Jilly Cross, MD of etv online writes .. Hi there, been a while since I’ve put one of these together. As we now look towards the last quarter of the year, I thought I’d share three themes that we’ve noticed across projects and the industry as a whole – just for interest really, but let us know if you agree / disagree / care very little…
Hacking – from underground criminality to brand experience
The word “hack” now has so many meanings (seriously, check out Wikipedia). What is clear is that we’ve come a long way from it referring to nameless underground anarchists hell bent on breaching their local supermarket’s website… Hacking has turned from something negative and underground to something productive, useful, fun, and even fashionable (I promised I wouldn’t say rock stars… as that is just ridiculous). Brands and media are increasingly connecting themselves to this practice, with Cadbury’s sponsorship of Digital Shoreditch’s mobile hack-a-jam-mashup-athon and World Bank’s Waterhackathon which got almost 1000 devs competing to build the best solution to challenges in water to name a few… to hack to do something clever, or do something good, what is clear is that coders are now officially cool… Who knew?
HTML5 vs Native – buzzword alert
HTML5 has been peddled around the industry as a silver bullet to your device compatibility and app woes (why have three apps in your budget when one can do the lot?!) We’ve been working with HTML5 a great deal in the last few months and we’re definitely seeing the benefits, but it’s certainly not without its limits. In fact, we’re seeing that although it CAN work across everything to a degree, it doesn’t actually reach the 100% mark on any platform in terms of the experience. Now we don’t want to side with one or the other, we work across both… but our advice would be to understand what to expect, and like so many other things, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is…
Who “owns” digital in your business?
As digital becomes more important across all business, where does the responsibility lie, who is involved and who has the final say? At ETV we’re seeing massive changes, from digital teams acting as an internal agency, E-Commerce directors taking a seat at the board table, to the emerging rise of the CIO as a digital decision-maker. Moving digital up the corporate ladder and across into more departments is progress to a team like us, but with that we’re also experiencing significantly longer sign off processes, more hurdles for digital officers to jump through internally and political struggles interfering with the progress of some great ideas. Is it time for companies to stop arguing over ownership and see the end benefit digital can deliver – something we can all benefit from?
That’s it – cheers for now,
Jilly Cross
Managing Director of etv online – the digital division of etv media group.
