The Quarter-Century Pivot
What more than 25 years of digital evolution taught us about the difference between a trend and a shift.
One of the benefits of working in digital communications for more than 25 years is that you become a little less impressed by shiny objects. We have seen technologies arrive with enormous promises, watched some of them completely change how people communicate, and watched plenty of others disappear not long after everyone declared them the future.
Our experience with that started early. Fose + McKay CEO Max Fose was part of John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign at a time when campaigns and brands were still trying to understand what the Internet could actually do. The work included online fundraising, email organizing, digital advertising and rapid communication with supporters. What became clear very quickly was that the Internet was much more interesting as a way to connect people and action than it was as another place to put a brochure.
That lesson has held up surprisingly well. Since then, we have worked through the growth of search, social media, mobile, streaming video, programmatic advertising and now generative AI. Each new wave arrives with some real innovation and a familiar amount of hype, which is why we spend a lot of time trying to distinguish a trend from an actual shift in behavior.
A trend may change where an audience spends some of its time. A shift changes what people expect, how they discover information, how they make decisions or how quickly they expect an organization to respond. Those are the changes worth building around because they tend to survive after the novelty of the particular platform wears off.
That distinction shapes the way we approach new technology for our clients. We want to understand it early, experiment with it and figure out what it makes possible. What we do not want is to chase every new platform simply because it has become the subject of the moment. The more useful question is whether something meaningful has changed for the people we are trying to reach.
The tools we were using 25 years ago would look almost unrecognizable today, but the fundamentals of good communications have changed much less. Understand the audience. Give people something worth paying attention to. Make the next step clear. Learn from what they do. Keep adjusting.
More than 25 years of digital change has made us excited about what comes next, but it has also made us comfortable waiting long enough to figure out whether “next” actually matters.