What he said …

If you still have your head buried in the sand, it’s time for you to come up for air. Take a look around you. Ideas are still where it’s at, but the business has CHANGED. Read on.

BDW NY Making Digital Work NYC: Day One
3 DECEMBER, 2010 | WRITTEN BY EDWARD BOCHES

A look at the Twitter stream tells you it was a day of awesomeness. Great presentations, lots of dialogue, hands-on workshops, and an end of the day session where the 70-plus participants actually invented new products or services, designed prototype websites for quick online testing, bought their keywords and prepared to put their content online — thanks to some Modernista digital elves willing to work through part of the night to make it happen.

Coming just a week after Fast Company suggested that there will be carnage if the advertising industry doesn’t adapt quickly enough, followed by an alternative view from Bloomberg Businessweek suggesting that’s a bunch of BS, Making Digital Work offered a little bit of reality.

The facts are this. Change is coming fast and furious, even accelerating beyond what we’ve seen so far. It’s not just about making digital experiences it’s also about understanding consumers’ new relationships to media, technology and community. It’s about mastering UX and engagement instead of the age-old art and copy definition of creativity. It’s about changing every organization to learn new ways of collaboration.

Perhaps most importantly it’s about being far more agile and lean when it comes to inventing work, prototyping it, getting it to market, and as Tim Malbon of Made by Many tells us “Learning fast.” Challenging the fail fast mantra of recent years, Tim instead argues we need to speed up the learning process. Nail it and scale it as he says.

So what does it take? If you were here at BDW’s NY workshop yesterday you may have concluded the following.

1. The consumer is at the center of everything
And the most important thing to remember is that he is a participant, a doer, a sharer, a creator. How do you create an experience that engages and motivates participation and action? Awareness and attitude do not lead to changed behavior. Action and behavior lead to changed attitude.

2. New teams and process are essential
You can’t make experiences with the same people and processes you used to make ads. Not everyone has to write code, but if they don’t enthusiastically embrace all that’s new bid them adieu.

3. Put aside your fears and anxieties and make something
You need to just jump in and do it. Get over thinking that ideas and creativity are the exclusive domain of one department. Get your ideas on paper. Build a prototype, get it in front of people (you can easily hide things on the web so you get enough feedback without going big time public), learn and proceed.

More to come as we begin to post the decks and presentations. So keep your eyes open.

Read more: http://edwardboches.com/bdw-ny-making-digital-work-nyc-day-one#ixzz175xwGwXe