School is again in session. Thanks for attending the second in a series of short lectures on Notes from Digital Reboot.

As you’ll remember from our last class, The Analog Age of advertising agencies is over.

What does that mean? What, exactly, has changed? Lots, in case you haven’t noticed.

In The Analog Age, the job of the agency was to create content to put within the context of Interruption. Ad folks happily disguised the reality that messages were designed to stop the flow of the consumer’s life by labeling the best of those Interruptions “suprising,” or as having “stopping power.”

In The Digital Age, an advertisement is not something meant to be viewed as much as it is, more often than not, meant to be used to gain an experience. You and I are no longer “consumers.” We are “users.” Users of information, users of technology to gain that information on our demand, users of that same technology to define what we want a brand to, in fact, be or become.

The people at Digital Reboot believe this shift happened with the advent of the Internet and it took an exponential upswing with the spread of broadband, specifically. Remember that symbiotic relationship between technological advancements and opportunities for ad agencies? The television became an important “screen” in our lives, but mobile devices today are arguably THE screen in our lives. Think about everything you do today on your “phone.” The point is not that mobile devices are the only thing moving forward, but that they are the best example of how Users experience the world of digitally-driven information.

What’s important to realize is that all Analog Agencies must now become–not “interactive” agencies, not “digital” agencies, per se, but–Digital Age Agencies.

The Digital Age agency realizes that Templated Work doesn’t work alone anymore. The User expects an interface-oriented experience to gain access to information and to interact with brands, even if he or she doesn’t necessarily realize it. Witness the fact that even when we choose a TV channel today, we do so through the interface of a cable company provider’s channel selector interface.

Singular Interruption has to become Multiple Facets of User Experience, and the Big Idea has to be developed with that end in mind.

When you create Multiple Facets of User Experience, it takes on the form of a Platform.

Is The Analog-Age Campaign part of this? YES! Analog versus Digital is not about an either/or result. It’s additive. You need to do both.

And that brings us to one of the biggest learnings of all: IF YOUR AGENCY IS STILL FOCUSED ON “360-DEGREE MEDIA SOLUTIONS” (how many times have we all heard that?), YOU ARE RUNNING BEHIND. YOU NEED TO BE FOCUSED ON 360-DEGREE LITERATE TALENT CAPABLE OF CREATING PLATFORM-ORIENTED SOLUTIONS.

And the Platform of Multiple Facets sets up the concept of Contexts, which we will discuss another time, class.

Dismissed.