Discovering real value in a post-digital world.

As we get used to a new reality post-COVID-19, it’s vital not to lose sight of a much bigger epochal shift…

This is a shift that sees us finally enter an age when the line between digital and physical, online and offline, has been permanently erased. This is the post-digital world – and it’s something fraught with new challenges as much as it’s filled with new opportunities to combine technology and talent in powerful ways. 

The simple fact is, digital-first is no longer an aspiration – it’s a given. The way we all communicate and collaborate is now, more than ever, reliant on digital technologies, and the businesses that will thrive will be the ones that seamlessly blend talent and technology to position themselves perfectly to secure value, when the sources of that value have shifted like never before.

Defining the post-digital world.

So, where does this value lie in a post-digital world – and what, in fact, do we mean by this term? Effectively, we entered post-digital times when we stopped seeing ‘digital’ as its own distinct channel and entity, and instead seamlessly incorporated it into our everyday lives.

Digital is now so naturalised, so unobtrusive and ingrained in our day-to-day, that we no longer need to consider it as an active additional channel for marketing, communications and beyond. Instead, we need to consider how it interacts with the wider whole, and how we can apply digital-first thinking for a human-centred future; how we can deploy new technologies and emerging paradigms in fresh ways that cut through an increasingly noisy, cluttered world to make businesses and brands more meaningful.

Beyond binaries and boundaries. 

This world hasn’t simply come out of nowhere – we’ve been heading in this direction for a long time. Personally, that’s what I find exciting about the B2B marketing industry, and why I’ve long worked to build digitalisation into the programmes and initiatives we develop and deliver – whether that’s creating digital firsts in terms of multichannel campaigns, or developing my own longstanding group for digital creatives and marketing specialists on LinkedIn. 

But just because we’re here now, in this post-digital future, doesn’t mean we can stop exploring. Digitalisation is accelerating, and businesses and brands need to stay ahead of that acceleration curve. Which means we need to go beyond the boundaries we’ve previously set ourselves; to look beyond the binaries of ‘digital vs. physical’ or ‘online vs. offline’. And that’s why it’s such an exciting time to be at the helm of Wyatt International as we head into uncharted waters.

Realising the bilateral post-digital vision. 

The decade that I’ve spent with Wyatt International is just one part of the agency’s story – and that story is one of evolution and adaptation, being independently nimble and flexible enough to reshape ourselves to the world’s big trends, challenges and opportunities. And, following the upheaval of COVID-19 and our new reality, it’s also that story behind why we’re helping to guide our international B2B clients through the post-digital world. 

We’ve reshaped ourselves again, creating a hybrid approach and a uniquely bilateral offering: part brand and business transformation consultancy, part world-leading multichannel activation agency. Uniting this bilateral offering is a whole-agency focus on driving digitalisation and spearheading internationalisation, all to help businesses find and secure value. 

No matter how much the post-digital world changes further, this is one thing that will always remain the same: an unrelenting focus on value creation. Which, ultimately, goes to show why, at Wyatt, we’re doing what we’ve always done best – it’s just that now we’re doing it in a very different way, for a very different world. 

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