25 years of the Commercial Internet

Part 5:  The Remix Years 2010-2015

Although this time has yet to pass, it’s clear that the next five years will see a great shift towards innovative media. Soon, (if not already) the amount of content on the web generated by individuals will vastly outnumber that which is created by organizations, corporations and governments. With this as the new norm, “social media” may actually cease to exist in the popular lexicon and be replaced or absorbed into every day language through new labels for specific behaviours. It’s already happening: “I’ll Facebook you tonight”, “Tweet me when the movie is over” or “Google it”. When these brand names are used as verbs, it’s no longer about technology or being part of a new movement. It’s something you simply do.

The APIs (Application Programing Interface) for leading publishing sites sites will continue to allow content to be remixed and mashed up into other sites and applications. Established publishers like the New York Times, CNN, the CBC and the BBC may decide to produce less content inhouse and explore the notion of remixing outside content for their own offerings.

API mash-ups will be the norm. How could this work for advertisers?

Each program (or campaign) acts like a mini social network spread across multiple platforms (Facebook, Twitter etc). Each platform gives the user a chance to view and interact with the content, thereby generating word-of-mouth within the user’s personal social network. This radical decentralization, remixing and re-telling of a campaign will spawn creative ideas that Cannes won’t even have Lions for. Sure, some of these mash-ups already exist, but I think we can expect this to improve beyond the current Frankenstein model to very sexy component-based campaign systems.

For example: User Generated Content from platforms like foursquare.com will be remixed with photos from Flickr and Google, videos from Youtube, perhaps fan page content from Facebook and consumer reviews from Amazon; combined with GPS and other metadata, all front-ended by an augmented reality engine on your mobile device.

The brand agency by 2015 as I see it:

• We will see  the 80/20 rule flip to 20/80. In other words, the spend for a campaign will change from an 80% media / 20% creative to 20% media / 80% creative.
• We will see a shift away from data-informed insights, replacing opinion-driven decision making. Big ideas will be a collaboration from all stakeholders on the agency, client and consumer sides.
• Agencies of tomorrow will be curators for communication of sorts . We’ll move from the agency-client model to an agency-consumer-client model. Agencies will create messages, utilities, applications, conversations and experiences that consumers will find useful enough to remix and share, leading to further credibility and awareness for the client.
• The agency will act as the purveyor of brand ideas and as guardians of brand behaviour. Stronger relationships between advertising, digital and public relation agencies will create more flexibility and better response to clients’ needs. When this is done, clients will be more responsive to agency recommendations. Given this new direction, agencies of 2010-2015 will begin to look more like consultants. They will advise brands in customer engagement, build community around products/services, and enable advocates to carry the brand message broadly.
• Trust is the biggest variable. By 2015 the best of us left will be the ones who balanced consumer needs and motivations with client needs and motivation.

How?

Big agency’s 2015 deliverables will be insights, innovation and creative.

If that is adopted all else will follow.

The Crystal Ball

Since this is all speculation, allow me to indulge in some ideas from the fringe that may or may not have significant impact in the world over the next five years. There is little doubt that the U.S. elections slated for 2012 will see social media amplified and incorporated in unprecedented ways, but what about social media for other social causes?

In Social Justice

• Combine the proliferation of Wi-Fi and 3G networks with very cheap video/picture-enabled tools like mobile phones and Flip Camcorders, would it be possible for NGOs to air-drop tens of thousands of devices throughout unstable regions of the world? Would the West be able to ignore thousands of videos and photos uploaded to YouTube and Flickr? Could visual knowledge prevent a situation like the 1994 genocide in Rwanda or the conflicts and crimes against humanity that continue to this day?

In Medical Research

• Will the world’s medical researchers be able to explore beyond their patent-hungry pharma employers and work with charity foundations towards a cure? What if researchers shared their data and research on a wiki or developed their own mass collaboration tool? Could the cure for cancer be found? How about aids? Or heart disease? What if the same model was applied to the development of new energy sources like it was with the hydrogen car in Holland?

