How long till the ad world gets a grip on the potential ramifications of the charmingly-named cloud computing revolution?

It’s a subject which seems to be provoking intense debate in the technology sector, but nary a twitter in adland.

Essentially, cloud computing is a catch-all term for the general migration of programs and data from the user’s device (e.g their PC) to a ‘cloud’ - a distant network of servers.

What this means in practice is that you’ll no longer need Microsoft Word on your desktop - you’ll log into a cloud hosted version.

Or, another example - rather than storing all your photos on your hard drive, you’ll store them in a ‘cloud’ and access them when you want… oh, hang on - already do that one, don’t we? Yep, the cloud has already begun its take-over to quite a large extent.

Without avoiding the issue, there’s clearly an absolute barrage of implications from this shift in how we do things digitally and I won’t attempt to address all of them here. But on a very basic level, some of the applications on our desktop today (like Word) may tomorrow be accessed remotely - and will probably come with a side-serving of advertising.

One thing which becomes abundantly clearer when you think in terms of a ‘cloud’, though, is the nature of the role that brands should play digitally.

Because it is quite evident that the ‘cloud’ is a consumer owned entity, populated with consumer data, which they can access as and when they choose.

As a brand, you should be looking at how you can help people to access and use the stuff in the cloud more effectively and enjoyably. You should be looking at how you can own some of those access points. You should be looking at how you can use the information in that cloud to drive your marketing more intelligently.

But by and large what you shouldn’t be doing is pumping more stuff into that cloud. We do enough of that ourselves. And - inevitably - we’re more interested in the stuff we put in there, than they stuff you do.

Let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t be interest if a load of photos from a brand suddenly appeared on my hard drive, I’m only interested in looking at my own.

The cloud is the new hard drive - so brands shouldn’t clutter it up.