Convergence is a tired concept, you here it all the time, there’s convergence of this and convergence of that, but sadly, it’s probably the best way to describe this messy little moment in time we’re all in right now. It’s happening in different ways within a variety of industries, but hands down it’s happening very quickly in the area of new media services.
Call it pure capitalism, err darwinism, but a lot of service side industries are trying to figure out which slice of the new media pie they can own…if any. Case in point, the ad firms want to create brand communities, the design shops want to assemble social networks, the comms agencies want to own the edgework, and somewhere in between all this there’s a mixed bag of marketing companies who want to “enable” the citizen marketer.
Equally interesting is how this convergence is impacting the client side. Increasingly, you have a bad game of organizational twister happening behind corporate walls, with the brand guy’s left foot crossing the PR gal’s right arm while she’s awkwardly stretched across the marketing dude who’s clearly about to collapse on the ad guy. Each of them trying to secure separate budgets for new media projects that obviously span and in some cases invade, traditional departmental territories.
It’s all really messy, but good and healthy, and inevitable I suppose. Some folks will say that with this convergence comes a collapse, at least for some sectors and disciplines, but I honestly couldn’t tell you which ones. Personally, I don’t really care, it’s a fun time to be in the soup. Soon enough we’ll be on on the backside of convergence…hopefully with jobs.
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