Biggest Challenge for Agencies? The Speed of Change - Uwe Hook

Some agencies are still struggling to integrate digital into their offerings, developing holistic communication and prospering in the digital culture. It's getting late in the game because integration was just a small mountain to conquer, compared to the Mt. Everest all of us are about to face:

Keeping up with the increasing speed of technology change

Our greatest challenge is simply keeping up-to-date with the technology from both the perspective of communication product delivery and media. Agencies were struggling to implement new experiences when Timeline was introduced and the new retina display for the iPad caused chaos for publishers and advertisers.

We have to acknowledge making the transition into the new world is not enough, we have to have our finger on the pulse of this dramatically changing world, filled with streams and feeds, and be able to respond to the changing requirements that technology is forcing upon you. No one wants to be left behind, drowning in the streams and no one wants to appear dated and behind the times with when they communicate digitally.

The emerging fragmentation of social media channels has just begun and adds a level of complexity to the task at hand. This doesn't mean we should jump on the next Path bandwagon once it rolls through ad land. Successful agencies of the future will have to keep up with the technological change and being able to anticipate it, build for it, and stay ahead of it. Agencies need to constantly read and live the pulse of change, build small experiences on new platforms to experiment. Test, and, possibly, scale up and down. And you thought integration was a challenge. You ain't seen nothing yet.

Uwe Hook is the CEO and Co-Founder of BatesHook, Inc. (www.bateshook.com) and a veteran of the advertising and marketing industry with the goal of building connections between people and brands. Uwe can be reached at uwe@bateshook.com.

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