David Sable: ‘Websites are dead’ [IAB SA Digital Summit]

“I believe that we should be changing the world with technology…the trouble is we’re not”. Those were among the opening words from Young & Rubicam Global CEO David Sable at the inaugural IAB SA Digital Summit.

Interestingly for someone who’s built a successful career in advertising, Sable reckons we should stop talking about monetisation and throwing around buzz-phrases like “digital-first” and “mobile-centric”. Instead we should be putting people first in everything that we do, whether that’s making ads, writing stories or putting together events.

“If you think first about people, if you think first about humanity…it changes the way you look at technology,” Sable said.

And in many ways, Sable believes, Africa has the opportunity to teach the rest of the world how to do that.

“Unlike any other part of the world, Africa is bringing about this convergence” between people and technology, he said.

Too a large degree, this is because many of the people using technology to work on Africa’s problems understand Sable’s maxim that “digital is everything, but not everything is digital”.

According to veteran ad-man that’s because many on the continent intuitively understand that when we talk about technology what we mean is the application of existing technologies to real problems faced by real people.

One area where Sable does feel Africa could stand to catch-up in, especially when it comes to the use of technology, is story telling. Given the continent’s natural affinity for story-telling as well as its massive mobile penetration rates, it’s a little surprising that this hasn’t really happened yet.

If Sable is to be believed, then there are several things that both the continent and the rest of the world need to grasp before we can start taking a people-first approach to digital and technology.

1. Websites are dead

“Websites are still useful, but as a concept, websites are dead,” Sable told the Summit audience. And when you think about it, that’s actually not so bold a statement.

Back in the early days of the Web, when Yahoo ruled and Google was still just an idea for a PhD dissertation project, websites mattered very much because they were the only way we could access content.

Now both Google and apps allow us direct access to the content we want and woe-betide anyone who puts up hoops we would’ve been happy to jump through just a few years ago.

2. One-click shopping

Not so long ago, ecommerce outfits were trying to get people to spend as much time on their sites as possible in the belief that doing so would make them more likely to buy stuff.

Anyone who’s walked into a shopping mall and walked out four hours later with nothing knows that this is far from a universal truth.

What they should have actually been doing, Sable explained, was making it as easy as possible for people to buy stuff.

“Amazon figured out you only have to be on its site for two seconds,” he said, “as long as you buy something, that’s all that matters”.

3. Social media and the conversation prism

“If you look at social as a technological problem,” Sable told the summit audience,”you’ve lost it”.

What we need to do is remember that social media is nothing more than a super-powered digital version of the conversations we used to have in the office around the water cooler.

It follows logically therefore that the stuff that people will spend a lot of time and energy talking about on social is the same stuff they’d want to talk about at the water cooler. You can’t force the conversation.

4. There is only one internet

It doesn’t matter what device you’re viewing a piece of content on, it all comes from the same internet.

And as Sable pointed out, that internet can’t extend beyond the limits of the people who built and maintain it. That’s something that will become increasingly important as more and more devices become capable of connecting to the internet.

5. Mobile: I’m free

As is typical of the introduction of any new technology, when computers first started becoming popular in the home people were worried that it might replace other experiences. The thought was that we’d choose to never go out because we’d be doing everything we used to do in the outside world from the comfort of our living rooms.

The trouble is, no one had begun to imagine the massive potential of the smartphone when they made those predictions. Smartphones don’t replace experiences in the way that people thought computers would, they allow us to experience things on the go and in profoundly new ways.

“In the beginning, we talked about experiences on the screen,” Sable said. “The mistake is to think that you’re making stuff for the screen, when what matters is what’s happening in the life of the person using that screen”.

6. Geo-location

As Sable pointed out, the geo-locationary ability of mobile devices means that the phrase “I’m never lost” applies just as much to consumers as it does to businesses.

The trick for the latter is to be appealing enough for people to want to find them and seek them out.

7. Tasks

The beauty of really useful technology, Sable said, is that it gives you the sense that “there’s nothing that I can’t do”.

In many ways, the iPad embodies that, because the action which allows people to use it — swiping — is so intuitive.

“Swiping is something a three-year old and 80-year-old can do,” Sable said. It’s a device designed to be accessible to people rather than what a technologist believes a person should be.

Cutting through the Digi-babble

According to Sable, there’s one major obstacle preventing us from putting people first in the digital space. He calls it Digibabble, or the ascribing of powers to digital and technology which it doesn’t have.

A great example of this, he says is in the ecommerce space. Amazon, eBay, and every other big ecommerce company are have had a massive impact on the world to be sure but, almost without exception, they could all operate without the internet. It would simply be a return to a prior state of affairs. What they could not do without, however, is a functional postal service.

Digital is everything but not everything is digital.

Another pertinent example is Warby Parker. An online glasses shop, it was meant to be the death of the retail optometrist. A few years later, it had started opening its own retail stores in exclusive locations across the US.

Funnily enough, its reason for doing so had a lot to do with people.

“It didn’t make sense to have glasses under lock and key in a display or on shelving behind a counter and out of reach. People want to touch and feel the product that they’re buying,” Warby Parker CEO Neil Blumenthal told PSFK in a 2014 interview.

Conversely, things can go spectacularly wrong when you try to take people out of the equation. Just ask Amazon.

When the ecommerce giant decided that it was time to get into original content, it proudly announced that it would be using algorithms to determine the kind of shows it would be producing. The result? Its shows tanked because they didn’t tell the kind of stories that people find compelling.

Small wonder then that it suddenly changed tack and commissioned a series from Woody Allen.

Another area where people are making an about turn is in publishing. While some are still heralding the death of print, it’s actually making a resurgence in some areas.

“Magazines are still being created, even in the developed world,” Sable said. “The smartest people are figuring out how to balance digital and print”

Even publishers who made their names online, like Cnet, are launching print publications.

A large part of the reason for that is the tactile nature of print.

According to Sable, even catalogues are making a comeback in the states. “It’s still easier to take a catalogue to the bathroom than an iPad,” he said.

Know your people

Of course, it’s pointless trying to target your digital and technological at people if you don’t know anything about them.

And one of the most important things you need to know is that people increasingly don’t like being put into boxes.

“Today’s generation of consumers are not defining themselves by age or demographic,” Sable said.

Forget all the talk about boomers, millenials, and post-millenials, the only generation you should care about, Sable believes, is Generation World.

It’s a wide-ranging group whose members see themselves as global citizens whose existence makes a lot more sense when you learn that there’s a 40% overlap between music that 14 year olds and 60 year olds listen to.

Finally, Sable pointed out, if you want to put people first, you can’t expect them to engage with your tech or your content constantly.

The question you need to be asking yourself, the Y&R Global CEO pointed out, is: “How do I take my story, use innovation, to make it more interesting as I get it out”?

Powerfully that could sometimes mean taking a hands-off approach. Like many of his Silicon Valley colleagues, Steve Jobs was a low-tech parent. That’s because he wanted his children to experience the world. And shouldn’t that be what we all try and do with digital and technology?