In this era of integration and unlimited technological possibilities, it’s a wonder there are still agencies that treat digital as something you tack on to an offline campaign. TVC? Check. Radio? Check. Print? Check. Online? Check.

What is even more worrying is the limited view some agencies and clients have of what digital is and what they can achieve with technology. To think of digital as a website, banner, Facebook app or smartphone app is old-school. And it’s holding back advertising creativity and effectiveness.

A recent McCann Truth Central study revealed that 50% of young people would rather lose their sense of smell than give up their mobile phone. To this generation, technology is like oxygen – they need it to survive.

Luckily for them, technology is everywhere. In our industry, technology has transformed every medium and extended the boundaries of what we can do. Outdoor displays are increasingly becoming more interactive with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, video and touchscreen. Print advertising is embracing augmented reality with apps such as Blippar and Viewa. TV is being enhanced with smart TV apps and integrated approaches like Shazaam, Fango and Zeebox. Even cars now have internet connectivity, and so do fridges.

All of these examples are digital, and all of them extend beyond online. More specifically, they do not live on the internet – and you definitely won’t find them within a browser. So why do most agencies and clients still gravitate to online when we talk about digital?

During a debrief a client once declared my ideas as not ‘digital enough’ because I did not include a website in the creative deck. I’d presented a slew of technological ideas – touchscreens, augmented-reality apps and integrated multi-screen concepts. But it was clear the client just wanted a microsite, a Facebook presence and some banner ads. I guess it’s safer to run with a tried and tested approach than try something new.

But the stats don’t lie. Microsites, Facebook apps and banners just don’t cut it anymore. When a click-through rate 0f 0.3% for a banner ad is considered high, you have to ask yourself the obvious question – is there a better, more effective way to spend that money?

More often than not, the answer is ‘yes’. General Motors demonstrated how technology can be used in an imaginative way to powerfully connect with consumers when it created the world’s largest 3D projection at Hollywood Boulevard, in which users could win a brand new Chevy by controlling a virtual claw in a skill tester machine. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOtWppRMzjQ)

With the ‘Invisible Mercedes’, Mercedes-Benz Germany covered a car in LEDs and a camera to project its surroundings and make it disappear, spreading the message that the brand’s zero-emissions F-cell car leaves no impact on the environment. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaM07OZCiZ0)

McCann New York was even more adventurous for the Nature Valley Trail View in which hikers traversed national parks across the US with cameras strapped to their back. Using Google Streetview technology, they were able to virtually map hiking trails and transfer this data into virtual hiking trails which users could navigate online. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHnb_srAv_E)

And it would be remiss of me not to mention our own super-popular Dumb Ways to Die viral, which lived entirely in the digital sphere and garnered more than 45 million views (including re-posts). (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw)

As advertisers we need to start thinking of new technologies as canvases on which we can tell our brands’ stories. And that involves taking risks, making a few inevitable failures and raising our hands to say, “I don’t understand this technology, please explain it to me”. Now is the time to start catching up to the new generation of tech natives and learning from their habits and methods of digesting brands technologically.

It’s time we started thinking beyond the screen.

It’s our largest trading partner and it is closing in on the US to become the world’s largest economy. China and its growing middle class will present a plethora of opportunities for Australian companies and brands in coming years – beyond the obvious categories of tourism, education, agriculture and resources.

As China’s online search engine, Baidu, ramps up its presence in Australia citing increasing demand from marketers to reach the flourishing Chinese ecommerce sector, it’s worth looking at the numbers.

By 2030, China will have approximately 1.4 billion middle class consumers, according to the UN Population Division, compared to 365 million in the US and 414 million in Western Europe. And by Credit Suisse’s estimates, Chinese consumption will equal US$16 trillion by 2020.

A large portion of the world’s products are made in China, but Chinese consumers have developed a taste for Western brands. While Australian shoppers seek budget-friendly products, Chinese consumers are more interested in displaying their growing wealth with status-enhancing Western brands – and it doesn’t hurt that they perceive these brands to be of better design and quality than their Chinese counterparts.

And yet, if five million Chinese citizens own a Louis Vuitton bag, how long will it be before it becomes passé? As the Chinese middle class grows and becomes more discerning, these new influential consumers will look for more substance to match the style. They will look for more distinctive, more personalised brand choices.

The driving force behind this trend will be the status that a high-quality, exclusive, artisanal brand could bestow on the wearer.

Hopefully this is setting off a trend alarm for Australian entrepreneurial brands. A more discerning Chinese middle class will present major opportunities for alternative, more exclusive – and therefore, less mass-produced – artisanal brands from overseas, which can reach Chinese consumers through the magic of ecommerce. (Already, 175 million Chinese people are shopping online.)

