Uber taxi app — Uber is no more a digital company than British Airways or American Express. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Welcome to the future of advertising, where the word digital is redundant

This article is more than 9 years old

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We obsess over the digital world in advertising and yet it means nothing. What if we stopped thinking of channels because everything was digital? What if we stopped caring about the pipe, but thought about the context and message?

Is there a more profound word in marketing than digital? We’ve digital agencies with their digital strategists and digital creatives. We’ve the triumphant rise of digital media owners and digital first companies like Uber, Airbnb and Facebook blazing a trail into the future. We’ve endless conferences on digital advertising where we ruminate continuously on when digital media spend will overtake TV. This month R/GA won Campaign’s Digital Innovation Agency award … with some wonderful TV ads?

For a word that seems so important, prevalent and transformative, it’s a bit odd that it doesn’t actually mean anything. While we can of course define it, for it to have actual real-life meaning, there would need to be non-digital agencies or non-digital strategists. We’d need to be able to explain why Uber was a digital company, but why British Airways or American Express wasn’t.

We’ve not really digested the power of digital

The word digital means everything and nothing, focusing on it is the biggest distraction of a generation. When electricity became widespread at the turn of the 19th century it was just business in the electrical age, there wasn’t electrical consultants or electrical agencies. When new technology is really understood it fades into the background, all the proof needed that we’ve not really digested the power of digital.

There is not a more meaningless divide and obsession than the notion of digital media. Media channels were once clearly distinguished and named from the physical devices that we used to consume them. Radio ads played on radios and were audio, TV ads played on TV’s and were moving images, newspaper ads were images in the paper while outdoor ads were the images around us. In 2014 the naming legacy is both misleading and of no value. I listen to the radio on my phone, read the newspapers on a laptop, watch YouTube on my TV and read magazines on my iPad. Our old media channels mean nothing yet their names survive and mislead us into artificially limited thinking. We focus endlessly on battles of no meaning like on whether digital is eating TV, rather than unleashing our minds on the new possibilities and how best to buy media and supply messages in the digital age.

We’ve arranged our agency environment around a false divide and two oddly different tribes. In the same way modern consumers don’t go online, they just exist in a world with the internet everywhere, they don’t watch digital or non-digital media either. Whether a TV show is watched on a phone, laptop or TV, and if it’s over the airwaves or over the internet is of huge significance to the agency world, as we’re arranged entirely around the pipes, yet it matters not one iota to the viewer. We’ve spent our time arranging ourselves around silos to create for, supply and buy pipes which increasingly have no meaning. Why are these new channels new verticals and not horizontals that cut across advertising, PR and customer relationship management (CRM)?

The pervasive web

In the future, the internet will be pervasive, it will be an ambient assistive layer that provides data for everything. We once watched DVDs, CDs, laser discs, we listened to the radio, cassettes, CDs, mini discs, it was complex and the physical manifestations of content and devices mattered, they contained inherent limitations. In the future it becomes simple, it’s all just streamed data. In this world we will just have audio and video, each of the devices we use to access this data will just be different consumption contexts.

Our TV’s will morph (like our phones have) to be places to watch video on a big screen. They may have apps, access to widgets and have ultra-targeted video ads, but the name TV will become as anachronistic as phones. Our phones become a portable place to consume content and record data, devices to make payments, store mobile coupons, keep tickets on. They become our most portable interface with the world. Smartwatches become ultra-thin notification layers and data recording devices. Tablets and car screens become the final two contexts, each with their own meaning.

In this world what will matter isn’t the pipe but the context, the act of searching on a laptop, the consumption of the TV, the need to find a hotel in the car. We will become far more interested about this mindstate than how the message got there. Each device will invent new advertising opportunities: the ability to buy against GPS directions, the ability to place mobile coupons, the media buying of map placements, the chance to pass a message after a near field communication (NFC) payment or when it’s about to rain. Ads will also increasingly run more seamlessly across different devices, the data collected from our mobile to aid the automated placement of video ads on the TV, a move to flow advertising where ads work around people not devices.

Tom Goodwin is the CEO and founder of the Tomorrow Group. You can follow him on Twitter @tomfgoodwin