In Global Warming

• Beyond 2015, we may be looking at a world much different than what we’re used to today. What happens when we reach peak oil? What happens if the planes are grounded and gas hits $40-$50 a gallon? Will innovative and immersive media be the only affordable way to explore the world we currently take for granted?

Questions of radical trust indeed, and a possible future where digital media is not about the latest app for your iPhone or Twitter client, but rather it’s about remaining connected to loved ones across town and around the world.

Check out the other posts from this series.

25 years of the Commercial Internet 1990-2015
1990-1995 – The Brochureware Years
1995-2000 – The e-Commerce Years
2000-2005 – The Advertising Years
2005-2010 – Web 2.0 and The Social Media Years
2010-2015 – The Remix Years

Tags: advertising, agency predictions, augmented reality, digital agency, future of social media, internet history, internet trends, mash ups, public relations, remix, social media, web trends

25 years of the Commercial Web

Part 4. Web 2.0 and The Social Media Years 2005-2010

It could be argued that the most significant period for internet fans was set in motion when Terry Tim O’Reilly and friends identified the principles of Web 2.0 in the fall of 2005. As of today, over 411,000,000 Google results can be found for the term Web 2.0.

Perhaps they can all be summarized with these two notions:

1. Web 2.0 defines the way we build the web.

Web 2.0 sites …

• are more about attitude than technology.
• incorporate the notions of “the Long Tail.”
• realize that content is the brand.
• are in a state of “perpetual beta”.
• support software which gets better the more people use it.
• often grant the right to remix with “some rights reserved”.
• try to provide the feeling of “play”.
• allow granular addressability of content.
• are emergent; user behavior is not predetermined.
• offer a rich user experience.
• trust the user (radical!).

2. Social Media forever changes the way we create content.

Content that is…

• free
• portable
• re-mixable
• ubiquitous
• copyright free (or at least copyright relaxed)
• created via multiple motivations and from multiple sources.

This revolution in principle started to deliver on the decades-old promise of global community.

The average person could now create and upload content onto social networks. Several of these platforms became household brand names. For instance, Youtube (2005) for video, Etsy (2005) for peer-to-peer e-commerce, Twitter (2006) for microblogging, Facebook and MySpace for social networking, Amazon and iTunes for ecommerce, the blogoshpere for news articles and opinion pieces, and Flickr for photo sharing – these were all now common publishing tools out-producing a thousand times the combined efforts of Hollywood, Bollywood, Madison Ave and the big television and news networks.

In 2006 Time Magazine recognized this massive shift in the control of content creation by naming “You”  the person of the year.

They went on to write:

“The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution. (full article)

To the chagrin of Madison Ave, Ad Age followed suit by naming “The Consumer” the agency of the year.

They went on to write:

“Of course, in some ways, they always have. A brand has only ever been as good as consumers’ experience of it. The difference today is that consumers have lots of ways of communicating those experiences, and trust each other’s views above marketers’ overt sales pitches. Consequently, they’re influencing marketing strategy as never before.”

By mid 2009, one in twenty human beings (on Earth) had a Facebook profile. Hollywood would have to produce about 134,400 feature films a week in order to keep up with the content that was constantly being uploaded to YouTube. Wikipedia would become one of the largest resources in human history (achieved with less than 50 employees) and Flickr would host over four billion photographs.

But it wasn’t just marketing and web development that had it’s core shaken, journalists had been impacted too.

One of the greatest criticisms of the notion of “freedom of the press” was that it was a guarantee granted only to those who could afford one. The largest fundamental shift in the history of communications finally took hold in these five years with very little monetary investment or internet savvy required to be a content producer, and anyone with something to say (or not) now had the ability to reach an infinitely scalable audience. The “free” press was free at last and circulation numbers at most of the big newspapers began their sharpest declines.

