Beyond Advertising

Chapter 1The Five Forces Driving the Need for Change

To prepare for [the] future, it is vital to understand that the greatest threat to progress is the inability to see around corners, the inability to respect our past and the unwillingness to realize that the way we succeeded is not the way we will succeed.

— Thomas Harrison, Chairman Emeritus, DAS at Omnicom Group (2012)

This Chapter Is about Inspiring You to Go Beyond Advertising. Why?

When we asked our Advertising 2020 contributors about what the future could and should hold—what was both necessary and possible—they scanned the horizon from their respective vantage points across disciplines and around the world and brought into focus an unprecedented convergence and interaction of extremely fast-moving trends, highly disruptive insights, and rapidly emerging capabilities that we will experience just a few years hence. A world that is becoming a reality in our daily lives, now.

As John M. Baker, CMO of Mirum Agency, notes, “The challenge with predicting the future is something science fiction writers talk about all of the time. Aside from the difficulty of getting it right, the hard part is balancing the consistency of human experience with the pace of change in technology” (2012). By asking what could and should advertising look like, we privileged aspiration over accuracy. By asking experts immersed in many different industries, we gathered together the viewpoints best suited to balance experience and change. The result: ...