Last year the number of ‘online’ ads overtook traditional ads for the first time. But should we have been surprised? The really outstanding takeaway from this is the fact that we’re still differentiating between the two media types.

Folks in the Creative Services  are demons for putting approaches into boxes. Online versus traditional. Social media as a set of techniques of its own. Rulings that marketers must embrace mobile to survive.  b2b experience, but not fmcg. b2c needing different treatments from a pure consumer play. Look at any awards ceremony to see how much the industry enjoys clinging on to these categories.

Let’s try to emerge from our little cocoons for a moment. Why are we still doing this? Why do we feel the urge to categorise and classify? Our role should be in delivering Creative solutions to engage customers. We shouldn’t specify the mechanism to deliver before we know what we’re addressing and why. Focus on the Creativity of the approach, then the approach itself.  By focusing on the type of campaign, rather than the objectives, we’re guilty of an elaborate security blanket to show that we’re following a trend and ticking a delivery box, rather than worrying about response and interest.  Social has taken on a whole new life of its own. We’re told how to do Social Press Releases: but in the end it’s the content that counts, not whether we tweet that content or put it in the post.

The same has started to happen with Crowdsourcing. It’s become rather either/or. This campaign should be Crowdsourced, this one shouldn’t. It’s why it’s received bad press in some quarters: by putting it into a box marked ‘alternative’ and worse, ‘cheap’ it’s also ended up being associated with poor quality. People are very keen on the public failures like the Gap logo, without realising how much good stuff goes on. Poor creative is just that, it’s not made worse because it’s sourced differently.

Boundaries are being removed in most disciplines now. The world of IT has been revolutionised by Cloud computing. Consumer and business electronics merge. Organisations mix outsourcing and insourcing as they focus on getting the job done. Yet we still want to keep things separate in the Creative world.  No more is this evident than with agencies: in amongst the furore about the future of advertising, little is made of the fact that too many are built on a specialism. No surprise then that someone wanting to execute a new campaign, build a new brand, has to think what shop to visit first for a pitch, rather than hearing the broadest creative approach.

It’s time to get away from ‘types’ of media, ‘categories’ of marketing, ‘different’ channels, specialist agencies and start thinking about Creativity first. It’s time to remove the differentiators from your vocabulary. It doesn’t matter if it’s online. Social is just a different way to say something. The digital age isn’t new and it’s time we stopped being in shock and awe of it, and concentrated on what we actually need to do. Over the coming months we’ll talk more about the Creative Platform developed by blur Group: built to emphasise the importance of Creativity.

Online is over. So is traditional. Get on with it. Start the Creative revolution now!