If you haven’t had the opportunity to watch Martha Lane Fox’s recent Richard Dimbleby Lecture, it’s well worth taking 40 minutes to listen and appreciate the vision that is "Dot Everyone".
The UK has world-leading creative industries. But we could be even further ahead.
We are not as brilliant at the internet as we have the potential to be. The Dot Everyone initiative will hopefully provide us with the necessary fillip.
Stealing a quote from the lecture, the late activist Aaron Swartz implored: "It’s not OK not to understand the internet any more."
But let’s not forget that the UK has moments of digital genius. The lecture mentioned that the Government Digital Service has saved more than £1 billion via Gov.uk.
It did this by a fundamental redesign of important services to remove the red tape and hassle; by making the system fit for purpose rather than by tweaking legacy frameworks.
It did it by making life’s necessary but dull stuff simple and easy – by applying creativity to technology, embracing the creativity of user experience, of data architecture, of code.
The world-leading Gov.uk rightly won the 2013 Design Museum Design of the Year award, beating The Shard and the Olympic cauldron in the process.
Getting where it did required a brave rejection of incrementalism and a fundamental understanding of how the internet works. It is the epitome of the Russell Davies expression: "The product is the service is the marketing."
So how does this relate to businesses and brands with more commercial objectives as well as to the role and output of our industry? We must more fully embrace the needs of our customers in understanding the role that the internet plays in a modern buying process and build experiences accordingly.
Yes, we still need ads; yes, we still need e-mail CRM; and, yes, we still need social community management. But, above all, we need the data and technological architecture to connect the experiences, so that the buying process for the customer is easier and more intuitive.
This is, of course, easier to build from a clean sheet, but frameworks can be built around existing systems, as we are creating with O2. This isn’t just about finding new places to put communications – that would be incrementalism.
Such thinking, for example, pigeonholes "content" purely as long-form TV advertising or at least to the "brand" end of the consideration process.
We should be thinking much more broadly than that, applying our understanding of customer behaviour and bringing to bear the might of the UK’s world-class creative minds to digital experiences and the integration and application of customer insight.
At MBA, we’ve built a virtual-reality ski and windsurf experience for Neilson activity holidays using Oculus Rift – to give people a feeling of the thrill and a flavour of what the holiday is like before they book.
We’ve created a "content hub" for Avios, to create and curate inspirational travel articles to use throughout the customer experience.
To truly thrive in this environment, we have built a model to represent the digitally fuelled, non-linear and dynamic buying process that people universally go through today.
Using the model as a map of the purchase ecosystem, we can unlock what types of different content are required at which stage of the journey – from billboard to pay-per-click to "social object" and beyond – giving each element tangible objectives and a better understanding of the time and monetary resource that it deserves.
The model forms the basis of our successful relationships with many of our clients.
Our industry has come a long way over recent years to embrace digital. However, we’re not moving fast enough. Many of our behaviours suggest that, as a collective, we don’t yet fully understand how the internet has changed, and will continue to change, everything. And that is no longer OK.
By Stephen Maher, chief executive, MBA