Agile Advertising

There are a lot of smart people out there talking about the future of business and marketing so I guess it's not that surprising that I spend quite a lot of my time reading other people's posts wishing that I had written them myself. Probably the best example of this recently is the brilliant post by Neil Perkin about Agile Advertising. In this post Neil highlights the disconnect between the traditional campaign focused approach to advertising and the increasingly fluid conversational collaborative nature of markets. He then goes on to suggest that we need to move towards an approach to advertising that borrows some of the attributes of the Agile development methodology used in the software industry. This would provide for much more adaptable, experimental and iterative advertising which is better aligned to the increasingly active consumer.

Neil also goes on to point out that much of the Digital sector already works in this way with its focus on experimentation and optimization. While this is certainly true for much of the best digital work, there is a serious danger that, as marketing investment in digital grows, we lose this flexibility and spirit of adventure in a misguided attempt to appear 'strategic'. Thankfully brands such as Burger King and Nike have shown that putting digital at the heart of communications strategy does not require a return to command and control marketing but instead provides an opportunity to move to a much more flexible and responsive style of advertising. The King is dead, long live the King.