Looking back as we prepare to go forward

4 February 2010 | By Mark Cridge

I remember, about this time ten years ago, reading a copy of Fast Company, the periodical du jour of the dotcom bubble. I was struck by the theme of the day: is your company ‘built to flip’ or ‘built to last’? This was a riff on the book of the same name by Jim Collins.

It summed up the spirit of the time perfectly, when kids were setting up agencies left, right and centre. Ridiculous unbridled optimism was in the air, which of course led to a touch of irrational exuberance. We all know what happened after that took hold.

Thinking of how pivotal that time was, the same is true today, so we should seek to use the turn of the decade as an important inflection point, to force us to consider how we want to spend the next ten years. It’s all too easy with business sentiment still so depressed to see the transition to a new year as simply a chance to put the previous years behind us. In doing so, we’re in danger of squandering an opportunity to genuinely reinvent ourselves.

What’s clear is that the fundamentals are now in place for a real transformation to take place. Rather than the shifting sands and vain hopes the digital industry was originally built on, having bootstrapped our way through the last ten years we can now stand on firmer ground.

From a creative perspective, there are many highlights from the last decade. However, I’m plagued by the nagging doubt that we, as an industry, haven’t really done anything yet. Even looking at the work of a few years ago, no matter how high the production values or successful the results, nothing seems to have come close to being the full article.

The best is indeed yet to come, especially now we can deploy the fullest range of creative responses over a more thoroughly understood and mature new media world. Russell Davies talks eloquently about being post-digital — the simple fact that no matter how flashy and bombastic, anything produced has a tendency to disappoint as we’ve seen it all before. So clearly more of the same isn’t going to be sufficient.

But let’s assume we have the technology pretty well understood. We all agree that successful ideas have to cross boundaries equally comfortable and tempered for traditional, digital and social environments. We understand consumers are in charge and that we need to culture conversations, not just broadcast our own propaganda.

As you can probably tell, I’m impatient to see what’s next. All the elements are in place to flip whole industries, so with this in mind, what will we do with it all? What’s your role in this? Are we in this for the long run or just scrabbling about trying to pick up what work we can to keep businesses chugging along? I hope you’re at least thinking about this.

Sadly this is my last column for new media age. I’ve really enjoyed writing it for the past year or so, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. I hope I’ve managed to keep at least a couple of you entertained.

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