We’ve all found ourselves in that familiar place — the one where we find ourselves remarking, “I didn’t sign up for this.”
Whether in family situations, relationships and/or business/career scenario, we can often end up feeling duped by the old switcheroo. It feels like falling for the oldest trick in the book.
You agreed to a chore as a kid and you were given a bigger one. You fell in love with a poet, got married, and your W.B. Yeats went to work on Wall Street. You accepted a job and, on the first day, found out your boss was on maternity leave. Being flipped outside our comfort zone without express authorization is unsettling.
This dynamic is very familiar to anyone within the digital marketing industry — it’s that constant adjustment we make to calibrate to the changing landscape, required technical knowledge, and presumed skill set (i.e. what people expect you to be able to do).
But, the older you get, the more ridiculous the complaint itself will sound. In our industry, the constant changing of assignment is a given. So, there will be no, “I did not sign up for this.” There will be no, “I was told there would be no math.”
Because guess what? In our industry, as in life, chores multiply; our better halves evolve and devolve before our eyes; once you are hired, all kinds of $#!& happens.
Challenges Encourage Us To Step Up
And you know what? We should want for it to be no other way. Unexpected change is the spicy companion who keeps us on our toes. Challenges make us a better (and previously unimagined) version of ourselves.
To varying degrees, we’ve all had to generally acknowledge our own state of constantly Continuing Education — but that makes us more ready and able to respond to all the amazing things happening in digital marketing right now.
For example, we’ve all come to terms with the steady march toward a more programmatic dominant marketplace. But, now, we must ask for more out of the system, and we are. Whether it be for desktop display or mobile, we are looking for more things to happen in a millisecond than ever before.
Our algorithms have to do an awful lot in a world of audience modeling, predictive analytics and dynamic optimization of campaign assets. Let’s keep our eyes on those charged with figuring that out and making it happen. Not only will their accomplishments take the industry to a higher state of play, our jobs will all become a lot more interesting.
The Video And Cross-Screen Challenge
Another area on which to keep an eye and be ready to step it up is in the cross-screen arena. My friends in the mobile video space are especially excited about the establishment of VPAID.
The Video Player-Ad Interface Definition (VPAID) is the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) specification that provides a standardized interface between video players and in-stream video advertisements. VPAID has long been used for Flash-based, interactive video ads on desktop, but, until recently, has yet to work effectively in video players on mobile platforms. I expect that those who embrace this new technology will help marketers and publishers alike deliver on the cross-screen opportunity in a much fuller, more lush, world, equally engaging across all screens.
It’s hard not to stop in your tracks when the game suddenly changes. But, in some ways, we’d be smart to not regard change as sudden, but as always par for the course–silencing that track in your head that wants to reel off of the changing assignment.
Forget what you signed up for. It’s long gone. In this space, as in your entire life, what you anticipate and what comes to bear are almost never the same thing. And, in a world of change — does that really matter?
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