'Digital will become the context of everything': Tom Goodwin

Zee MELT 2015, the two-day festival of creativity in advertising and marketing created by Kyoorius in partnership with ZEE, GroupM and D&AD, concluded on Friday at Nehru Centre in Mumbai.

One of the key sessions held on the second day at ZeeMelt2015 was that on the advertisement industry at large. The speakers talking on the occasion was Tom Goodwin, Senior Vice President, Innovation and Strategy, Havas Media.

If we look across Tom’s career, we can notice he has worked in different sectors of the advertising industry, his profile at Havas Media is to understand the new technology, behaviours and platform and ideate and implement solutions for clients that take advantage of new opportunities these make possible. Before joining Havas, Tom had started his own agency ‘Tomorrow’, which provided innovative advertising and marketing solutions for the post digital age. Prior to this he had served as a Director Partner development, at IPG Media Lab. Before that he led new business development and strategies for companies including HUGE Inc and Lowe Worldwide, holding global roles based in the UK and US. If we could sum up his career in one line we would use his own quote and say, “I get bored easily”.

He started off his session by clearly mentioning that his presentation would be divided into three sections, the first one talking about why the kind of work that has been done is not really great, second one highlighting some of the best works and third and final section spoke about the themes he had charted out for us.

“Things have never been so fast before but will never be slow again” this one quote sums up the entire journey of the advertising industry. He believes that there have not been many evolutions in the advertising Industry; it is yet to reach its highest potential. Talking about the growth in our Digital world he pointed out that even though we’ve moved ahead in terms of technology and times, the format has changed but the content still remains same. The content we see now days is the same we have seen in the past but it’s just that the packaging has changed over a period of time. Adding to this, he said, “technology is transformative, it will revolutionise”. 

He also addressed the issue of hash tags, how they’ve become the know all of advertising. Brands and marketers are moving towards hashtaging everything; they’re losing out on the context and perspective of the entire brand messaging. Instead of working on the messaging part they’re working on how to make a campaign hash tag based.  He still believes as an industry, with the inclusion of technology we have hardly moved ahead.

While talking about the negative aspects of the technologies that we’ve developed, he said, instead of the technologies making our lives easier, it’s more time consuming. He explained this with an example, stating, instead of going to a café , ordering a drink, and sipping it we’ve complicated the entire process by going to the app on the phone, placing an order, making e payments, waiting for the order and then waiting for it to get delivered it to us. Adding to this he said it shouldn’t be this way; technology should rather provide us with some relief.

He gave few examples of certain campaigns, where agencies have done an incredible job in making the campaigns interactive and ahead of our times.  All the examples he showed were all digitally driven and since there are about 200 odd digital agencies around the world, he said, “Digital will become the context of everything.” He also pointed out how technology has already become too intimate for us, and all our personal experience will be showcased on digital platforms. While talking about the future generations, people will now grow up with the concept of offline experience. Their entire life will revolve around online, and TV will become a background noise and not a primary screen.

“Inspire. Provoke. Make it happen”. These were the three terms he used to describe how an agency or an organisation should look at themselves for creating more ideas. He believed organisation should inspire their employees, provoke them to challenge themselves and then these employees should make their ideas come to life.

He summed up the entire session in a few statements, ‘It’s not TV vs Video, it’s just video’, ‘its not digital vs traditional, it’s just a modern world’, and ‘think about new calls to action and not just “like” or “hash tag”’. 

Media
@adgully

News in the domain of Advertising, Marketing, Media and Business of Entertainment

More in Media