The ad:tech Playground

I was lucky enough to attend and speak at the recent ad:tech event in Sydney. It was an immersive experience. Something like IT in the early ‘90’s, summed up by this elegant quote: “One strategy is worth 100 tactics”. It captured endless discussion on a blamange of tactics and tools. But a worrying dearth of strategy.

Brand thinking with the structure of real strategy was clearly not the focus. More so fun new tools that spew out metrics to a hungry audience wondering what to do with them. Wondering how they could potentially create new business value, if they had some kind of plan in which to interpret them. Where were the measures of brand equity anyway and how did digital contribute to lifting them?

Then the reason dawned – these were creatives in a playground full of new toys. Can we really expect them to work to a strategy?

Enter the seasoned architects. They remind us that exchanges of value are based on trust. Trust is created by relationships with people behind the brand. People that operate on principles and values, not scripts or rules. This blends across touch points in the business. At its core is communications – co-ordinated across functions, beholden to a bigger strategy. A strategy that in this new world is not set and forget. It is iterative and fluid. And who drives that, when so few senior people understand the medium?

Do not be alarmed, we are passing through the twilight zone and will shortly arrive…somewhere! More soon…