If you don't know me by now

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="262" caption="This is Toad. Toad belongs to Nintendo."][/caption]

I'm working my way through a great article by Marcus Brown, a guy who has clearly been doing this for a while, though I've only just found him. The article, If I Were A Client Today is actually on a blog he was previously writing and now has left behind called The Kaiser Edition where he would write from the point of view of a handful of personas (as far as I can tell, I'm still figuring it out as I'm not actually all that bright).

The piece is part analysis of where we're at in agency-land, part retrospective of his time client-side at either Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft (if he reveals which one I'm not there yet, but I have a hunch based on the litany of characters sporting mushrooms on their heads). One of the more curious revelations thus far is the Internet Department he was hired to be a part of didn't get placed with the Marketing department or the IT guys but in their R&D labs.

This is curious but also brilliant, an early realisation that the Internet and technology in general is good for more than just spitting out new kinds of ads. For me it naturally harks back to Iain Tait's 10 Reasons Digital is Better Than Advertising, in particular his first point in that series, that you don't have to do advertising.

When Iain says advertising there though, what I think he means is you don't have to do something that lacks substance, you can do something with balls, that means something and actually impacts people's businesses long after a campaign has finished. I'm not saying this is unique to digital, Droga 5's Tap Project is evidence it can happen anywhere. But I think there's a greater propensity for it to happen online, it moves things from distinctly separate operations closer to functioning as a single organism - and that's where things are going to get really interesting.