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Colossal. Structural. Cultural. A watershed. Luca Lindner is struggling to find a word that adequately describes the digital revolution. Tsunami comes close. But finally he settles on “revolution” – the French Revolution. “The scale of change is like before and after the French Revolution,” he says. “Unimaginable. Everything changed: the social structure, the political system, the economic system. The advent of the steam engine or the automobile didn’t come close.”
Lindner is McCann Worldgroup president for Latin America, Africa and the Middle East on a flying visit to South Africa. Across that vast region Lindner sees many mutual learnings.
“A generation ago the Latin American lower middle class was desperately poor. Now they live in real houses with phones. We still believed digital was a toy of an affluent youthful minority with computers in the home. The lower middle class, we believed, only used computers in the workplace or in Internet cafés.
“We got a surprise. We discovered 45% of that group have a computer at home, 70% have broadband, 80% use them for banking, shopping on line and entertainment.”
Sao Paolo-based Lindner’s region is an unusual one in the advertising world, where most global agency networks align their regions with time zones. “SA has much more in common with Brazil and Argentina than with Switzerland and Norway,” he says. Lindner is dismissive of Europe. “They’re absorbed in the past. They still believe they’re the centre of the world. But this region is forward-looking and optimistic.”
Lindner is McCann Worldgroup president for Latin America, Africa and the Middle East on a flying visit to South Africa. Across that vast region Lindner sees many mutual learnings.
“A generation ago the Latin American lower middle class was desperately poor. Now they live in real houses with phones. We still believed digital was a toy of an affluent youthful minority with computers in the home. The lower middle class, we believed, only used computers in the workplace or in Internet cafés.
“We got a surprise. We discovered 45% of that group have a computer at home, 70% have broadband, 80% use them for banking, shopping on line and entertainment.”
Sao Paolo-based Lindner’s region is an unusual one in the advertising world, where most global agency networks align their regions with time zones. “SA has much more in common with Brazil and Argentina than with Switzerland and Norway,” he says. Lindner is dismissive of Europe. “They’re absorbed in the past. They still believe they’re the centre of the world. But this region is forward-looking and optimistic.”
