The recent budget has yet again brought home the severity of (and I hate saying these words) ‘the current climate’ and the doom and gloom it presents to us all… a continuously shrinking economy, a whole world of debt and a future looking more and more financially-bleak. However, one industry continues to see the silver lining and, very fortunately for us, it is digital.

With budgets moving to digital/online for the obvious reasons of lowers cost, clearer ROI and better visibility on results, we are seeing that work is not only coming through as thick and fast as it was BR (Before Recession) but also that the kind of work we are being asked to do is changing. This is largely due to the fact that business are moving their day to day processes online to save costs, whether this is in the form of selling online (e-commerce), dealing with their customers (CRM) or general advertising.

Last year was all about viral marketing, fun online interactions and social media applications – really allowing us to flex our creative muscles. This year has been all about improving processes, building better systems and driving as much traffic as possible to the websites we produce.

Alistair Darling has added fuel to the digital fire by announcing broadband will be made available to all households by 2012. In his budget speech, Darling said: “It is vital to ensure the entire country and economy benefits from the digital age. So I am allocating extra funding for digital investment, to help to extend the broadband network to almost every community. This will allow us to deliver the vision set out in the Digital Britain report – making sure everyone can benefit from this communications revolution and create thousands more skilled jobs.”

Whether or not we trust the political reasons for such a move (tax on your broadband anyone?) what it will again mean for the digital industry is a mass improvement on how the normal household, across the UK, will be able to view the work we do and the speed at which they can access it. And this addresses the only stumbling block digital still faces: the issue of access. At the end of the day, if people had the ability to completely cater their leisure time to their own interests, they could get access to their choices cheaply and at the click of a button – why on earth would they choose to use any other medium? The move of on-demand television online is the first real sign to Mr and Mrs Normal that times are a-changing and soon enough we will use the internet in our private time as much as many of us do in our business time.

Checking our bank balance, watching the latest episode of Mad Men, communicating with friends who’ve moved abroad on Skype, buying an outfit for the next night out – the majority of us already do at least some of this already. How is the demand for digital services going to change when everyone is? In a time of seemingly endless bad news, digital is offering a ray of light giving us a future of continuing job prospects, opportunities for creativity and successful business stories.

If there ever was a time to go online, it is now.

Jude x