For the past two days, I’ve been in South Beach, at Miami Ad School for a conference called Digital Reboot. Great instructors, including Barry Wacksman (Chief Growth Officer, R/GA), Nick Law (Chief Creative Officer, R/GA), and Chris Wiggins (Interactive Creative Director, Crispin Porter + Bogusky) to name a few.

Topics from digital ecosystems to mobile technology to touch-based interfaces to the motherlode of data that is Google were addressed.

All toward trying to answer one question: where are advertising agencies headed in this technologically-driven era?

Big question, huh? They didn’t necessarily provide definitive answers–who could? But there was a lot of great information that, when brought together, defines a path.

I’m going to do a series of posts here on the topics covered at Digital Reboot. The first is about how technology and advertising are irrevocably intertwined, and what “the digital revolution” means for the overwhelming majority of ad agencies today. Pardon me while I go into college professor mode…

Prior to the Internet and the advent of broadband, agencies functioned and succeeded in The Analog Age. And the media darling of The Analog Age was Television.

In The Analog Age, the job of the advertising agency was to create content to provide a Singular Moment of Interruption. Two things are important here: the idea of Singularity, and the experience of Interruption.

All Analog Age-oriented media is Singular in nature when it comes to the experience. Television, print, radio–you can do one thing with each of those media. Watch it, read it, listen to it.

As a result, the Interruption delivered via those media is Singular, too. I’m reading the newspaper and your ad is on the facing page. I’m watching TV, and a commercial diverts my attention away from what I was watching.

If you’ve worked in advertising for longer than, say, five years, how many times have you talked about being in pursuit of the “surprise” in an execution? The “memorability factor”? And you, and the industry, were rewarded for achieving that moment of Singular Interruption. Hell, advertising creative award shows are purely and wholly based on this concept.

The reality of this pursuit is that solutions became Templated. TV happens in 30-second increments. Radio in 60 seconds. Print is single-page. The execution of advertising became variations on a theme within a template. And multiple executions based on medium-specific Templates made up the Campaign. And the audience for those templated executions was waiting, in mass quantities, for that Campaign.

The Analog Age is over, folks.

And so is this post. We’ve reached the stopping point for our lecture today, students.

Come to class next time to learn why:

-Technology, as it relates to advertising, is no longer about the Interruption

-The audience should no longer be called a “Consumer”

-Campaigns of Templated work no longer comprise the Big Idea

-And Digital is no longer just a medium

Class dismissed.