188 The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World
about the future for creativity in digital and advertising as a whole. After all
that, we are going to offer some recommendations for advertisers.But first a quick recap of from whence we came.In the beginning there were banners, and they probably didn’t please many,
but like our ancient friends from the traditional press who spent several
hundred years lumping ink and trees around the place to form similarly offen-
sive advertisements, it just took some time to get it right.Banners have fought hard to remain on the schedule. They flashed, buzzed,
expanded, contracted, floated, popped up and under, in and out, and generally
sought to intrude while howling ‘CLICK ME’ at the growing billions online.On the second day the internet had a God and Google was its name. Although
‘search’ had been around for some time and indeed keywords were nothing
new, it was Google who got it right through advanced algorithms and its
saintly, ‘do no evil’ image. Now advertisers didn’t have to rely on banners for
response and traffic, they could simply de-risk the process by acquiring disci-
ples who were already looking for answers.Improvements in broadband brought us video – now we could choose
between being passive or interactive. We could also wrap around, pre-roll,
post-roll, take over and do lots of other neat stuff as we marched happily
towards the dawn of convergence. However, we were still caught inside the
boundaries of a site or destination and our clicks and strokes were somewhat
victims of circumstance and distraction. Then two key trends emerged and
we found ourselves on the brink of a new horizon; the beginning of the user-
generated content era or Web 2.0 or let’s just call it ‘social’; and the other
major trend was, of course, ‘mobile’.Mobile has been quite a drawn-out and at times hilarious journey. I remember
the times when I was commuting in the UK (circa 1989) and someone would
be on their giant phone: ‘Hi, yeah, I’m on a train, yeah, I might lose you as a
tunnel is coming up’, and all the other passengers would ‘tut tut’ and shuffle
their morning papers around. Now the ‘tutting’ has become ‘tapping’ and