Nick Law On The Top Interactive Marketing Trends For 2010

Nick Law, Chief Creative Officer at R/GA, spoke with MediaBeat about what he sees as some of the top shifts to expect within the interactive marketing space in 2010.  He sees R/GA being tasked with more but smaller projects (i.e., thousands of projects created, vs. hundreds of campaigns), smaller budgets distributed differently (partially driven by client ad budgets being reallocated from costlier TV media and production to the online space), and the increasing presence of social media within the overall advertising landscape.

Law speaks of his and R/GA’s philosophy on how the digital medium differs from traditional advertising – if advertising is about breaking through, he views the digital medium a way to fit into individuals’ personal media rhythms.  The challenge for brands and their advertisers (in the digital space) can be to identify a platform to “own” that fits into people’s day to day lives.  Said differently, the challenge for a brand is to learn how its customer engages with the researching and purchasing of its product online, and develop a relationship with them within that context.

In order to meet this challenge, Law sees both agencies and clients retooling their employee skill-sets in order to focus on developing ongoing relationships with consumers, vs. an older-school focus on purely getting a particular message out there at a given time.

This may be true of more flexible, forward-thinking organizations, but there is still much resistance and confusion to approaching brand-building as a long-term relationship being built with consumers – vs. a myopic focus on short-term campaign/promotion results accompanies by very specific brand measures and muddier validation methodologies.  Let’s hope Law’s predicted approach permeates the halls of larger, old-school brands and organizations in 2010, as well.

Watch the video below: