It’s Time to Upgrade to You 2.0
Think You Don’t Work in Digital Media? Guess What: You Do. Here’s Your Guide to Translating Your Skills From Traditional to Digital
In the next year or two, you’ll be interviewing for a new job. So will I. So will your coworkers. So will your boss, your client and your competitors. Digital media is changing advertising so quickly, so radically, that we’ll all have new jobs in a couple of years, and our careers will depend upon our ability to use digital media to our advantage. It’s not just the creative department or media; it will drive how every person in the company creates and operates, from human resources to accounting. Today, digital is not a department — it’s a competitive advantage.
Bad things happen when people don’t upgrade their skills. About 15 years ago, when computers entered the creative department, most art directors quickly adopted them. But some resisted, especially “senior” ones (read: those over 40), who continued to rely on the studio. Their argument — quite noble in theory, actually — was that they should be hired for their brains, not their wrists. Unfortunately, nobility doesn’t live long in agencies. Within a few years, most had been replaced by younger (and cheaper) wrists/thinkers who’d never dream of art directing from the back seat.
Let’s avoid that unpleasantness, shall we? Translating your skills and experience from traditional media to digital isn’t as hard as you might think (at least, assuming you had strong ideas and strategy to begin with). Below, your guide to navigating this transition.
STOP RESISTING IT
It’s happening. Or should I say, it happened. No longer is digital a “department” within an agency — it’s an essential competitive advantage for everyone in the company. Time to get on with it.
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE, YEAH, BUT YOU STILL NEED A MESSAGE
It’s not enough to slap up content and expect it to get hits. For every Dove “Evolution” there’s a burial ground of failures.
EXPERIMENT MORE
Digital marketing is written in code, not stone. Constantly try new things, tweak formulas and take more risks.
GET READY FOR OBSOLESCENCE
Even as you launch a digital project, the clock is ticking on its countdown toward cliche-dom. Things change so quickly in digital space that 2008’s breakthrough will be 2009’s yawn.
QUIT BITCHING ABOUT FASTER TURNAROUND TIMES
Immediacy is a key advantage for clients. Make it your advantage, too.
STOCKPILE NEW SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE
Collect as much digital understanding as possible. Boost your learning curve by attending conferences (and not just for the boondoggle). The best way to turbocharge your worth in the digital marketplace is to work alongside the best, so work with digital superstars even if you don’t get paid for it. As someone once said, “Aspire to be the dumbest person in the room.”
LIMBER UP YOUR BRAIN
The most successful people in digital marketing can mentally multitask. Stay flexible. Don’t get married to any one solution.
BE CONVERSANT WITH A VARIETY OF TECHNOLOGIES
It’s always a bad sign when someone on a digital assignment isn’t familiar with Facebook, SMS, Skype and other key digital technologies. Learn about the main players and understand their implications. You don’t need to read the TiVo owner’s manual to understand the implications of DVRs.
DON’T WORK IN A COMPANY THAT DOESN’T EMBRACE DIGITAL MEDIA
Your career will take a hit in a culture of Luddites. Digital media mirrors a modern career: Constantly changing, fast-paced, occasionally frenzied and always filled with new possibilities. If your company becomes outdated, your work for it will, too.
PERFECT THE ART OF THE SELL
As if selling great work to clients wasn’t difficult enough before, now there’s the added complexity of explaining unfamiliar media. If your client isn’t fully versed in a recommended form of media, boost your odds of selling the idea by boosting his or her learning curve in advance of the presentation.
CREATE A “FIRST”
It was easier to discover new lands back in the days when guys like Christopher Columbus could accidentally bump into continents. Today, countless uncharted digital territories still await. Now’s your chance to conquer one.
DEMONSTRATE DIGITAL PROWESS THROUGHOUT ANY JOB SEARCH
Find new ways to sell yourself. Describe case studies you’ve been part of. Have a website built and become active on LinkedIn and other professional social-networking sites. Creatives should have a DVD with examples of all forms of experience, including traditional media.
GET OUTSIDE YOUR COMFORT ZONE
The best way to get smart about the digital space is to constantly expand into new forms of media by actually working with them. Take on assignments outside your area of expertise. Become a generalist in thinking, with specialist application as needed.
EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY IN YOUR PERSONAL LIFE
You shouldn’t spend life tethered to a BlackBerry, but you also don’t want to become known as the slowpoke who can’t access e-mail out of the office. Don’t allow personal resistance to technology to become a pain in the ass for the people you work with. In this case, it’s not OK for the cobbler’s child to go barefoot.
