Creative fuel? Hell, yeah. The headline speaker at Creative Fuel was R/GA founder Bob Greenberg. And he has put all of you on notice.

This is Bob Greenberg’s most famous quote: “People talk about change and adaptation, but they don’t see how fast the competition is coming, from everywhere. We have to move. We have no choice.” It is the statement by which his agency lives.

Greenberg believes that advertising is moving beyond the digital era to the connected age, where digital and physical combine. “Devices that collect data and share them through digital services will transform everyday life as well as the entire marketing industry,” he stated earlier this year.

Clients will gather and own data about their consumers, he added, rather than buying it from outside sources. They will “earn” the data from their consumers by providing digital services that deliver their value by becoming personalised partners, assistants and advisers to consumers, aiding them in everything from their finances to their health/fitness to what they cook for dinner at night to where they go on vacation to what clothes they wear, what make-up they use and how they use it.

In Greenberg’s new year overview of what would happen during 2014, he stated that the marketing world would become divided between companies who have made investments in digital platforms in order to collect earned data, and those that have not. The ones collecting data will use it in business as usual, he said, for product development strategies, CRM programs and one-to-one marketing approaches that deliver finely-tuned messages to their targets that are also actionable.

That prediction has already become a fact of life. And R/GA has already changed to accommodate it. “We have begun to work with Volvo on the connected car, and with Nike on the connected athlete. In New York we are working on a geographical area that will be a connected community. Functional integration and the connected everything is the future.”

Agencies and agency’s creative output have to change for this new world order, Greenberg said at Creative Fuel. “What we’re doing is flipping the model from having an agency that’s set up to do TV advertising and then interactive, mobile and social to be really the flip of that and being informed by the mobile, internet and social to come up with new types of TV work.”

You are put on notice because clients have been – and have already begun to respond, Greenberg gauges. In his view, clients are moving away from horizontal integration to embrace new business models that do not rely on the same amounts of mass advertising to drive growth. In the connected age where devices collect data, and where product development, marketing initiatives and even the kinds of relationships companies have with their customers are guided by it, an entirely new set of marketing channels will drive awareness and purchase. In this whole picture view, the purchase becomes the beginning that connects consumers to an “ecosystem of value” and spurs further purchases. The purchased object becomes the marketing tool that triggers further purchases.