Cars, phones, electricity, television, computers. All were specialized until, suddenly, they were so integral to human existence that their ubiquity had utterly eliminated their novelty.
And so we find ourselves contemplating the meaning of the word digital. It has subsumed so many of the functions that used to be just, well, whatever they were, that its usage in those contexts has become inseparable from however we might have previously conceived of them.
Virtually all of the creative pursuits and many business activities are now almost completely digital. But our insecurity about what it means leaves us stuck in some interim nether world. We continue to reflexively add digital as a prefix or suffix as a means of saying we 'get it.' We are hip, of the moment - and, due to the nature of this economy - determined to assure all and sundry that our skills have not atrophied, our awareness not become hopelessly outdated.
That there continues to be a perceived need to differentiate, which is either an antiquated response mechanism to the power of the Old Ways - or a curious but useless reflection of some genetic holdover akin to a human's vestigial tail. At some point it should simply disappear. Everyone will get that the word digital is superfluous. But perhaps there is a lingering belief that digital itself is simply a transitional phase, to be followed and overcome by something even more powerful and all-encompassing.
Whatever the motivation, digital is more descriptive than nominative. It illustrates and articulates, inferring knowledge, prescience, modernity, even futurism, more than any particular expertise. We will continue to use it until we conclude it is no longer necessary. By which time we will be chewing over some utterly new word or phrase to communicate the equally ephemeral and indistinct essence of credibility. JL
Tony Quin comments in Advertising Age:
What isn't digital these days? TV is digital, you can't even get the old kind anymore, whatever that was. Photography is digital. The old days of film are so gone, but do you see Canon trumpeting their digital cameras? Digital vs. what? So here we are, professional marketers, and we are using a word to describe what we do that has no real meaning anymore.
I am the CEO of a digital agency. I also chair the board of an association of digital agencies. My problem is I don't know how to tell people what I do.
It's not that I don't know what I do. I just don't know how to describe it in terms that people will understand. The problem is that the word "digital" has become obsolete. Every time I hear it or use it I cringe.
The association I am involved with is called SoDA and its letters originally stood for the Society of Digital Agencies. But our great acronym is already in trouble. Some of our members say that "digital" is an irrelevant word because everything is now digital, and so it's a distinction without a difference.
Of course, there was a time when being a digital agency was a clear differentiator, a opposed to being a non-digital, or dare I say it, traditional agency. Those were the days when digital agencies like mine used to run digital rings around the traditional agency behemoths. But then the big guys woke up and before long were digital agencies, too. Now every agency has to be digital if it wants to stay in business. Digital in all its forms has changed so much of our business, that the old Mad Men concepts of advertising seem quaint; and I don't know many agencies that want to be considered quaint.
Take my own dilemma. I call my agency a digital-advertising agency. I thought about dropping the word digital but I just can't let it go, because without it we are just, God forbid, an ad agency. I was tempted to use "next generation" for a while, but it was too pompous even for an ad guy. I toyed with "an advertising agency for the digital age" or "an ad agency with digital at its core", but they felt at best clumsy and at worst buzz-word noise. One agency I know just gave up and called itself "an experience company", which is so vague it could be an escort service.
The bottom line is that we need to find a new word or words to describe what we do. It's almost as if we're a new industry and we need a new name.
Side-note: For a humorous take of the sometimes absurd world of buzz words in our industry, you might also want to take a look at "The SoDA Buzz Word Launcher" that debuted in the first 2013 edition of SoDA's biannual trend publication, The SoDA Report.
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