For those of us that have been in marketing for a few years, we remember what it was like to have our marketing messages centered around print ads, brochures, postcards, annual reports and the like. We rejoiced when the web came along and gave us even more creative freedom by making things more interactive.
However, a funny thing happened on the way to 2021. As digital media has moved into the spotlight, the spaces where our creative exists have gotten smaller. We now live in a world where ads are not always in paragraph form – they often exist in the handful of characters Google Adwords gives us. Our value proposition can be relegated to the 140+ characters that Twitter allows. Finally, our art and pictures are becoming icons or parts of banner ads that are getting lost in a sea of other visual media that each web page hits us with. With our world getting more complicated and bombarded with an infinite number of inputs, the greater the challenge is for marketers everywhere.
Does that mean that creative isn’t important anymore? Far from it. The ability to creatively get a theme, message or point across with smaller spaces and fewer words demands even more or our time and energy. Just because we have smaller windows and even shorter attention spans doesn’t mean we just throw our creative energy in the trash and think all is lost. Like with any advancement, marketers need to adapt to the challenges and come up with new and exciting ways to get our brand out there. We just have to think of the best ways to do it with the medium and the audience in mind.
The good thing about this challenge is that marketers can push the envelope of technology to get what they want. We manage and analyze our programs and adapt to market conditions with even more insight and visibility. All the advancements in video, messaging, social and community are basically derived from marketing, so our ability to push and drive the change we want to see will make our creativity and its execution have just as much impact as it always has.
Some of your old-school marketing deliverables may become antiques, but don’t let yourself become one. Push your creative thought processes in the mediums we have today and be excited about all that is to come.
