Dani Bordiniuc

I finally found some free time these days and finished reading the e-book called Oh My God What Happened and What Should I, written by the guys from Innovative Thunder. A book that I stumbled upon by pure mistake, seeing it heavily promoted through Twitter. I download it, read the first pages and got wired. And I’m really glad I found it. With all the changes taking place in the marketing industry, this book  was in the right place and at the right time to answer couple of questions I had been carrying in my head for some time.

Now, about the content of the book:

The book is flagging the fact that media is changing and there’s a new generation emerging, a generation with a totally new media behavior. And it’s imperative for the marketing industry to adapt since the traditional means will no longer work in reaching this generation. Well, most of them. The book comes up with a set of tips and guidelines to help traditional advertising and marketing people make their way into the digital era.

• First of all, in order to be able to manage the issues that will arise in the future, everyone needs to have a good understand of each other’s work. There should be a cross-functional effort through which everyone should understand the medium the others in his/her team are working with. Otherwise, it’s gonna be difficult if not impossible to execute a truly integrated campaign, mostly when separate departments are working as one team.

Nowadays, everybody should have an understanding of what digital is all about, be it a writer, a designer, an event manager, a planner. Still, digital specialists themselves need to open up to traditional media and story telling, since theoretically, anyone must be able to take over the other person’s job. An online writer should be able to write a TV script, just like the art director should know how to design a website.

Here, I don’t necessarily agree. I still believe you need specialists in your team, people that worked for years in the field and built their expertise through time. It’s hard for me to imagine that, if a creative gets fired, the planner can easily replace him/her and do the exact same job, at the exact same standards. I do however agree with the statement that everyone should understand the work performed by the other members of the team. It helps you better understand your role in the team, how your performance is affecting others and what’s your contribution to the project/business.

• We live in times where having a passive brand = dead brand. The brand should listen its fans/customers, pay attention to their conversations, observe and gather insights. Ultimately, use those insights to include the fans in the story, give them the possibility to interact with the brand.

The times in which people just listened to a brand is over. A brand must give its users the possibility of interacting with it.

• Interactive doesn’t necessarily imply that it has to be digital. But, digital is most often the best way to execute, to deliver an interactive idea. How can you make people interact with your TV ad or your integrated advertising campaign? How can you make them part of it? How can you transform your website into an interesting tool people will enjoy using over and over again and (most important) willing to share it with their friends?

A brand should insert itself meaningfully into people’s lives by enabling and enriching their existing behaviors, not by requiring new ones.

• Don’t create a Youtube channel, a Facebook page or a Twitter account and then think about what you actually want to communicate through them. Think the other way around. First, find the relevant content you want to communicate to your customers/fans and then choose the most appropriate medium to reach the crowds.

Bottom line: a great useful read. It’s an entertaining book from the first pages all the way to the end. There are multiple real-life examples throughout the book, making it easier for the readers to make the connections and see the applicability of the concepts. The book also features a fabulous history lesson on technology and media, from the birth of the internet in 1969 up to the latest innovations from 2010.

download the free e-book here

If you liked this post, you can also read the following:

• the art of knowing when to quit