It’s time to rethink new media strategies

While there are some very good annual reports around, five minutes spent looking at a cross section outside the award winners leaves you wondering why some companies spend so much time and budget identifying company values, creating a corporate identity (in its broadest sense) and then abandon everything when producing the ultimate corporate document.

Similarly, five minutes on the Internet reveals much the same state of affairs. There are numerous sites, other than the few very good ones that bear little or no relationship to the rest of the sales and marketing activities of the organisation in question.

Why is this? Is it because both the annual report and the website are often briefed out by specialists within the client organisations (for example finance director or IT director) and often to specialist consultancies? The result being a tunnel vision view of both the means and the end.

This seems to be particularly so with regard to new media where the process and technique of the medium seems often to have mesmerised both client and consultancy.

Perhaps the time has come to drop the term new media. It is, after all, no longer new and as a catch-all for anything in digital format has become irrelevant and misleading.

The knowledge of “new media” is now widespread and its application is likely to be dealt with more effectively by those consultancies who have a breadth and depth of understanding of broader marketing issues – not those who are simply knowledgeable about the technology.

Alan Coley

Joint chief executive

Light & Coley

London SW6