He gives plenty of texture around the comment (how agencies overcompensate for various deficiencies by stressing digital, etc.), but one can take the comment at face value and still glean plenty, especially in the wake of Steve Jobs’ recent passing.

From day one, Jobs understood how much technology depended on the human touch, figuratively and literally. And that if there were a one-word catch-all, it wouldn’t be “digital” but rather “design.” And design, Jobs said, was not merely how good something looked but how well it worked.

To him (and for us), digital was more than just tools but extensions of our limbs and imaginations. Not hardware and software. Lifeware! Sight, feel and now voice are the operating principles that drive Apple. Not “technology solutions,” a phrase, like the word digital, that couldn’t sound more inhuman if it tried.

Oh, the irony! For the last decade or longer, we marketing geniuses have gone great guns trying to bolster our digital creds, doing everything in our power to look savvy, often at the expense of working savvy. We learned the hard way that flashy microsites were likely meaningless to our clients’ businesses. And hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube often meant winning a popularity contest without any prize. We realized that brands aren’t social just because they’re on Facebook and Twitter. And so on …

The costs have been tremendous—to us and to our clients. But make no mistake, because clients are as culpable as we are. The clamoring for digital came from all corners. I’d argue that social media (another techie term) has exploded the myth of digital, reminding us tweet by tweet that people are and always will be living, breathing human beings; in other words: analog.

However painful the learning curve, this is good news for those of us toiling in Ad Land. Agencies are at their best when we put ideas before clients and, dare I say, technology.

Steffan Postaer is Executive Creative Director of gyro San Francisco

Follow him @Steffan1

He blogs regularly at Gods of Advertising.

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

Crises happen. Interestingly, how communicators handle a crisis now garners bigger headlines than the crisis itself. What used to be the stuff of case studies and water-cooler gossip among marketers now makes national headlines.

Perhaps reality TV has made us more interested in the exchanges that happen behind the scenes versus the actual performance. Or maybe it’s the voracious, instantaneous news cycle. The why doesn’t really matter much. How organizations fail to respond to a crisis affecting them is news, and it can be critically damaging to revenues, reputations and brands.

The pork industry’s traditional response to the swine flu outbreak (Forbes article) and the missteps in how Domino’s Pizza reacted to the YouTube video posted by two of its former employees (BusinessWeek article) are two very recent examples of this phenomenon. People began Twittering about how the organizations were handling, or not handling, the situations as the drama was literally unfolding.

What is so frustrating to observe is that solid crisis communications planning could have helped these organizations avoid such obvious pitfalls. Done correctly, crisis communications planning lays the foundation for a thoughtful, rapid-response approach. Effective crisis planning must help you quickly engage the right channels to deliver your message, mobilize your advocates and build dialogue with important stakeholders.

Too often communicators and marketers indefinitely postpone crisis communications planning, considering it a marketing luxury separate from their integrated marketing plans. What they fail to bear in mind when making that decision is that the time and cost associated with lost confidence is far greater than the cost of planning.

Pattie Kushner
Senior Vice President
Director of Public Relations, North America