For real?

I just watched this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djCHvkQP9oE) and although I admire Martin Lindstrom's work, I do wonder whether it'll actually be relevant in Malaysia...like now.

In this video, Mr. Lindstrom's pretty much saying that traditional medium is dead, long live digital. Erm...hate to tell you this Martin, but there's still a big load of people who have yet to cross the digital divide.

Realistically, much as I hate to say it but it's not gonna be over for TVC, radio and print ads just yet.  I mean how else are people gonna know if anything's new out there. It's just that these mediums cannot be depended upon to tell the whole story.  It just needs to do enough to whet people's appetites and get them to be interested to find out more.  Only then can the marketer wax lyrical about their products.

But here I go again, assuming that the place that marketers can wax lyrical about their products is on the net when I know that not eveyone in Malaysia is currently on the net. 

Thomas Friedman said something about this.  Something about how it's no longer the divide between the rich and the poor but also between the digitally-connected and those not.

Malaysia is a really tough market for any advertising agency 'coz we've got the following to stall us:

1) Malaysia is multi-racial - which means at least 3 languages must be used for effective communicating

2) The gap between the digitally-connected and the non-digitally-connected is still wide - which means that both traditional and digital mediums must be used optimally.

3) Media is not as heavily fragmented as other countries - but this means that your competitors will be in the same medium too. And worse, so is everyone else.  So, the medium itself is cluttered filled with advertisements and amazingly, the target audience has developed the ability to completely block all this clutter from their sight and ears. The ante is raised each time.

4) And because of the social, digital and media situation described above, the ad budget is stretched really thin.

So, the ad agency is stuck. They have to :

1) Create traditional ads jammed pack with info that it makes the ad ugly, simply because they need to cater to those that have no other way of accessing more information about the product/service

2)  Still create that website/microsite which are also jammed packed with information, and this to cater to the net-savvy crowd.

Double work and paid peanut shells....what a drag!