(Source)

In around 2006, market research firms like Forrester began to hint that social media should be considered a primary marketing channel and a yet another ghetto was created in the mass advertising agency – the social media department.

Almost every agency has one… the social  media guru (guilty). Even with these newfound principles, many Mad Men still struggled to figure out how to integrate banner ads, micro-sites and emails (BBDO excepted of course .  Meanwhile, all web publishers and content creators struggled to find a way to be more inclusive to their readers in the content creation process. Comments and “likes” mechanisms started appearing on NewYork Times articles and Tweets began to scroll CNN tickers.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 made significant use of social media through the radical decentralization of campaign headquarters over clever iphone apps and the digitization of the “March of Dimes” concept of crowdfunding.  Tens of millions of phone calls, tweets, Youtube views and micro-donations later, the U.S. had a new president. The marketing world noticed.

In the last part of the decade, uploading content to social networks became the norm, marking a temporal shift and thereby seeding the desire for real-time search results.  The idea that one could search content that is “up to the moment” is a powerful one – it’s new the new gold rush for our times.

In the meantime, the world continues to struggle with these new behaviours and the ongoing battles over copyright control, ethics and corporate transparency.

This confusion will only be amplified in the next 5 years.

Check back again for the next post in “The first 25 years of the Commercial Web” series: 2010-2015 – The Remix Years.

25 years of the Commercial Internet 1990-2015
1990-1995 – The Brochureware Years
1995-2000 – The e-Commerce Years
2000-2005 – The Advertising Years
2005-2010 – Web 2.0 and The Social Media Years
2010-2015 – The Remix Years

Tags: 2005-2010, adage, crowd funding, long tail, perpetual beta, PR, principles, social media guru, social media years, social relations, Tim O'Reilly, time magazine, Web 2.0, web history

25 years of the Commercial Internet

Part 3. The Advertising Years 2000-2005

There was a lot of coin to be made if you were dealing in digital advertising between 2000 and 2005.  And even though the fledgling digital department was a ghetto within the mass advertising agency, three profitable advertising platforms were established and able to emerge during this period in a big way:

• Banner ads or OLAs (On Line Advertising) echoed print and television ads as the creative departments in ad agencies laboured (painfully) to “integrate” their creative messages.

• Microsites were sold as immersive brand “experiences” that helped consumers have an “emotional connection” with a brand.

• E-mail, born out of the CRM direct marketing world, promised (though rarely delivered) one-to-one communications from brands to “loyal” customers.

I spent most of this era at MacLAREN McCANN as the Digital Group Creative Director on Pontiac, Buick, GMC and Coke. Even with the small economic downturn known as the “dot-com bubble” ( a blip by today’s standard), hundreds of millions of dollars poured into these quick-hit “campaign” programs. The object of the game was to catch people where they were starting to spend more and more of their time – online.

I don’t have a lot of insight on this era because I don’t find it a particularly insightful time. It felt like the mass commercialization of the web was somehow ruining it. Despite our best efforts, much of the work from this era didn’t seem all that persuasive, informative or credible. It was labourious to build, hard to maintain and expensive to promote. I remember a client once said to me, “Why is this internet stuff is taking up 20% of my budget and 80% of my time?”

A handful of memorable programs come to mind. Subservient Chicken ruffled a lot of feathers, and BMWFilms.com turned a lot of heads. But both programs relied on huge investments in media for promotion. The notion of spending money on an ad, to drive somebody to what is esentially an ad, never sat well with me.

I found the most interesting stuff wasn’t happening in a commercial space,  it was happening in outerspace.

