Online Ideas vs. Offline Ideas

Published
by
Matt
on Jul 21, 2009
in New Marketing and ideas
. Tags: , .

…is an increasingly dumb distinction.

Inspired by this tweet from Paul Isakson, which was inspired by this piece from Ad Age, I got to thinking about the general concept of ideas and executions. Paul says “ideas are ideas” and I’m inclined to agree.

So many times, ideas get pegged as Online or Offline and then executed independently. The problem with this is that it’s not how people operate. My online life might be more tied to my offline life than the average person, but just look at how many people are active on Facebook (250 million!), not to mention Twitter, Blogs, and e-mail. People don’t consciously think “this is an online action” and “this is an offline action”. A social action is social, it doesn’t matter if its a tweet, text message, or lunch plans.

The fact that many companies have different agencies for online and offline efforts certainly doesn’t help, but that’s a poor excuse. If the best ideas and efforts really tap into the markets behavior, then why do we still insist on segregating ideas. If the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, it makes it really easy to get punched in the face.

  • "why do we still insist on segregating ideas"

    I'll take this a step further and ask why we still insist of segregating the people in our organizations that have these ideas? Most organizations I work with still separate web and print in their in-house communications teams. Wouldn't it be more effective to have writers, marketers and strategists working together on messaging across the spectrum of all media? Seems like this would be more efficient and extend the reach of their work exponentially.

    I can see a need for separation in terms of technical skills-- you may need well trained designers for your publications and your interactive. But even they can learn much from one another.

    "If the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing..." so true.
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