Want to get ahead in advertising? Then learn how to navigate MySpace, and pick up a programming language or two.
Ad agencies are about to trade three-martini lunches, schmooze-fests and fast-talking account executives for programmers, custom software and anthropologists who can navigate MySpace.
At an American Association of Advertising Agencies conference in New York last week, Colleen DeCourcy, chief experience officer for JWT, spoke about how social networks can be exploited for advertising purposes.
She laced her presentation with a lot of opaque references to cultural theory, some of which had the unmistakable scent of bullshit; but when she finally got down to brass tacks, she had a few interesting things to say.
One comment was aimed squarely at all those agencies that are desperately trying to acquire people who understand digital and "interactive" advertising, which invites consumer participation via digital media -- for example, voting on products online or sharing text messages as part of a viral marketing campaign.
"Digital anthropologists are going to be the next people you scramble to hire," DeCourcy said.
Her point was that as social networking continues to grow -- she claimed there are already 24 million people involved in virtual communities -- agencies will need people who can use the tools of cultural anthropology to interpret the overwhelming amount of user-generated data, and come up with strategies for using social networks to sell stuff.
Right now, DeCourcy doesn't think agencies are fully equipped to do this. But she believes the industry will be transformed over the next couple of years by an influx of young workers who are familiar with social networking.
"Within the next two years, this whole battle of hiring the right people will be over," she said. "We've got around 24 months that we've got to get through before it becomes really easy."
In the meantime, she said, agencies can occupy themselves with the "busywork" of figuring out how to monetize social networks.
Eric Johnson, the president of Ignited Minds, an interactive agency based in Southern California, claims that advertising is undergoing the biggest changes in a generation.
According to Johnson, the transition from traditional to interactive advertising is "akin to the transition from radio to TV."
Johnson said that though this particular digital revolution was promised in the late '90s, it only now seems to be taking place. And he emphasized the nervousness and confusion it has engendered among traditional agencies, along with the disruptive effect it will have on the industry.
More than once, he asserted that ongoing shift to interactive advertising will "reshuffle the deck" of hierarchies within the industry, allowing smaller high-tech firms like his to overtake larger, more established ones.
This is basically the dot-com model of advertising, with digital media being the "change agent" that will radically alter the face of the business and allow small, innovative companies to overturn the status quo while leaving their larger, more entrenched rivals in the dust.
Some of what Johnson said resonated with Michael Hart, a veteran adman from a midsize marketing communications firm in Toledo.
According to Hart, a lot of big agencies are just "sort of lost" when it comes to digital media. But Hart's own experience proves that even an old dog can learn new tricks.
Hart steered his firm towards interactive work nearly a decade ago, and he now makes a lot of money developing custom software applications for his clients.
This is not something that a traditional agency would do, or that a traditional adman would ever conceive of. Hart himself never imagined he'd be in this position, yet he employs a team of developers to build systems that end consumers never even see.
Not everyone agrees on the long-term significance of digital media and interactive advertising, however.
At an afternoon panel featuring several high-ranking advertising executives, an argument broke out over how important pure-play digital agencies will continue to be.
"I think that a digital agency is a short-lived creature. I don't think there's going to be room for purely digital agencies for long," said Tarik Sedky, chief digital officer at Y&R Advertising.
Despite his own title, Sedky added, "I think that we won't have digital officers for very long, or digital agencies, or digital this and that."
His point was that digital media would soon be so thoroughly assimilated into the mainstream that they will become invisible, losing their current exotic status amid all the other channels that advertisers use to reach customers.
Jay Woffington, of Bridge Worldwide, countered that there will only be two careers in the future: "software developer or algorithm writer."
The tongue-in-cheek comment was aimed at the event's sponsors, Microsoft and Google. But it neatly encapsulated the view that digital media are not just another marketing channel, but a paradigm-shifting phenomenon that will eventually overshadow everything else.
Michael Hart might have agreed. "Some day," he said, "this'll be the tail that wags the dog."