FINALLY, KNOW WHEN TO SKIP THE DIGITAL AND GO OLD SCHOOL
When sending a thank you, skip e-mail in favor of handwritten note. When giving a presentation, don’t read PowerPoint slides verbatim; instead, tell stories. Get up off your butt and go talk to people across the office. Be a human. Not an avatar.
March 17th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Sally,
Occasionally, I do work for a large digital agency in Boston with big corporate clients. These clients usually have an ad agency partner as well that coordinates with the interactive group on campaigns. One thing I’ve noticed in phone conferences with the ad agencies is that they don’t really understand the nature of online media.
They may have done all the things you listed in your post and still misunderstand the dynamic. Online, visitors are not captive in the same way they are with television or print. They skip around from interaction to interaction in a way that makes TV channel-flippers look like zen masters of concentration. Creating successful digital media experiences requires an element of engagement that goes way beyond creating a clever ad concept.
Clever concepts are still a good thing, but they’re not enough any more. And neither is merely understanding how various digital applications work. We need to get out of the monolog mindset and create dialogs (and community-logs) in order to be effective online. It’s really less about learning new technical platforms and more about learning a new way of communicating‚Äîwhich is really about joining the conversation rather than trying to dominate it.
April 25th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
I love this column.
I wish I wrote it.
In fact, maybe I’ll say I did.
xxx
April 26th, 2008 at 9:53 am
George, how great. That means a lot coming from YOU!
May 7th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
A gazillion advertisers and sites compete for attention on the web Having a great name (like yours) and smart concept and audacity helps. Thank you for supporting audacity, in particularly.
Having a clear POV and engaging in a dialogue with your audience is one of those elephants on the table that many companies miss.
I wondered how I could get more online work, coming from mostly print. So I explored this arcane and limitless world and found, voila, it’s the same old skill set in a new package. “Architecting” a site: that’s what I learned as outline. Site navigation: that’s a bit tricky, but you can do it if you know how to map. Organic search, turns out, is writing relevant and specific to who you’re trying to reach. I think it’s kind of silly to say paragraphs must be short. Six links per page. Or whatever. It depends on what you’re writing and just how much your visitor knows, needs to know and wants to know.
Yet, you still see jittery copy that’s been “SEO’d”. Websites that are thickets for navigation. Branding that is unextendable. And, very few websites that are built around a concept.
Tell me, isn’t the pencil mightier than the code?
May 7th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Susan, good points. And the one thing that people who’ve slaved over concepts in ad agencies have that nobody else understands quite as well is how to connect emotionally with their audiences. The dialog part is how you find out what your market values‚Äîso you can then connect with them emotionally AND relevantly. No you not only have a built-in bullshit detector, you get the benefit of an external one as well.
I read about a neat trick from one marketing “guru”. He goes to Amazon, finds books on the subject he needs to write copy about, and reads the reviews of those books. It’s a great way to listen to people talk about a particular subject in their own words. Sometimes he lifts phrases for his copy right out of those reviews, and it gives his copy a more authentic ring.
I’m no SEO expert, but the more I read from people who are, the more I think you’re exactly right. Google appears to have all kinds of secretive formulas for awarding high rankings. But that’s only because they’re trying to filter out the scam artists and the sleight of hand web tricks, and let the good content rise to the top.
So I guess you’re right, it comes down to the same things we’ve always believed: Do good work that rings true, respect your audience and their feelings, and the rest is details.
May 29th, 2008 at 10:54 am
[...] Guess What: You Do. Here??s Your Guide to Translating Your skills From Traditional to digital …http://www.radicalcareering.com/hogblog/?p=93DIGITAL MEDIAskills needed to work in the multifaceted fields of digital publishing and … Special [...]
January 14th, 2009 at 12:24 am
Sally…
I will be sharing this post with my Seniors about to graduate this spring 2009.
As someone else noted… “I wish I wrote this”. Not a single point is missing from the concept of “Brand You” to launch ones career in these new times.
Education is ramping-up as quickly as we can to prepare the new generation, adding interactive from the concept to content to execution, how does one prove they have the skills… a blend of traditional with cutting edge.
It’s tough times ahead, a portfolio that shows “the big idea” isn’t enough, but when has “the big idea” not been enough. Confusing for these young souls.
Anthony Kalamut
Professor/Program Chair
Seneca College – Creative Advertising
Toronto Canada
August 17th, 2010 at 1:30 pm
[...] I thought may be of interest to readers of this blog. First, there’s a lengthy post on “translating your skills from traditional to digital media.” Her main point is: if you haven’t embraced “digital” in your [...]