Photo by aeu04117
I was reading the digital supplement to Campaign earlier. I don’t read Campaign that much these days, generally getting my industry information from blogs rather than the press. But apparently the conversations that took place in the lunch they organised gravitated around some things I’ve been thinking about on and off for quite a while – mainly around the place of digital agencies, the name “digital” itself, and such vast topics.
I’ve been thinking I would wait until having really thought the whole thing through before blogging about it (Probably with some romantic notion of it being completely amazing and ground breaking) but actually I’ve been thinking about maybe doing something for the past 8 months and never starting, so I’m using the blog to draft some ideas and things will take shape over time.
Names are very important and human beings are pretty addicted to labeling stuff ever since the rise of language. And it’s damn useful to be able to make sense of this whole wide world around us. Also, in numerous mythologies and folklore names hold great power, you can even practice ancient forms of magic with someone’s/something’s true name.
If there’s one thing we surely kept from the myths, I think it is that names still hold a lot of importance in our minds, whether consciously or in the background – all the time. Looking at it from that point of view, it isn’t that surprising there are so many arguments around what to call a digital agency (not “digital” apparently is the new thing). The number of words that have tempted to or have been used so far to describe an industry is ridiculously huge, and most are right and wrong at the same time, depending on what you’re referring to.
Essentially I thing the whole names argument is a function of the technologies used and the work developed and/or created evolving faster than anyone can name and describe them.
But for all these ingenious buzzwords, does it really matter? It’s all about communication and experiences in the end. Do people in the real world really want to know how the company that built this nice website/banner/interactive wall/application/widget/thing defines itself..?
I think that’s it for now. I may give that some more structure later on. next rambling about the rift between digital and advertising (which I get on some level, but I find completely silly overall)