In short, it’s a great time for Australia to invest in its “homegrown, homemade” high-end brands in the fashion, beauty and cosmetic industries. Beauty products and clothes are among Chinese consumers’ five most popular categories for online shopping – a ready-made ecommerce opportunity waiting to be mined.

Of course, cracking into the China market will require careful strategic planning. It might be obvious to argue that China is different to Australia, but many international brands still fail from not giving their products and messaging a local flavour.

Others fail from localising too much, and feeling too Chinese. Chinese consumers ultimately want Western brands, so it’s important to celebrate the national values and attributes of your brand – what makes it Australian and unique.

Those Australian brands that do attempt to woo Chinese consumers will have to adapt to the way their new customers process information online. A recent study by the Acquity Group showed that the Chinese prefer more product and price-centred communications on websites that may look cheap and cluttered to Western shoppers.

They will also have to adapt to new marketing platforms. Chinese consumers’ main source of finding new retailers is Taobao, which accounts for nearly 43% of new e-tail discoveries. Baidu search and Google search only account for 7.7% and 2.2% of discoveries respectively.

Most importantly, any pioneering Aussie brands should keep in mind that while new is good, revolutionary is going too far. China still has a very collectivist, conservative culture by Western standards. The rising Chinese middle class may be looking to push boundaries, but there is still a reluctance to go to extremes, especially outside the first-tier cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Success for Australian businesses will come in catering to China’s desire for collective individualism – help people to enjoy and display their appreciation for premium quality and design, but give them an edge through the uniqueness of Aussie brands versus mainstream Western brands. 

It’s fair to say things have changed a bit in the 20-plus years I’ve been in this caper. The bromide machines are gone. Type doesn’t go through a waxer, Joan the tea-lady has sadly been retired and the dispatch department is no longer. Oh, and all-staff memos don’t arrive on your desk on an actual piece of paper anymore.

These things have a habit of creeping up on you. You just go with the flow and adapt as you need to. It’s only when you reflect that you realise how drastically things have altered for our industry and of course for consumers as a whole.

It’s no longer enough to make a blockbuster TV ad and run it on Channel Nine on a Sunday night. We can’t put all our eggs in one basket and expect one medium alone to do the job. Our ideas need to work harder as they must connect with people on many different levels. I’m not the techiest punter out there, but even I sit and watch TV with an iPad on my lap and my smartphone in my hand, while blokes are multi-tasking as much as the ladies – who’d have thought? We clever humans have evolved to interact with several things at once, in the home and out of it. A great modern campaign must acknowledge this and enable involvement at every possible touch-point

Digital should be at the core of every creative idea. And it’s not ok to leave it to a ‘digital specialist’. Every creative needs a grasp of the digital space in order to keep up. You don’t have to know all the technical ins and outs. But you do have to know what’s possible.

So what does this all mean?

Our ideas have to be explosive. We must ask ourselves: Does it work as well online as it does in print, as it does on Facebook, as it does at point of purchase? Will it inspire comment and get the social conversation started? Does it have longevity and an ability to evolve over time?

We need to keep broadening our horizons. The boundaries are blurred now between what’s considered advertising and what’s not. Great product innovation, great art, great performance, great street theatre… it can all be part of a great campaign.

But despite these huge (and they really are huge) changes in the advertising landscape, I would argue that the fundamental thinking process for a creative practitioner hasn’t changed and probably never will. Start with a sound strategy and a compelling insight, and the great creative idea will come.

I believe a truly great idea from 10 or 20 years ago would still be seen as a truly great idea today – it’s just that we can take it further these days. Old barriers are down and the possibilities are endless. That’s a pretty exciting prospect when you think about it…

First, a shout-out to Bob: the guy in the States who this week got fired for outsourcing his programming job to China. He paid a consultant based in Shenyang less than a fifth of his salary, and the consultant did his job for him. And did it so well, that Bob was his company’s best programmer. Not only that, it freed him from the shackles of actual work so effectively, that when Bob finally got busted, an analysis of his online activities shows that a typical workday went something like this:

• 9am: Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours, watch cat videos
• 11.30am: Take lunch
• 1pm: eBay
• 2pm-ish: Facebook updates, LinkedIn
• 4.40pm-end of day: Update email to management
• 5pm: Go home.

Now that, my friends, is genius. The sort of genius that really should be rewarded rather than punished. Bob’s problem was that organisations only really tolerate and reward unscrupulous and devious behaviour when it comes from those running the company. Still, I hope Bob gets his measure of fame and glory somewhere along the line.

