Image by RWLinder

‘Digital first’.

It’s such a harmless phrase, almost inoffensive in its bland yet bald stating of what is an obvious truth.

Except it’s not – not harmless, and not even necessarily a truth, obvious or otherwise.

Start with a simple experiment: you would not say ‘Electricity first’ as being the aim for your agency or brand, would you? And yet you don’t get to be digital first without the presence of a current. Does that not therefore make electricity more important?

Of course not. And yet, many of us working in marketing and communications persist in this notion that ‘digital’ is a thing that in some way should be venerated above all other things.

Edward Boches for one. He apparently thinks that agencies should:

Think digital experience first, tv and messages second.

That he can say this without possibly stopping to think that might be as important to define the messages that go into a digital experience makes me worry for the state of marketing education in the US, but that’s for another day.

Anyway, such shallowness was enough to prompt the following observations, naturally enough spewed out on Twitter:

– Honestly, some of the stuff I see extolling ‘digital first’ as a mindset make me want to rend my garments, and wail.

– Someone’s just said, ‘think digital first, TV second’. What, even if your brief is for a telly ad?

– I thought the point was for the idea to be brilliant, and then you bring it to life in the best media possible for it.

– Can you imagine Michelangelo being told, ‘yeah, all very well about that ceiling, but where’s the digital bit?’

– The main thing to remember is that it is very rare that new media ever fully kills old media. Both adapt, change in reaction to each other.

– Does no-one read McLuhan any more? This stuff is 50 years old. It’s not hard. Really, it’s not.

And yes, I am aware that I am tilting at windmills here. But this post by Dave Trott about the late David Abbott makes the point far more eloquently than I ever could. The famous poster campaign for The Economist actually started as a conversation about a TV brief. But instead of thinking medium first, the idea won out.

The point is not that we should be doing digital first, or digital only, or half analogue, half digital or whatever. It’s that we should be aware that media ‘technologies’ – and yes that means paper, as much as it means anything mostly composed of bits – should always be subservient to the ideas and the messages we want to put in them, and that we should work with their affordances to make the best things we can.

That should be the first thing to remember – always.