What’s Next? Andrew Reinholds

We asked some stalwarts a simple question. Here’s what Andrew Reinholds, managing partner at OMD, had to say.

It’s become a cliché to note that the amount of change affecting our industry in the past five years is unprecedented.

The rise of digital technology has changed the nature of media and commerce, and therefore advertising, forever.

The media landscape is now so diverse that even the definition of the word ‘media’ has forever been altered. No longer defined as simple ‘time and space’, media has now become a meeting point to create a connection rather than cause an interruption.

I would suggest that our biggest challenge today is what to select from an ever-increasing range of media and technology options and how these options can be connected together to deliver holistic solutions that cater for increasingly savvy audiences.

But, at a time when clients require real leadership from their partners to help them successfully navigate a fractured and fragmented media landscape, too often, competing business models are promoting competing points of view as to what the most appropriate solution should be.

The result is that there is now a real undercurrent of tension in how we, as agencies and clients are making the transition from more traditional advertising to this modern connected always on world where traditional advertising isn’t always as accepted as perhaps it was in the past.

So where to next?

I believe that in 2015 it will be time for us to agree that all media should be considered as part of one inter-operating ecosystem. Components of a campaign can then complement each other in something close to real time.

As we become more focused on developing solutions rather than creating advertising what will be more important is the effect we have on the ecosystem rather than what we make for it.

To achieve the real inter and intra-agency collaboration required to thrive in this dynamic and increasingly complex and connected environment, then both agencies and clients need to demonstrate leadership.

We need to explore new ways of working together and new models of reward and remuneration to lay the pathway for real change.

My favourite definition of leadership is by the late novelist David Foster Wallace: “Effective leaders are individuals who help us overcome the limitations of our own selfishness and weaknesses and fears to get us to do harder, better more important things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.”

2105 needs to be the year for real, authentic and effective leadership.