There are many cool scenarios offered on how our lives will change when computers and ground- and satellite-linked networks become commonplace in the home. Here is a recent one: Imagine that your house knows you. Imagine it knows what you have in the fridge and what to order to prepare for Friday’s formal dinner for four. Imagine it knows to light your path through its halls, interpret your e-mail, and display digital reproductions on flat-panel monitors when your feminist grandmother visits or when your multipierced niece arrives. Technology is the ultimate shaper not only of the material substructure of society but also of human thought patterns.

One revolutionary technological force is digitalization. The digital revolution has fundamentally altered our concepts of space, time and mass. While it’s impossible to say exactly what the future will look like, a few things are certain. First, we will eventually reach an inflection point when the majority of the channels become digital; digital will be the mainstream and mainstay of media. Second, content created by companies and consumers alike will proliferate, particularly video content, and will be viewed on multiple screens and devices in people’s lives. People will increasingly search for the content they want among an ever-expanding mound of digital media. Third, as channels and content proliferate, the virtual and physical worlds will intertwine with consumers, crossing back and forth constantly between the two.

The shift to new media is not a fad or short-term trend; it is the inevitable result of a series of deep, long-term, structural changes. “A fad garners a lot of attention but doesn’t necessarily relate to a truly mass issue in terms of genuinely changing the way businesses operate or the way companies make money or the way consumers interact,” stressed OgilvyOne Asia-Pacific president Kent Wertime during an interview prior to his talk during the 3rd Internet and Mobile Marketing Summit, themed “Digital Delivers” organized by the Internet and Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines.

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CREATIVE Juice Manila team

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Consumers are certainly averse to overt selling when the product doesn’t deliver. But the point is to sell the product! Is it smart for marketing to be so seamless that consumers don’t know when and why to open their wallets? We can’t remember seeing an infomercial that we thought created a seamless brand experience. We would argue that consumers appreciate brand messages—when the brand is relevant. And we would insist that consumers don’t like the big brand-reveal, especially if they’ve been tricked into thinking that the content that they’re enjoying isn’t actually a sales pitch.

It’s easy to understand why top heads of other advertising agencies are frantically grasping at any new tactic in order to get consumers to open their wallets. “It’s necessary to create an integrated strategy that fuses a great product with marketing, and communications that reflect the product’s attributes,” Creative Juice Manila CEO Gigi J. Tibi said in an interview.

To champion disruption is a great addition to this strategy. Anybody creating marketing campaigns today needs to be thinking about how the core message is going to spread. In others words, quick marketing fixes don’t solve deep product issues. “Our kind of disruption is very strategically directed. Because if you keep on doing what you keep on doing, you keep on getting the same results. That’s insanity. [That’s why] we break away from the norms. We do not follow conventional norms [whatever else is doing],” stressed Tibi. The same formulas, she pointed out, are actually what’s preventing the brand from making the leap forward.