Thanks to Matt West for the picture. The usual applies. 

As an outsider (I´m from Latin America, where “traditional” advertising is still the king), I sometimes feel that advertising industry in the US and Europe is rushing so desperately into reinventing themselves and fit into the digital world and their rules, that sometimes they forgot everything that they had learned during many many years of “traditional” advertising (what works, what doesn´t, what people thinks about advertising, etc…)

Via Paul Isakson`s blog I found this post about the missing value of  the concept, the “Big Idea”:

“To be successful over the long haul, your career can’t be founded upon trendy epiphanies or shiny new executions. Just as a pun wasn’t a concept in the late 80s, a typographical treatment wasn’t a concept in the mid 90s and shock value wasn’t a concept in the late 90s, so does new media need a core idea in order to reach its full potential. Most new-media revelations will seem laughably quaint in a few years. But true human insight will never go out of style.”

The thing is that being Internet a “world” in itself many of the ideas are around creating new-media (widgets, blogs, podcasts, virtual worlds, IM, etc.) that let brands be where the people is.  And as in the real world this only means that brands will keep interrupting people in their activities. I think one insight that could go out of this is that people think of media (TV, Internet) as a mean of entertaining not as a mean of communication (which is why I think that Branded Utility and Marketing as a Service are so brilliant ideas)

Brands should be platforms more that anything else, something that enable people to obtain what they want (satisfaction, entertainment, whatever….). That´s how Google became the top brand in the world,
by being the epicenter of the “digital world”. And that´s why we should learn a thing or two of Google, maybe dedicating 70% of our time to do what we do best and 30% in exploring new ways of doing it too, because otherwise they could bury us all.