NASA’s ClickWorkers

NASA’s ClickWorkers was one of my favorite programs of this era.  Millions of images from the Mars survey missions needed mapping. The amount of time it would take NASA staff to map each crater hole was, well, astronomical. The solution? Raw images of Martian landscapes were posted to the web and many volunteers like you and me clicked around the edges of the craters to map them. Perhaps NASA could have written software to accomplish this feat but I’m glad they didn’t.  I must have done a thousand images before I got tired.

clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov circa 2001

Having the opportunity to look at photos seen by only five or so other human beings on the planet connected me with NASA like never before. Although I’m sure that NASA marketing or brand managers had no play in the decision to mobilize this program, it left a brand impression on me that I will never forget. It also introduced me to the concept of crowdsourcing and it set the bar for meaningful online brand experiences.

A New Generation of Websites

Bubbling just below the advertising world’s adoption of the web were platforms like Blogger.com (1999), wikipedia.com (2001), WordPress.com, Typepad.com, LinkedIn and MySpace (all in 2003), and Facebook and Flickr (both in 2004). Quietly gathering force, these offerings would change the nature of the game again, paving the way to the next generation of the web.

Check back again for the next post in “The first 25 years of the Commercial Web” series: 2005-2010 Web 2.0 and The Social Media Years

25 years of the Commercial Internet 1990-2015
1990-1995 – The Brochureware Years
1995-2000 – The e-Commerce Years
2000-2005 – The Advertising Years
2005-2010 – Web 2.0 and The Social Media Years
2010-2015 – The Remix Years

Tags: banner ads, birth of social media, brand experiences, clickworkers, dot com bubble, immersive media, internet history, microsites, nasa, ola

25 years of the Commercial Internet
Part 2. The e-Commerce Years 1995-2000

By 1995 those ahead of the curve were now online. Success could be measured via clear business objectives. The most direct path to ROI for the typical business was the relatively new notion of e-commerce. The larger retailers saw big dollars in turning their bricks and mortar into clicks and web pages. As America got busy lining the highways with strip malls and big box plazas, so too did they get busy on the information highway. These were the salad days for a guy like me. Eight out of ten times, the sites I designed in this era had a shopping basket somewhere.

One of the big ones I worked on was Sears Canada (launched 1998). Due to its well-established catalog business in rural areas, Sears.ca quickly became the largest e-commerce site in Canada and possibly the world.  Sales rumoured to have peaked with over 1 million shopping baskets totaling an estimated $40 million in revenue by 2001 – more than the rest of Canada’s e-commerce revenues combined.

Sears.ca circa 1998

“Long tail” newcomers like Amazon.com launched in 1995. The rise of peer-to-peer ecommerce sites like eBay started establishing social media principles a decade ahead of the term’s popularization. The era saw some spectacular multimillion dollar failures like Boo.com and, coupled with an unhealthy (irrational even?) fear of the Y2K bug, the “dot com” bubble burst over the faces of weeping NASDQ and VC investors. 

Napster, the popular peer-to-peer music platform, launched in 1998 and set a new understanding of what peer-to-peer actually meant. The music industry lawyers jumped on it and by 2001, it was shut down — the major record labels’ collectivel lack of imagination failed to notice that this was biggest thing for them since pressed vinyl.

Let’s not forget about the quiet incorporation of Google.com in Sept. 1998. I remember the first Google search I ever performed. I was looking up photos *** from the Mars Pathfinder Mission ***. The search was successful and I have rarely used another search engine since. (post edited ***)

Google circa 1998

But not everybody is a retailer and Google needs content to fulfill what you’re looking for. Check back again for the next post in “The first 25 years of the Commercial Web” series: 2000-2005 The Advertising Years

25 years of the Commercial Internet 1990-2015
1990-1995 – The Brochureware Years
1995-2000 – The e-Commerce Years
2000-2005 – The Advertising Years
2005-2010 – Web 2.0 and The Social Media Years
2010-2015 – The Remix Years

Tags: birth of google, collin douma, digital retail, eatons canada, ecommerce, internet history, long tail, sears canada

25 years of the Commercial Internet
Part 1. The Brochureware Years 1990-1995

I came into this business at the tail end of the brochureware years. For most companies adopting the web early, the goal was simply to “get online”. Web architecture of the era used basic taxonomy to sort the content flowing from the home page (aka the Home Site). Not many websites went past “Who We Are”, “What We Do” and “Contact Information”. Almost none of them had search, but they did sport neat-o site maps and FAQ sections that often acted as the main interface to the brochureware.

