The More Things Change......
12/29/2009 11:09:29 AM by John McCallum
Somehow the end of the decade has sneaked up on me. I’m not sure how I didn’t notice we were moving from the noughties into the twenty-tens but we are and very shortly. The end of a decade is usually a good time to pen some self absorbed navel gazing, at the end of the last decade the world became obsessed with ranking events from the previous 10 and 100 years, the millennium became big news, catastrophe was being predicted by every closet Nostradamus. Most of us thought the turn of the century was significant, although when pushed most of us didn’t know why. So maybe we’ve still got decade-change-fatigue because I’ve barely noticed any comment of this one slipping past.
Another reason might be that many are really pleased to see the back of this year. The new year brings new hope, a fresh start, the symbolic changes and resolutions that will ensure next year is better than this one. This must be entirely psychological as the economy isn’t going to change dramatically in the next few months, at least not for the better that is. As marketing people we deal in the psychological though, we play on emotions, desires and needs; we make things look pretty and sound exciting, we spend our working days creating new year resolutions all year round if you like. Our agency has had a contradictory 2009 with billings down yet new business as buoyant as it has ever been. On the whole though the decade has been kind to us yet we find ourselves mired in recession once again. However clients still need to communicate with their customers so the need for people like us is greater than ever. We’ve a few media challenges ahead, local press particularly is in a bad way, but TV and radio are also facing an uncertain future here in 2010. The internet continues to evolve and the challenge for us is to continue to evolve with it, in many ways we are running trying to keep up rather than leading the way, it’s beholden on all of us to remedy that.
A lot has changed since the turn of the last decade; we didn’t even have a website then. Yet a lot hasn’t changed and we would do well to remember that. Creativity will continue to be the spark that makes us, and our clients, memorable and successful and that’ll still be the case 10 years from now, of that I have no doubts at all. Our new year resolution should simply be that we continue to nurture that.