By Michael Nutley of



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At a digital summit organised by the advertising agency OgilvyOne last week, the chairman and CEO of OgilvyOne worldwide, Brian Featherstonhaugh, gave the introductory speech on global digital trends. What was most interesting about his speech was that in fact he identified only one trend - that consumers are taking control.

This point was then reiterated by speaker after speaker. Wherever you look, if consumers are given the tools to control their media experience, they grab them. And, usually, their first priority is to get rid of adverts. You can see this in the speed with which telephone preference lists are built, the uptake of pop-up blocking software, the enthusiasm among owners of personal video recorders such as Sky+ and Tivo for their ability to fast-forward through commercials.

But this is only half the story. Consumers also increasingly expect their needs to be met on their terms, not on the companies'. In this respect, consumers are far ahead of companies. They expect joined up business, and they have little sympathy with those firms that can't provide it. For example, there may be good reasons why a company doesn't stock the same range of goods online as it does in its shops. These reasons will have no relevance to consumers. If they want to buy online from you and you don't have what they want, they'll go elsewhere.

Shifting balance of power

Customers also have far better access to information. From car dealers to doctors, everyone is experiencing the rise of the informed consumer, with all that implies for changing relationships between the parties. If, as business journalist Alan Mitchell has said, the world is moving from a model in which companies said "We make this, do you want to buy it?" to one where consumers ask "I want this, do you make it?", the consumers know more about both what they want and what companies supply than ever before.

Two thoughts spring from this. The first is that, for those of us who've been in new media for some time, this is not news. After eleven years or so of the commercial Internet, we're familiar with many of these ideas. What's striking is that now an agency the size of OgilvyOne feels this trend is sufficiently important to host a series of events to tell its clients about it, and that over 100 of its clients came to listen.

Reaching the tipping point

The fact that this happened shortly after The Economist published a special report about the idea of the Internet making the customer king suggests that some kind of tipping point has been reached. Indeed, talking to Louise Ainsworth, management partner at OgilivyInteractive London during the event, she said she thought that this tipping point had already been reached in the US, where the agency has experienced a significant jump in work.

But the opportunity remains enormous. The newly-renamed Internet Advertising Bureau's figures for the latter half of 2004 show 4.3% of UK advertising spend goes online. That's an increase of 60% on the year before, but it still means that 95.7% of spend still goes offline. Half of UK businesses still don't have a Web site.

So the second thought is that the gap between consumers and producers has grown vast in the years since the dotcom bubble burst. Companies are starting to realise it needs to be bridged; and we are the people who will bridge it.

Michael Nutley is the editor of New Media Age

In The City Interactive - 7 June 2005:
Can you engage with consumers who shun traditional advertising, create their own content menus and form communities to recommend, share and forge new relationships? Explore the issues and opportunities facing content creators, owners and distributors in the era of convergence at In The City Interactive's conference 'Are You Content?' on 7 June 2005 at the ICA in London.