Not a lot of thought was put into the content of the website.  Success for most companies was simply about being online. Sadly, most web design shops of that era didn’t even employ writers. The copy was often left to the client, the producers or even (shudder) the art directors.

For the most part, web sites fell into three main categories:

• Reference: Simple corporate or special interest reference sites (hence the term Brochureware)
• Task: Banking, credit card and other billing firms found their way to the web very quickly. One of my first jobs was as Jr. Designer on Canada Trust’s Easy Web (now TD Canada Trust’s Easy Web) with the now debunked (and possibly defamed) Mackerel Interactive in Toronto.
• Search: Still in their infancy, internet search tools were pretty bad. Finding a good website usually meant several clicks through a few pre-determined categories. Even at this tender age, many of the bigger search engines started to look at themselves as “portals“. This business model relied on the paid placement of links on high-traffic sites; very attractive to advertisers, but often a dead end to consumers. Google’s founders must have been watching … and learning.

Yahoo.com circa 1994

Early Communities Online

For the most part, online community in this period was limited to gated Bulletin Board Systems and to those who had a firm grasp of the “back end“. By the end of this era, a handful of self-publishing platforms like GeoCities started poking up, but the impact of this was not felt until after 1995.

One community site of note from that era was IMDB.com (The Internet Movie Database). Launched in 1990, this site allowed users to rate and review movies. Standard fare found on today’s sites, but certainly ahead of its time back then. Acquired by Amazon in 1998, IMDB is still the pre-eminent movie resource on the internet.

Check back again for the next post in The first 25 years of the Commercial Web series: 1995-2000 – The e-Commerce Years

25 years of the Commercial Internet 1990-2015
1990-1995 – The Brochureware Years
1995-2000 – The e-Commerce Years
2000-2005 The Advertising Years
2005-2010 Web 2.0 and The Social Media Years
2010-2015 – The Remix Years

Tags: amazon, brochureware, geocities, imdb.com, internet history, online community, seo, yahoo

25 years of the Commercial Web

Introduction:

2010 marks the 15th year of my career working in digital media. In that time I’ve seen a massive shift in the attitude towards the medium, and perhaps most fundamentally, the end of the idea that this is about technology. The key concept that first got me into this arena was the notion of a global community. That promise took a long time to come true for the average household, but for some of the early adopters (AKA geeks), the digital community has been there all along.

As with any new medium, the curve has been steep and with each stage, blunders of epic proportions have been made. In my experience, those who chose to bravely innovate their communication programs towards some clear objective typically stayed ahead of the curve and found a way to great profit. Those who “gave in” to the expertise of the individuals or companies they hired to get them to the next level succeeded the most. Those who attacked these communications innovations without a fundamental understanding of their purpose, or without a clear objective in mind often found little to no success for their money or effort.

Thankfully the days of ghettoizing the digital departments of mass advertising agencies are coming to a close. As are the days of empty ideas and blue sky objectives which chase venture capitalist investment as the ends, rather than the means.

Over the next couple of days, I will update Radical Trust with a several posts that take a look back, a look at now and a nod to the future as I see it in the digital world. Here is a sneak peak at the next five posts of this six post series regarding the future of the Commercial Web. Check back for:

25 years of the Commercial Internet 1990-2015
1990-1995 – The Brochureware Years
1995-2000 – The e-Commerce Years
2000-2005 – The Advertising Years
2005-2010 – Web 2.0 and The Social Media Years
2010-2015 – The Remix Years

Tags: advertising, collin douma, commercial web, internet history, marketing