Watching Qantas’s in-flight safety video on my flight home last week reminded me of how much in-flight safety demos have evolved.

From the days of bored flight attendants blowing whistles, pulling out red tabs and pointing out the nearest exit to disinterested passengers…

…to slickly produced stories showcasing thebrand and home country, often in partnership with not just creative hot shops  like wieden+kennedy but even  Hollywood and music entertainment companies.  With a reach today that goes beyond the 777-300 to millions of views on YouTube.
 
So how did we get to the point where our planes are full of mythical film creatures, swimsuit models, football stadiums and even a medley of internet memes?

Are websites breaking to bits?
 
Is the brand website becoming an archaic idea, at least as a communication vehicle? Given the content overload in the environment isn’t it wishful thinking to expect people to troop to your website or download your app unless they desperately need to? Wouldn’t it make more sense therefore for marketing engagement to happen at places that are part of the organic flow of people’s lives? Also, given that the digital age demands and allows marketers to have a disaggregated view of segmentation, shouldn’t content be created and distributed across a multiplicity of communication platforms and properties appealing to a wide variety of segments?

Digital advertising turned 25 this week. Doesn’t seem very old given Google and Facebook were not even born in 1994. But that rainbow-hued clunky ad “Have you ever clicked your mouse here? You will” was arguably the harbinger of massive change for the advertising industry.

I recently came across an article on this where seasoned ad industry practitioners reminisced about what they were thinking then and how they feel about it now. It certainly made for interesting reading.  

I was left with the thought that, despite that much touted idea of ‘personalisation at scale’, how much of digital advertising has been about the adtech and how little about the consumer of that adtech.