MEDIA SCENE
THE DIGITAL
ECONOMY
By Dominic Malan
O
ne can feel and experience
that state of disruption, that
we are currently experiencing
as you arrive at an airport and
you experience the chaos of the
traditional taxi driver shouting out
his unique pricing and destination
offers at a crowd of travellers that
have just disembarked from their
journey, not realizing that their
chants fall upon deaf ears as small
little tech company called UBER
has just taken the hassle out of
commuting.
The existing TAXI model is now
‘‘We now live in the
EXPERIENCE +
TRUST realm where
consumer experiences
are shared via social
media and garner
trust from peer to
peer endorsement
vs the credibility of
advertising stories. ”
38 MAL 12/16 ISSUE
redundant and a tech firm that does
not even own a car is possibly now
the world’s largest commuted taxi
business.
Disruption will continue and it is
amazing to see global businesses
adapting to the pace of this change. It
is confidently estimated that the
pace of change over the next 15
months, will supersede the change
experienced over the past 3 years.
Globalization and convergence is
driving this change with convergence
accelerating the point of engagement
closer to the point of purchase.
It is estimated that smartphone usage
will double to 2.6bn handsets by
2019, Mobile ad spend will increase
3x to 200bn USD by 2019, Video ad
spend will increase 4X to 36bn USD
by 2018 and ecommerce will double
in size to 2,6 trillion USD by 2018.
Organizations that are not harnessing
this and using the state of disruption
will inevitably die a very quick death.
With this level of change, those in
the communications business are
reinventing the way they leverage this
trend and Dentsu Aegis Network,
have organized themselves in such a
way that offers clients access to liquid
talent across a number of functional
capabilities within communications
(Media, Digital Media, Experiential,
Content, Sponsorship, search etc.).
The idea is to move into an era of
using cross functional capabilities to
solve complex client challenges and
deliver media solutions that drive
business outcomes.
We have moved from a “RULES”
culture that for centuries used books
and manuscripts (Bible, Kuran) to
learn from, this migrated quickly
in the 80’s into a world where the
golden age of advertising educated
and told consumers about product
benefits and features, this worked
well as people were relatively
advertising illiterate, the current
times are vastly different.
We now live in the EXPERIENCE
+ TRUST realm where consumer
experiences are shared via social
media and garner trust from peer to
peer endorsement vs the credibility of
advertising stories.
The world has moved from Business