‘scene’, or you’re hopelessly square.
In this scenario, agency and marketing executives above, say, 35 are no more able to get their old-media heads around digital than they are the lyrical musings of Dizzee Rascal. Any attempt to get involved and they risk looking as desperately pitiful as middle-aged men squeezing into skinny jeans and hanging out in dimly lit nightspots.
This is dangerous territory, for several reasons. First, it assumes that the only people online are the content-mashing, social-network-surfing youth (that may largely be true in China, but experience shows it doesn’t stay that way).
Second, it assumes online consumers really do play by completely different rules. Certainly, the way young consumers use online to interact with each other, with brands and with different forms of content can seem mind-boggling. But in other respects they’re just doing what kids have always done. There was some great research MTV and Microsoft carried out a couple of years ago that suggested exactly that - kids are interested in the same things they’ve always been interested in, they’re just expressing it via different channels. Chances are that if you don’t understand today’s consumer, you didn’t really understand yesterday’s.
If there genuinely is a lack of understanding among senior agency personnel (and, let’s face it, senior clients), whose fault is that? Theirs for lack of trying? Their holding group’s for giving up on them? Is it the fault of digital media owners who haven’t done enough to explain how and why they deserve ad budgets? It may even be all of the above. But that doesn’t make quite such a snappy sound bite.
Got a view?
Email David.tiltman@media.asia
This article was originally published in 19 November 2009 issue of Media.
