Is 10 years too short a time for the world to change?

• We bring to you a series of columns from industry experts, looking back at the last 10 years
• The columns will explore how the media, marketing and advertising industry has transformed in the last decade
• Varun Duggirala, Co-founder & Content Chief, The Glitch answers if '10 years too short a time for the world to change?'

This year marks the end of the second decade of the millennium. It also marks a decade for me in the agency space (I never worked in an agency before co-founding The Glitch in 2009). So looking back, I’d say it’s been not just a disruptive but also a transformative period for the advertising space.

How brands function has changed to its core! The distribution pipeline has been democratized by the advent of e-commerce. The content outlay from a brand has evolved towards a wider spectrum, that of 3-4 television commercials in a year. It’s not a calendar of content opportunities that a marketer has to focus on to both build her brand as well as push for sales, while consistently understanding and evolving with the ever-changing mindset of the consumer. This has, in effect, directly changed the needs of a brand from its agency.

While traditional agencies have borne the brunt of it, digital agencies have ridden this wave to become the default agency for brands. Because in the world we live in, what has become the new normal is that everything is digital at its core, even if the execution is non-digital. Because of the core consumer insight, the broader creative building process by using data as your superpower and the ability to be agile, creative yet effective is now the new normal.

What’s also been disruptive for the agency model is that there’s no singular template model for all agencies; we all do a lot of the same but a lot of different things as well. Some might focus on content creation a lot more versus others who concentrate on technology platforms and tech innovations. It’s not a one-size-fits-all and that’s what makes it an exciting time to be in advertising.

We live in a time of massive disruption and hence, we live in a time of massive potential for innovation of how we do what we do. Automation and AI are spaces we’ve just scratched the surface of, when it comes to automating tasks that don’t need human creativity or intervention. Collaboration with the modern content creator ecosystem while employing and learning from the methods that most new media creators use is not just necessary, but mandatory. To constantly reinvent how we work with data and how we engage with influencers, new media and platforms is going to define our strategy. There is no 5 year plan now, it’s a 6-month revamp.

So I’d say it’s been a great decade, a game-changing one and I’m looking forward to what the next one brings.

- By Varun Duggirala, Co-founder & Content Chief, The Glitch