One of the things I’m constantly muttering to myself these days is how agencies and their clients need to speed up their creative development processes. Six months is a joke today, at least when it comes to digital. Six days is more like it. Of course, radical change doesn’t come easy.
Apparently, I’m not alone with this sentiment. Catharine P. Taylor also has some thoughts on it.
What I wish for the industry (in 2008) is that it accelerate its pace of change, and not necessarily by snapping up any shop that makes a claim to digital advertising expertise. (There was way too much of that this year. Way too many headlines about huge holding companies buying little digital something-or-others that no one has ever heard of.) In reality, the only way the pace of change will accelerate is for everyone in advertising to either change their mindsets or get out of the business. We all know that there are thousands of ad execs who find all of the changes to the advertising marketplace scary; all they really want to do is retire before the grim digital reaper comes and cuts them out of the business before their time.