Our Non Exec Mark Bainbridge gives his Spring time thoughts....

  

 

It’s been a crazy month in communications. It has been conjectured that the laptop is set to become obsolete, Steve Jobs has unveiled the IPad 2 – it’s lighter and thinner and has a camera - hmmm... not quite the version 2.0 features we might have hoped for. Mr Lund has left the COI – I will leave you to read into Andrew Lewin’s view of that one – as they say in the London bus fraternity “all change please”…

But hurrah... Spring is here and we are into 2011 proper. It’s a great time of year when life bursts forth and I’m leaning on my garden fork with a sore back looking at the allotment and wondering whether napalm might be the only way to get rid of the Jerusalem artichoke invasion.

Elsewhere the great and the good are back from Barcelona’s mobile fest and there’s a lot of buzz that we are creeping towards the year of the 4^th screen proper. We’ve got social on mobile, video on social, screen convergence, everyone targeting consumer ownership and, and, and...

 

So, it seems everyone can do mobile now and I have been musing on this a fair bit of late as I hear more about digital and mobile hothouses popping up here and there. While the clever “new” content agencies are prepping to take on more direct clients. The bigger old agencies are clearing out management again and clearly worrying about losing ground to the smaller start-ups. I think we are going to be looking at a bit of a transition ahead... a bit of a digital Klondike maybe looming.

 

The good news is that with such proliferation of real time access to digital through 4^th screen technology that the demand for content is going to increase, but it’s not just versioned content – it’s going to have to be designed bespoke. Our little smart screen pal is going to become a new window into this content and with 4G coming at us like a fast thing it means that social and distributed programme content and m-commerce is becoming more viable for transaction. So, it’s time to look hard at our content plans, the big point I think is that we are going to be consuming more and more content and from so many different points that brands are going to have to start looking harder at digital and mobile in their planning.

 

My prediction is that this year might well be the year of the mobile. We will certainly see the clever clients buying more digital content direct from the new agencies. Closer to home I think it’s going to be the year of the carrot up the allotment, if I am to take on the rooty scourge of the Holy Land.

Mark Bainbridge is non-exec advisor to The Big Shot, A revered digital marketer and has a worrying attitude towards Jerusalem Artichokes

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