A foreigner in my own land!

Chris Gledhill, Managing Director, PDMS

In a recent speech at the advertising film awards in Cannes, Maurice Saatchi announced the imminent demise of ‘traditional advertising’ at the hands of the ‘digital native’. He said "The brain of the digital native is different - it's faster, it sifts more, it recalls less. It means, from the point of view of the advertiser, life has become much more complicated and much more fickle". According to Lord Saatchi digital natives are people under 25 who have grown up with digital technology and therefore cannot be expected to sit still for an entire 30 second commercial, let alone remember it in the morning.

He then went on to say "A new model is required for marketing. What I am describing as a new business model is one in which companies compete to establish one-word equity”.

"That is, they aim to define in one word the particular characteristic that they most want instantly associated with their brand around the world."

For example, he said Google possessed "global ownership of the one word 'search'." He said the same marketing approach could also apply to political parties or even whole countries.

I can see the excitement in the eyes of branding consultants the world over as they seize the opportunity to create ‘one word equity’ for their clients, as I suspect one word will be even more expensive than the verbose three word slogans which are now so out of date…

Lord Saatchi is not the only media luminary to pick up on the term digital native; in a recent address Rupert Murdoch described himself as a ‘digital immigrant’ that is to say someone who has not grown up with computers and digital media.

His thesis was that large media organisations which are run by digital immigrants are increasingly out of step with the news gathering habits of the digital natives; “they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.” He said.

“Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle.”

Rupert Murdoch’s remarks reflect an increasing awareness of the impact of ‘social media’ a term coined to describe the new generation of web activities such as blogs, digital stories, podcasts, RSS feeds, wikis and social networks.

Increasingly people are using the web not just passively as a source of published information, like a newspaper, but actively as a place to publish their own views and comments. A recent poll for the Guardian showed that a third of young people (14 – 25) who have access to broadband have launched their own blog or website. No wonder they don’t have time to sit through the adverts or read The Times!

Podcasting is another phenomenon which is gathering momentum at present. Podcasts are essentially audio files published on the internet which anyone can download and listen to in their own time on the PC or on a digital music player such as an ipod (hence podcast). Anyone with a laptop, a microphone and some time on their hands can become a ‘podcaster’ and create their own internet broadcasts. Getting an audience is obviously more of a challenge. Without millions to spend on conventional promotion you have to target a very specific audience such as your best mate, other newt breeders, the flat earth society etc.

Alternatively you may just be very good and generate a huge audience by word of mouth (or should that be word of blog) eventually leading to a lucrative contract from one of Rupert Murdoch’s organisations back in the world of digital immigrants.

I first came across the idea of digital natives and digital immigrants in a 2001 article by Marc Prensky, a writer on game based learning. He suggests that the impact of new technology is so fundamental that young people - digital natives - have differently wired brains.

The idea is that because they have grown up surrounded by all of the conflicting sources of information, entertainment and communication available in the modern world they are “native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the internet.” The rest of us who have not grown up with this stuff will always be ‘digital immigrants’, that is to say we may adapt to new technology but we will always use it in a less natural way, like an immigrant speaking the language of their adopted country with a thick accent.

He goes on to suggest that we need to fundamentally rethink the way we go about teaching young people to reflect this profound difference between the generations. Although it is a bit of a sales pitch for his game based training business, there may be some truth in the underlying idea that what some people interpret as a short attention span may also reflect an ability to deal with information overload better.

However, in the context of the tragic decline in advertising revenues for conventional media bemoaned by Lord Saatchi and Mr Murdoch even a digital immigrant like myself values their time enough to get to grips with the fast forward button on a sky+ remote.