In London, I am a somewhat of a novelty. And I can thank my career history and choice for that. In ultimately fascinating times, and I mean that with sheer compassion, where we almost reached Armageddon last Thursday before the US government bailed us all out by pumping $105 billion of liquidity into the frayed banking institutions- I am still getting calls from eager Head Hunters. The vast majority of central London dwellers are financiers. Now you can put two and two together on why I am a novelty for them. While poor Lehman folk are still packing their work belongings and itching to find another job in a current hiring freeze, I am getting calls aplenty for potential job opportunities in the digital media capacity. Now let me assure you that this is not meant to be a blog for boasting! The point i’m trying to make, and which David Armano at Critical Mass so wonderfully articulated some 1 year ago, is that in times of recession, Digital Advertising BOOMS where other companies (financial, traditional advertising and retail) fall. Why do you ask? (And I’ve been asked this one too many times this past week ) is due to a few key reasons, one of which:
In times of trouble, every dollar counts. And Digital investments are about the only sure way of getting the most out of your advertising dollar. The abundant ways to measure performance of the ad budget (site metrics, eMarketing metrics and DEPARTMENTS solely dedicated to measure performance of each capacity) coupled with the real time phenomena is probably the biggest competitive edge Digital has over Traditional. For this reason, I am confident that ad dollars are being pulled from Traditional and placed into Digital at rapid speed as we speak, which is why I have had about 8 head hunters reach out to me in a span of 3 weeks.
“Wow, what an amazing pitch. I’m really intruiged. You present Digital so well and I never even knew what you guys do!” says a Barclays Wealth lady among a group of friends who fears a job cut is just round the corner. The funny thing is that I wasn’t even pitching DIgital. This goes to show you that when an idea, service or any type of offering is viable and JUST THAT GOOD, talking about it (with passion) will always resemble a pitch of sorts. I think deep down that is also the case because when you know a formula works, you want others to join the movement.
To Leo Burnett, JWT, Saatchi and the like: Hurry up and evolve those damn primitive digital arms of yours if you want to stay afloat in this deep, deep recession.
[...] wrote an article about this very topic (see Goodbye Lehman, Merrill, AIG – Hello Digital!) that Gary and so many other social media entrepreneurs have been preaching and practicing. Please [...]