I did a presentation at a media planning agency last week on the challenges of integration. The brief was to talk to them about the changes in our business as it has migrated to do what we do across multiple channels. So I attempted to define the challenges into 3 main areas: the consumer challenge (the changing dynamics of the relation between content producer and consumer), the strategic challenge (structures, resource, priorities), and the people challenge (skills migration, recuitment, talent).
A number of things struck me as I started pulling this together. Amongst them was the similarity in issues faced by all the players in this game (owners, distributors, producers, aggregators, agencies, clients), notably how hard it is to strike the right balance between specialism and generalism, and also deal with the necessary blurring between functions in organisations. People within the organisation often want to know where we are along the journey of transformation that we are undertaking. And you know I don’t think we can ever really answer that question because we don’t actually know what the end game is. Perhaps the reality is is that because significant change is now a constant, we’ll never actually get there. All of which is potentially quite unsettling or exciting depending on which way you look at it (I prefer the latter of-course).
Image
Leave a Reply