Hi everyone. These days there’s a lot of talking going on about what’s ”new”. Let’s open a history book and talk about what’s old instead.

Here is a graph showing the dominant forms of communication during the last 37000 years. As we can clearly see, Conversation has been the primary way to communicate for approximately 36900 years. In the 20th century, however, Mass Media dominated. The mass medial one-way message was an incredible device for manufacturing and spreading lies (see Propaganda in the very same history book). Under the second half of the 20th century, the Internet came along. And in the last 15 years, this new technical platform has proved itself a great tool for the old way of communicating; with the substantial difference that all information is accessible to 1,5 billion people and therefore spreads much, much faster than 37000 years ago.

If we replace the word Information with Power, we quickly discover that a shift in power has occurred, challenging all 20th century structures. The Record Company is a 20th century structure. The TV Channel is a 20th century structure. The Ad Agency is a 20th century structure. We are middlemen between makers and users. And if we wish to prolong our reason of being, we need to re-define our respective businesses and add more value than we withdraw.

In our specific trade, for example, we can stop believing that our job is to control branded one-way messages to passive potential consumers in the form of advertising campaigns and focus on giving people something useful to talk about instead.

It’s exciting. It’s fun. It’s relevant. But it’s not new. And it’s not revolutionizing. It’s a regression to the world before Joseph Goebbels.

/David