Digital Business insights: Let's not waste creativity

Recent Adobe research found that only 8 percent of people paid attention to online ads. No surprises there. Print ads in newspapers scored 26 percent. TV ads scored 22 percent. Radio 16 percent and billboards 14 percent. Ads in apps and games scored only 5 percent.

Remarkable percentages. But confirmation of other research finding the same thing. And reassurance for everybody else out there who suspected it.

What it means is that we are all getting very good at selective attention. Or inattention.

We are busy.

Is this distraction in my peripheral vision relevant?

Did I go looking for it? No. Ignore.

Looking for something? Google it.

Well what do you know? Here is a wide choice of possible answers to my search. Not all relevant, but most are close enough.

It’s that simple.

On the one hand instant relevant answers to questions and on the other hand people pushing stuff at me when that is not why I am there. 

Just like the Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on my door, when I want to work or rest at the weekend. And if they actually had a relevant message for me I might even be interested. But they don’t.

Timing and relevance.

Online ads fail to deliver. Only 8 percent of people pay attention, and then an awfully small percentage actually do anything about it.

And Facebook hasn’t got a hope in hell of building an advertising audience. They are already well on the way to making their regular visitors feel increasingly hassled.

What used to feel safe, comfortable and familiar now feels intimidating, pushy and busy. It’s not going to work.

Vendors need to think about this. Print, TV, Radio and billboards are a much better investment.

Online just needs to be used in another way. It’s not rocket science.

I was asked after my presentation whether I thought advertising agencies had a role to play in the digital revolution, given the research above and a number of other disruptive issues I covered in the presentation.

I think they do. Not it the way they currently operate. But in a more expansive and far more valuable way.

Advertising agencies, architects, designers are all creative thinkers and solvers of problems. They work to a brief.

They are highly capable translators of strategic problems into creative solutions. They are good at it. Always have been. A lot of concentrated brainpower goes into selling soap and cars, designing buildings and new products.

Whether that is the best use of that brainpower for society is debatable, but that is where the money is, and it attracts smart thinkers.

This ability to define a problem as a creative strategy, pass it to a creative, production and media team and then measure the resulting solution against the strategy is what makes advertising and other creative agencies useful. They do this again and again to order and the solutions are generally worth paying for.

They are wasted trying to prove they can compete fully in this new software development and online digital environment.

They are much more valuable than that. They can think creatively.

Wouldn’t it be good if governments at all levels paid them to look at a wider range of issues and problems beyond purely communication and selling?

What about bringing them into economic development teams to add new insights and ideas that expand and explore the potential and possibilities of our existing resources, strategic aims and objectives in regional economic plans?

Most regional 2020 or 2030 economic development plans are all the same (bar the name on the front page) and lack any real creative vision. And we all suffer as a result.

They need creative input.

What about bringing creative teams into government departments to add new insights and ideas to policy? Couldn’t be more important.

What about bringing them into tourism development, not just at the selling and promotion stage, but at the product development stage?

What about bringing them into remote, regional and rural development planning?

What about focusing them of health not illness? And what about some fresh, new ideas to address our never-ending intransigent indigenous welfare problem that seems too hard for everybody else?

What about connecting them directly with manufacturers and agriculture and other productive industries much earlier than at the marketing and sales stage?

Product development. I know this happens already, but it can be more creative, comprehensive, customer focused and visionary than it is today.

We need the input of our skilled, innovative and creative designers, architects and advertising agencies to be aligned in a deliberate manner. And we need to allocate a percentage of all economic development funds to pay for it.

That is what a Future Fund should be about. Not superannuation, but investing in our future.

Economists, policy officers and developers are good at analytics, but the translation of that analysis into informed action requires creativity and ideas, and that skill set sits somewhere else entirely.

Our national creative resources have to be actively matched to our productive resources and capabilities if we are going to establish, maintain and build a value added future now mining is in decline.

Time to get on with it.

 - John Sheridan, August, 2013.

* John Sheridan is CEO of Digital Business insights, an organisation based in Brisbane, Australia, which focuses on helping organisations and communities adapt to, and flourish in, the new digital world. He is the author of Connecting the Dots and getting more out of the digital revolution. Digital Business insights has been researching and analysing the digital revolution for more than 12 years and has surveyed more than 50,000 businesses, conducting in-depth case study analysis on more than 350 organisations and digital entrepreneurs.

www.db-insights.com

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