• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 28, 2017

A byproduct of the always-on world of digital media is that marketing finally is catching up with the “real world.” Think about that for a moment.

Or, as Bank of America Senior Vice President, Enterprise Media Planning, Investment and Measurement Lou Paskalis put it: “Life is real time.”

That may seem obvious to some folks,  but it's actually a remarkable insight for one of the world's biggest brand marketers to acknowledge on stage during one of the ad industry's preeminent events: Advertising Week.

It’s remarkable because historically, brands -- and their agency and media proxies -- have behaved as if they control people’s time, buying and selling it like a commodity. The difference now, Paskalis acknowledged, is that the marketing world has to be accountable to the reality of consumer time: i.e., real time.

“It’s kind of organized chaos in the future,” Paskalis conceded about the implications the shift has for marketers, especially the need to keep up with all the content, channels and behaviors that digital media unlocks for consumers.

“You sort of have to embrace it,” Paskalis said, adding: “This is going to be fun.”

The challenge, Paskalis said, is that metrics for tracking and understanding it haven’t “caught up” with consumer behavior.

He cited the fact that people are consuming “156% more video on a mobile device” this year versus last, with a corresponding decline in their linear television viewing.

“We have to get the metric modalities down to where we can actually capture what is happening,” Paskalis advised, asking, “What are the experiences people want? How do we tell stories that people want to share with their friends?”

From an industry point of view, this fundamentally represents a “shift from an advertising mindset to a marketing mindset,” he said.