I’ve fought a long and hard battle to stand up against digital advertising in a vain effort to protect my love of traditional advertising, however, the end is nigh.

Well, it’s not nigh, just that in order to take on a career in advertising these days you cannot neglect that digital will be a major part of your working life. In interviews today, if you have little or no knowledge of the importance in digital advertising then you may as well not bother.

The figures speak for themselves really, TV and outdoor are shrinking and digital is going through the roof. Now, that’s not to say I’m going to be open arms to working in any kind of communication. I mean Direct Mail for me is still the stain on a agency’s services portfolio but to understand it will increase you value ten fold compared to the dozy intakes who harp on about TV and this is all they can use as a mark of reference when discussing campaigns.

That’s a good point, if someone was to ask you about a great online campaign what would you say? Not much actually springs to mind like TV. This is probably because the internet is a pro active medium where you are using it with where you want to go already in mind, for example you want to check your Gmail you don’t want to wade through a lots of banner ads, clicking on those crosses so you can just see that you have a load of junk mail. TV acts as a passive medium where you are led by the medium, other than network selection, you have little control (right now) so the audience tend to absorb in a vegetable state.

Anyway, I digress, thinking of a digital campaign, I noticed one worked on me recently. I went in to

www.brandrepublic.co.uk

and out of the corner of my eye I noticed a flickering, as much as I tried to ignore it I couldn’t and I ended up looking at it. It was for the new i mac, the new one with an intel processor, the images on the banner were changing at an extreme rate creating this flickering effect which attracted my attention. I therefore thought that was a good example of something very visual and active that broke through my usual web browsing and I guess herein lies starting to understand how digital banner advertising can work.

But now we can start to think about digital advertising through TV. I was speaking with some friends who work at the digital pioneer agency Glue London and even by using a High Definition TV we are talking about digital advertising.

www.gluelondon.co.uk

The Labour Govt has enforced a digital switch over for all our TV viewing anyway so it would appear we will be forced into digital advertising.

Now this is where it gets exciting. Tivo are developing a service whereby you can nominate which brands you would like to receive TV advertising from. With this will be data that can be tracked, i.e. Nike will be able to tell when their ads were viewed, by who and how many times. This is the pretty much the saving grace of TV advertising as measurable data will be able to be presented to clients, providing the argument that branding is just as important in the sales pushing services of the usual BTL shop.

So what’s my point? Well I guess it’s to start educating yourself on how digital works, right now in terms of the internet. For starters it’ll mean you’ll be more employable and it also means that you’ll be a cut above the rest if you are looking to work in a large ATL shop. I recently bought this book which is an amazing resource to learn from:

Online Marketing: Online Media Planning, Pay Per Click Search Marketing, Organic Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Rich Media and Banner Advertising, Viral Marketing, Social Networks and Analytics by Ravi Damani, Chetan Damani, Dana Farbo, Jane Linton

Alternatively you could work for a pure digital agency and specialise in the digital arena, it all depends on what you are looking to do. The problem with big ad agencies is that they are somewhat slow on picking up trends. As a result, you may find yourself hanging around for ages bleating about the need for a real digital push on your sole TV based account and then one day have you Account Director turn around and say “You know what, we should really be thinking of digital here”, sigh.

Whatever the older generation think, as they start to be phased out, we can rest assured that our careers will be turning quite tech frenzied within advertising so best to be aware of it.