Enough about Bob, let’s talk about me. I was lucky enough to spend the Christmas break in London and Paris, and I return with a piece of professional and personal advice for all of us:

Don’t be like Paris.

I’m talking about the city, not the celebrity. It should be entirely self-evident that you really shouldn’t aspire to be anything like that Hilton chick. Anyway, why don’t you want to be like Paris?

First a little background: I returned to both London and Paris after a decade’s absence. London has really moved on: it’s preserved everything that it’s famous for, but added a whole lot of new. It’s evolved, and was both instantly recognisable yet completely fresh at the same time.

Paris: it was like they sealed the place up after my last visit, and instructed everyone there not to touch a thing until I got back. Paris (or at least the ‘old’ Paris that we all visit) feels like it isn’t really allowed to change. The world expects certain things of it, and it meets those obligations accordingly.

Paris allows itself to be defined by a very strict sense of what it should be, whereas London (and most other cities really) is constantly reinventing itself. I think we should all be more like London than Paris.

This idea is nothing new of course. Change or Die is a maxim that’s been around for a while, but that’s all a bit gung-ho and management-speak for my liking. I think when I hit Paris, I was struck by the idea that here was a city bound by everyone else’s expectations of what it should be, and I wonder if that also doesn’t hold true for many people, brands, and organisations.

I like to think of it more as living in a constant state of becoming: becoming something different, more evolved, better. That’s a good place to be, for individuals and organisations.

In the last year I’ve lived through this at McCann. It’s not change for the sake of it, there’s more purpose to it than that. You may well be in exactly same boat, it’s a sign of the times. And it’s a good thing. We’re blessed to be living in this age, although at times it can feel like anything but a blessing.

Would you rather be challenged and exhausted or living a life preordained? Don’t be like Paris. Don’t be like Kodak and Polaroid (sob…), who believed so much in what they were, they didn’t even try to become what they could have been today.

I spent last night at the final full rehearsal for the Impossible Orchestra: a 24 hour nonstop orchestral concert we’re organising, as part of an awareness campaign for Australia’s unpaid carers. In addition to the nearly 300 highly skilled musicians we’ve pulled together from a variety of orchestras, there’s a host (actually what is the collective for more than one celebrity: a gaggle, a suite, a whole bunch?) of celebs that we’ll be inserting into the orchestra during the performance.

There are also real-life carers who will be playing in the orchestra, who we’ve been training up. Politicians to wrangle. Thousands of seats to fill at all kinds of crazy hours in Melbourne’s Hamer Hall. It’s been a six month process, all of which has been filmed as part of a feature-length documentary. It should make for one hell of a story and by the time you read this, the concert will be over and we’ll all hopefully be catching up on some much needed sleep.

But the kicker, and what makes this truly exciting, is the simple fact that we’ve never done anything like this before. Not even close. The less charitable may say that we got in over our heads, but I prefer to think of it as biting off more than you can chew and then chewing like hell. There’s a lyric in the Rodriguez song Crucify Your Mind: ‘How much of you is repetition?’ and I think it speaks of our industry at large.

How much of your day is spent doing the same kinds of things, in the same kinds of ways, as you’ve always done? Thinking you’re creating when all you’re doing is following the formula? I’ll wager that most of what we all do is repetition. Which I guess is inevitable because you can’t really be trying to do new things every single day, not in a commercial enterprise. We need to leave that to proper artists, who constantly struggle to reinterpret the world around them and go a bit mad in the process.

But I think we can do better.

As an advertising person, as a marketer, as a lover, as a human being… how much of you is repetition? If you try not to repeat yourself all the time, I think that’s a good way to be. It’s not about being creative, it’s about deliberately not doing what you’ve always done, at least some of the time.

I stress ‘deliberately’ because human nature dictates that we seek the comfort of routine wherever possible; it keeps us sane. But we should perhaps recognise that sometimes we need to go against our nature, and do the things that make us a little uncomfortable.

If your job is to surprise and delight, to gain attention, to weave stories, to separate your brand from all others, to stand apart… is comfort and predictability going to help you do that? No. That’s what dogs are for. Seriously, everyone in advertising and marketing should own a dog. That way you can live on the edge all day at work, trying things you’ve never tried before, safe in the knowledge that when you get home you’ll be greeted by consistency-on-four-legs.

Dogs never change. Dogs love routine. They love eating at the same time, walking in the same places, playing the same games. They will always greet you enthusiastically, they’re never moody, and they’ll never leave you for a new owner. No matter what else happens in your life, your dog will be the one constant.

Get a dog and it’ll give you the repetition you crave. That way, you’ll be free to experiment a little more at work.