Native advertising, content creation, adaptive marketing, media labs leading to agency revenue streams and industry recognition. These things, ideas and more have built steam within the digital agency world for the past 18 months or so. Reinventing classic marketing ideals of branded content & brand relevance and making them shiny and sexy. Providing new content distribution tools, and forms of content creation to play with. Allowing media professionals to be and feel creative. To have traditional 30 sec TV ad creative agencies shake in their boots as production and creation dollars slipping out of their grasp. It’s an exciting time to work in digital.

One of the ongoing effects will be brand-bombing. Brands appearing out of context within events and content. And not just good old sponsorships, but somewhere involved and trying to add to your and my experience of whatever it is we are doing in our lives. It will be weird, and many brands will be trying it, and tripping over each other at times, clumsily trying to woo us. And some of those brands will stay the course, learn, deflect the arrows, know where they have permission to be and build relationships with consumers. Others will wilt, realise it’s not their potential and market themselves differently. While others will succeed spectacularly, with some mis-steps but nothing out of the ordinary and will carry those learnings and disciplines across all of their marketing efforts.

So brand-bombing, look out for it. Three hundred brands looking to comment and be involved with Event X, hoping you will notice and care, at least a little beyond the real reason why you really tuned into Event X.

And when brand-bombing becomes too prevalent, everything will slow down in the digital marketing industry and we’ll wait with bated breath for the next historical wave of digital marketing change to overwhelm us.