Russell Davies: Products As Communications Channels In A Post Digital World

Russell Davies recently did a presentation for the Guardian, in which he provided some perspective on post-digital thinking.  Davies’ subsequent blog post elaborated on where he sees the industry moving as the digital conversation shifts from how brands should engage with consumers on a computer screen, to how brands should engage consumers when the communications medium becomes the brand’s product itself.

While humorously pointing out how unimpressed we’ve grown by mostly anything delivered on a PC screen, Davies proposes that “digital” communication will evolve into the real world space, perhaps by using physical objects/products as their medium, and not just the computer screen.

According to Davies,

The stuff that digital technologies have catalysed online and on screens is starting to migrate into the real world of objects. Ideas and possibilities to do with community, conversation, collaboration and creativity are turning out real things, real events, real places, real objects. I’m not saying that this means that these things are therefore inately better, or that the internet has ‘come of age’ or any of that nonsense. I just mean that there are new, interesting things going on IRL (in real life) and that they have some advantages (and penalties) that don’t apply online.

Davies cites several examples of products with datastreams built into them (like Nike+), and technologies that are helping bridge the analog and digital worlds with a product as the medium – from botanicalls to pachube,  to violet.

Davies’ believes that the ultimate challenge for the advertising and marketing community is to figure out how to communicate with consumers when products become the medium of choice – and not just a social media profile or Twitter stream on a computer screen.  The web-based challenges that the industry is still mulling over will soon become questions of how to build a business and communications model around products with a built-in communications channel.

[via Russell Davies' Blog]