advertising industry x web culture x media convergence

Although my maineducation is within advertising & commercial design professionally I've worked mainly with conceptual planning & web development. I've been quite content with this and curiously enough only spent two years within traditional advertising industry. Working with advertising is not an easy task and there are certainly many angles to discover. I'm starting to grow on the fact to re-enter this field again and my main reason for jumping fence is simply the sheer fascination with new media and communication and the desire to make an honest effort from a different perspective of creative competence. Media culture today is not what it was just two year ago and two years from now will surely not look and function like today. The 'long tail' effect, web culture, mobile platforms and the collective awakening of that we are living in an open sourced 21th century where most information (data, consumer products, movies, music...) is available with the press of a few buttons have given people the freedom to sculpt their own perception of what could be considered desirable and worthy of possession without the direct influence of advertising.

The particular industry of advertising have always marketed itself as a creative hotspot and a necessary aide in the process to locate consumergroups and find strategies to stimulate further growth for a labeled company/brand/opinion/product. Unfortunately the service of 'creativity' is not always easily implemented on a diagram over its measured effects on a certain targetgroup. 'Creativity' doesn't show any precise data on how many more items that where actually sold on the shelf on a particular day and that often makes the market respond to an ad agencys suggestions with extreme caution as to how much 'creativity' should be allowed in the marketing process. With the ongoing convergence of old and new media it will be a great but also exciting challenge to deal with these issues. I'm sure, based on the conversations I've had recently, that this is a time when many within the advertising industy feel, or atleast should feel a bit edgy about the future role of advertising. It would be provocing to say that a lot of creative initiatives nowadays is being wasted and never allowed or inspired to reach its full intention but the truth is behavioral patterns are also changing in a drastic way; it's hard creating value and the emergence of brand new mediaplatforms also mean even more solutions need to be found as how to reach intended targetgroups. New webprojects like Joost p2p television and the collaboration of NBC x Newscorp will soon change the way we interact with media and for advertising it will be an endless but necessary task to survey and understand social media and many other emerging trends. Banners and online campaign sites will not be enough if even desirable at all. The Web 2.0 culture with Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Digg, and other personal media instruments help users guide eachother the way advertising was intended to do but somewhat has failed to deliver. The advertising industry need to lay down new guiding principles and interesting ways to create an activate dialogue with the next generation of mediausers. To constantly question what is desirable at any given time and to help people find what they already know they want.