Recently, I was fortunate to attend an executive workshop called ‘Making Digital Work’ facilitated by Boulder Digital Works (BDW), one of the few programs out there that is truly preparing the next crop of digital thinkers. With speakers such as Matt Howell, Alastair Green, Gareth Kay, Edward Boches, Scott Prindle and John Winsor, I was expecting some clear-cut answers about how we should deliver value to our clients and the best operational approaches.

What I found was a refreshing, genuine and honest take on the status of our industry. The consensus? It’s absolutely insane and constantly in flux. But that’s ok, really. How we react to change is the real question, and that reaction is entirely up to us. The reality is that, in the last three years, 50 years of advertising has literally been flipped on its head. Everyone is rushing to figure out what to do.

Not since Bill Bernbach and the Mad Men era has there been this much upheaval and change in the industry. Working in the post-digital era is an incredibly exciting time to take action, experiment and focus on what it means to provide real value to clients.

Here’s a little more about what I learned about the post-digital landscape:

• Stop thinking in terms of campaigns and start thinking in terms of platforms. Creating new platforms to engage users is much more powerful and longer lasting than a campaign.
• We have to be iterative, collaborative and try multiple ideas. Less than five percent of ideas actually work, and there’s no way of knowing what those are until we try them.
  
• Fail early and often. The digital landscape (or seascape as it was referred to) actually allows for it as the monetary cost of failure can be relatively low when it comes to new media.
• Digital is a type of idea, not a channel.
• No matter which new media or channels come out, it will still always be about the idea. New platforms are a means of execution and only as strong as the original idea.
• Stop communicating products and start making communication products. It’s not what we do that matters; it’s what people do to what we create that matters.
• Focus on ideas that can be advertised, not advertising ideas.
• Don’t be media agnostic, be media positive.