IPA Digital Business Group: Practical initiatives to develop digital

The IPA’s new Digital Business Group (DBG) aims to cater for and support those agencies for who digital marcomms represents just one aspect of a deeper integration of technology into business. Chris Thurling, founder and managing director of 3Sixty and co-chair of the IPA Digital Business Group, explains…

There was a time – not all that long ago – when being in advertising meant you were involved in making advertisements and buying the media space in which those advertisements appeared.

Then the World Wide Web came along, and defining what it meant to be in advertising became a lot less straightforward.

To begin with brands did their best to apply the traditional broadcast and interrupt model of advertising to this new medium… hence the rise of the banner ad.

However, back in the 90s (and well into the noughties) most established agencies weren’t that interested in creating 468 x 60 pixel animated banner ads. So about a dozen or so years ago in-poured a whole host of young advertisers who were excited about pushing pixels. We witnessed a flurry of startups (the likes of Glue, Dare and Agency Republic) that started to show that online advertising could be about much more than just banner ads.

Meanwhile, some of the earlier entrants – the web design and build agencies – came to understand that the process of building a website encompasses a wide range of disciplines; not just IT, but also graphic design and many of the skills traditionally associated with advertising, such as planning and copy writing. Excitingly the industry also began to spawn some completely new skillsets such as user experience design and search engine optimisation.

For a while the digital advertisers and the design and build brigade found common cause at the IPA as evangelists for digital in the aftermath of the dot.com fall out.

But as the industry matured and digital went from afterthought to mainstream, the pioneering digital advertisers became – by and large – part of an integrated approach to marcomms and often absorbed into full-service groups. The agendas of the different types of digital agency started to diverge.

This is why the IPA has formed the new Digital Business Group. It’s recognition that there is a bunch of agencies in the IPA who don’t fit neatly into the ‘digital is another channel’ category but who fall into a modern big tent definition of what advertising is all about.

The agenda of the DBG is not about championing one approach to digital over another. Instead its remit is focused on practical initiatives that can help develop digital as a whole.

Those agencies that have been involved in founding the DBG all agree that the first priority is working together to encourage fresh talent into the business. We want to begin talking to young people from backgrounds who would not traditionally consider a career in our industry. That means reaching out to a wider group of universities and colleges and also engaging with students taking courses not usually associated with supplying recruits to advertising.

The UK has been at the forefront of digital, but there’s a general recognition that skills shortages threaten our ability to stay competitive over the medium to long term.

And as we widen the net and bring new people into our agencies, the DBG wants to make sure that the IPA provides appropriate training with a view to continuously raising professional standards. We are looking at developing new courses in areas such as user experience design, information architecture and advanced digital project management that cater for the kind of specialist and in-depth skills needed at many digital agencies.

Ultimately, the formation of the DBG acknowledges the importance of this growing area, provides the resources to help support and develop it, and has shown us how powerful it can be when senior people from ostensibly competitive agencies sit down and find common ground to address the kinds of issues that are not easy to address single-handedly.