How a TV agency reclaims the screen.

We used to spend 4-5 hours of an evening watching TV, our dreamweavers told us in the 90’s we’d soon spend 3 hours on the Net, only 2 hours with the TV. Guess what? We now spend all our waking hours in front of screens. TV, PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod, Laptop, even tills. (As an aside, get hold of a film – Until The End of The World, don’t worry, it’s got a U2 soundtrack.)

A young adman went on record in Campaign in 1997 as saying that one day we’d have a black box in our home, and a series of flat screens delivering televisual information through the internet. What was unusual at the time among the media fray (the media boys were in freefall over ‘fragmentation’) was that no one would step up and say it. Where is he today?  I’d like to know.

There was so much fear at the time, a lot of money at stake – worse still, livelihoods and school fees. Many powerful men were faced with the problem of telling the wife they may have to shoot the pony, and their kids would disrespect them forever. It was clear then to those who had first met HTML at University that the world was changing, but 50 years of post war TV couldn’t be wrong. Generations were conditioned to be entertained. Just as the telephone was conceived as a one way medium which we brought to life as a two way medium and a network,  the Internet would be lauded as a two, three, four, everyway medium but be brought to life as a one way portal – a total control one way portal.

We just had to wait and see. But business doesn’t wait. We saw the dreamweavers set up all kinds of sites, the speculators set up all kinds of businesses, and the venture capitalists get in on the ground floor. Then the bubble burst. Today we have the infrastructure for the market to dictate change properly – and as usual it’s a heady base of consumerism. We want to live, and to do that we hunt. Well the hunting just got organized and the hunters have no need to get off their bums to bag the prey, the Net is tip top as online catalogue and social network.

So what has MWO got to do with it?

PR, that’s what.

Ask most creatives and they’ll dis PR, but ask any enlightened account man and they’ll light up. Digital agencies are fighting for their lives, sorry, adapting; and TV agencies with experience are lapping up the new video channels. But pure PR agencies are quietly enjoying their golden hour managing ’social media’.

When MWO comes up with a Big Idea for a brand, an idea that will live for years – decades with the right management – we inevitably have a thought that will galvanise opinion. That opinion will filter through all media – not ‘social media’ – it will simply be a Social Idea and will need to be guided carefully with the people involved, the people who want to be a part of it. Sometimes that social media will be TV, believe it or not some people still come to work on Monday to debate the moral issues raised in the church of Eastenders.

So we think the TV agencies, with their blend of guile and experience, are in pole position to become ‘activated’ first, all they really need is a good technical director and good digital production companies and as they join in they’re going to need a decent PR machine to write through all their channels – even their BLOGS.