Jon Beardsley, Chief Revenue Officer, Pontiflex.
Simply put, Jon makes Pontiflex grow. He’s a master of all verticals, with major sales successes in travel, retail, technology, education, non-profit and market research. His greatest triumph was securing the Barack Obama presidential campaign as a client after almost two years of
perseverance.
Before Pontiflex Jon held a series of leadership roles at Innovation Ads, a premier interactive agency. He helped his
department grow 20-fold and was instrumental in the company being named the 29th-fastest-growing small business in America, as named by Entrepreneur
Magazine and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Back in the day: Jon worked for
Britain’s new local government network and taught kids how to unleash vicious forehands at tennis camps at Harvard.
When not thinking about CPL Jon is dedicated to charitable causes in Africa, with a specific focus on Liberia. He has been involved in The Grassroots Movement of Liberia and the rebuilding of the war-torn city of Monrovia.
Creative biography
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“
looking forWarD To
a CreaTive DigiTal
fuTure
‘Genesis and Revelations, the next generation
will be… hear me.’
Police and Thieves (originally Junior Murvin, mastered by The Clash)
Creativity dictates our future. The power to imagine through storytelling can unlock global change as well as filling the coffers of brave digital marketers everywhere by pushing the boundaries of what we understand to be the norm. If this book has taught us anything it is this: that nobody knows the boundaries, nobody knows just how far we can go in the future with digital marketing. All we now know is that the rules change on a continual basis, standards of excellence are breached daily and the future looks bright. One of the many problems we now have of course is defining ‘what is digital?’ In fact we would suggest we are now beyond the point of ‘reasonable distinc- tion’. Instead perhaps we can just move up a gear, and assume all marketing is digital, as it’s hard to think of a single reason why an advertiser wouldn’t deploy at least one digital aspect within a campaign. That’s simply because we can all safely accept today that at least some of our audience is going to want to engage with us online.
This chapter is going to summarize the book. We are trying to knit some themes together, analyse what is actually going on and present it to you in a reasonably intelligent manner. We are also going to make some predictions
188 The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World
about the future for creativity in digital and advertising as a whole. After all that, we are going to offer some recommendations for advertisers.
But first a quick recap of from whence we came.
In the beginning there were banners, and they probably didn’t please many, but like our ancient friends from the traditional press who spent several hundred years lumping ink and trees around the place to form similarly offen- sive advertisements, it just took some time to get it right.
Banners have fought hard to remain on the schedule. They flashed, buzzed, expanded, contracted, floated, popped up and under, in and out, and generally sought to intrude while howling ‘CLICK ME’ at the growing billions online. On the second day the internet had a God and Google was its name. Although ‘search’ had been around for some time and indeed keywords were nothing new, it was Google who got it right through advanced algorithms and its saintly, ‘do no evil’ image. Now advertisers didn’t have to rely on banners for response and traffic, they could simply de-risk the process by acquiring disci- ples who were already looking for answers.
Improvements in broadband brought us video – now we could choose between being passive or interactive. We could also wrap around, pre-roll, post-roll, take over and do lots of other neat stuff as we marched happily towards the dawn of convergence. However, we were still caught inside the boundaries of a site or destination and our clicks and strokes were somewhat victims of circumstance and distraction. Then two key trends emerged and we found ourselves on the brink of a new horizon; the beginning of the user- generated content era or Web 2.0 or let’s just call it ‘social’; and the other major trend was, of course, ‘mobile’.
Mobile has been quite a drawn-out and at times hilarious journey. I remember the times when I was commuting in the UK (circa 1989) and someone would be on their giant phone: ‘Hi, yeah, I’m on a train, yeah, I might lose you as a tunnel is coming up’, and all the other passengers would ‘tut tut’ and shuffle their morning papers around. Now the ‘tutting’ has become ‘tapping’ and
189 Looking Forward to a Creative Digital Future
some of the morning papers are handed out free of charge. There is no doubt we are getting closer to the device of choice for the Web 3.0 or Web 4.0 gen- eration; iPhone and iPad have gone some way towards this but the best is surely yet to come.
So back to our gospel. Then the conversation opened up for all, advertisers included. No more would we be servants of the net, we would be authors, film directors, political leaders, visionaries, champions, fashionistas, rock stars clicking in a levelled world earning our 15 gigabytes of fame. For those more ordinary folk, we too would be empowered in the most extraordinary ways – here we are reminded of the great legend and media prophet of the 20th century, Marshall McLuhan. For those of you who haven’t heard of the man, he is well worth a ‘search’. In fact, McLuhan was the under-riding inspiration for our first book Understanding Digital Marketing. If you have ever come across a really witty or insightful quote from the world of media and advertis- ing, chances are it was McLuhan who quipped it. Our favourites include:
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● Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.
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● The modern little red riding hood, reared on singing commercials has no objection to being eaten by the wolf!
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● Today it’s not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence , but the ad agencies.
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● Diaper backward spells repaid.
McLuhan observed that the successful adoption of new media by societies followed four basic principles or qualifiers – called a ‘tetrad’. It is a very useful qualifier for new stuff like ‘social media’.
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