Not only communication and advertising groups, but the entire industry, is now running an Usain Bolt sprint against its own obsolescence
By Pyr Marcondes Reading time: 3 min
The most recent acquisition in Brazil of the WPP group, the world’s largest communication conglomerate in the advertising industry, was a software company, DTI from Minas Gerais. It’s not a fluke, it wasn’t punctual and it won’t stop anymore. I mean, not just the WPP group, but the entire communication and marketing industry, in Brazil and in the world, will continue its journey in search of a late technological upgrade, which should have been done over the last decade, but which now, no no way, it will be executed. Yes or yes.
Not only the communication and advertising groups in this industry, but the whole industry, is now running an Usain Bolt sprint against its own obsolescence and, this is already starting to happen, it is no longer just a functional marketing sector, but a new industry in gestation , the marketing tech. Or martech, for the intimate.
We are not facing a modern terminological change. It is the most comprehensive, profound and radical transformation of this sector of the economy, which, moreover, drives most of all other sectors of the economy that depend on consumption to exist and progress.
The invasion of technology happens today in advertising agencies, in communication vehicles, even in those considered more traditional, such as newspapers and magazines, but with great emphasis on the advances in what we used to call television, which now becomes something else. It still happens strongly, and perhaps mainly, in companies that need to advertise and, therefore, are called advertisers.
Vehicles, agencies and advertisers, the historically consolidated tripod of this sector, becomes martech because it is no longer able to resist the inevitable contagion, otherwise viral, as we know, of digital technologies, which invaded all its darkest and most remote corners, from the smallest radio in the interior of Brazil to Rede Globo. WPP included.
When we look at what this means, we see that digitization not only brings connectivity, interactivity and speed to this industry, but also breaks down boundaries between these three pillars. In addition to, voluptuously, allowing entry and integration with previously only connected sectors of this chain, such as retail, bringing together the previously so distant logistics, for example. This on one side. And on the other, at the other end, the miscegenation with the telecom industry, electro-electronics (where cell-phone gods live) and game consoles (where one of the most promising communication industries for the most varied brands lives).
What was once a kingdom has become an empire without borders, where the great conqueror of the new times, marketing, pervasively starts to inhabit and dominate, anointed by Genghis Khan 2.0.
Martech is the logic of marketing, now, and more and more, embedded in technology to the top, also inflated by sales at the consumer end of the furthest haberdashery shop in the most remote neighborhood in the country, integrated, it, via social networks, Whatsapp, Google, Facebook and Instagram, in a known endless network, fostered and economically supported by the industry of industries, which is communication and marketing.
This renewed design of the sector is like a painting by Jackson Pollock: chaotic rips of lines, stains, blots composing, on a canvas that is the uber-connected society of our times, a panel apparently meaningless and gesturally random, but which, in fact, , is an inspired work of innovation, disruption and breaking paradigms, which shocks academic art critics and outlines, for that very reason, the inevitable advances of the future. From marketing.
