Ultimately, advertising has two objectives:
Do pageviews still matter?
Whenever you pull up a piece of content, you are creating a pageview. The frustration that certain marketers have with pageviews are well-placed. Unlike a physical page (in a newspaper or magazine), clever online editors do sneaky things like create slideshows or paginate articles so that consumers have to click through multiple webpages for content that would have traditionally appeared on one page. In short, they've turned one page of content into many. This generates the ability to serve an incremental amount of ads for the same piece of content. Good for the publishers (in terms of revenue), good for the brand (looking to get their message in front of as many eyeballs as possible) and questionable for the consumer (lots more ads and lots more clicking around for a single piece of content). Due to the exponential growth of mobile (driven by both tablet and smartphone usage), content publishers are struggling to figure out what will replace these banners ads and/or how to make their pageviews as lucrative as possible in a post PC world.
The complexity and challenge of new media.
This struggle is real. Publishers are feeling the pressure to generate revenue in a world where print advertising is struggling to return to its former glory. Because of the lack of scarcity in online advertising, online publishers are trying every trick in the book to generate substantive advertising revenue, in an attempt to validate online publishing as a credible revenue model that will match (and, hopefully, surpass) that of traditional print advertising. Still, the reality is the reality. We live in a digital world that has an ever-growing abundance of advertising inventory. It can be pushed and manipulated to create more (as needed).
The cost of standard run of network advertising is relatively low. Consumers have never been fond of clicking on these ads (so much so that we changed the nomenclature from "banner advertising" to "display advertising" in the hopes of validating the model as an amazing engine for branding purposes). Banners have become digital clutter. Even the most refined of webpages seem engulfed in images that blink, ping and prod for attention in a world where every eye-tracking advertising test to date has demonstrated that consumers have developed a keen "banner blindness" ability.
Is ignorance bliss?
It's hard to argue that most content-based webpages aren't all that annoying, but there is a cost for access and there is a cost for this content that must be paid by the consumers. Whether this is a paid-subscription model to underwrite the profitability of the business or ad-supported as the model, consumers have to accept that advertising and pageviews are going nowhere. Recently, DigiDay ran an article titled, The Pageview is Dead. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. Pageviews may be a poor metric. Pageviews may be something that most online publishers manipulate for their own revenue-generating endeavors, but pageviews are as important today as circulation is to newspapers.
We have to suck it up.
Yes, our world needs better digital advertising creative. Yes, our needs the ability to track engagement and create more contextually relevant advertising for consumers. Still, even the hottest forms of online advertising (think native advertising or Google's AdWords platform) still require consumers to generate pageviews. On top of that, while earned and owned media are the new darlings of the new social media world, let's not forget that there is still a vast majority of businesses and brands that absolutely must pay for that quick impression (be it online or otherwise). It's doubtful that a 30 year-old bran cereal brand is going to get much earned and owned media simply because they're launching a new line with dried strawberries in it. All they really need is a hefty media spend and something that will capture the consumer's attention but for a moment. They are paying to share their corporate information.
New media is hard to reconcile.
It's admirable to want the metric of pageviews to die. It's admirable to desire that brands do a whole lot more to engage their consumers, rather than disrupt them, but it's also hard to bucket all brands into one homogenous group. If someone is looking at content and multiple display ads are pushed to them, instead of screaming that pageviews are a wrong metric, perhaps the marketing industry needs to take a greater step back, and ask even more profound questions: are display ads and the pageview model the most compelling way for a brand to create attention online? Is there a better way to create attention in a world where consumers are connecting to content on a myriad of screens in a vastly different contextual experience? Ultimately, the problem may not be the pageview, but rather the entire financial and creative structure that the pageview is simply a minor player in.
What's your side? Do you see a day when the pageview goes away? 
Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image - one of North America's largest independent digital marketing agencies. His first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His latest book, CTRL ALT Delete, is out now.
]]>Those seem to be the billion dollar questions, these days. After it was announced that Yahoo would be acquiring Tumblr for a little over a billion dollars, the online channels (and traditional media outlets) went crazy in an "Instagram just got bought by Facebook for a billion dollars" kind of way. And, while the discourse continues, we're now hearing rumours about a few other billion (or close to it) dollar acquisitions that could be right around the corner as Waze deliberates between Google or Facebook and Yahoo could also be looking to pick up Hulu. The money is flowing, but will the revenue follow?
Are we asking the right questions?
Like Instagram, Tumblr has no immediate and clear revenue model (the company reportedly made about $13 million in 2012 with an estimated $100 million for 2013 in advertising revenue). The rumours -- in a post-acquisition world - are around everything from how Tumblr will have to deal with the significant amount of blogs that are porn, adult content related or copyright violations to the opportunity and potential for native advertising (if anyone can agree on a legitimate definition of what that means). Others think that this play by Yahoo was to buy a younger demographic, whose only encounter with Yahoo may have happened when they had to use their parent's computer and opened up a Web browser. Suffice it to say, that we may well be asking the wrong questions.
Could it be a question of brand over revenue?
When Samsung was fined close to one billion dollars and forced to pay Apple damages after a patent infringement trial in August of 2012, there were some interesting discussions online about what this all meant. The jury found that critical features of the Samsung smartphones and tablets design were copied from Apple's iPhone and iPad. The jury backed Apple's claim against the South Korean firm, but there's something bigger -- that when placed in context makes this all seem meaningless. At the time, Samsung was the biggest maker of smartphones in the world and the biggest of the Android smartphones as well. A billion dollar fine seems like a low-cost of entry to become number one in that industry, doesn't it? And, that's without considering that the fine could have been a lot less or the jury ruling could have gone in another direction.
The true Face(book) of Instagram.
Similarly, prior to Facebook's acquisition of the social mobile photo sharing app, Instagram, the world's largest online social network was grappling with the mobile revolution. Facebook was built for the Web and in 2011, their mobile experience was a tough sell. With photo sharing being one of the largest components of the Facebook user's experience, the company could not allow a small startup like Instagram to grab that much market share in the mobile space as the consumer's habits were rapidly evolving. As Facebook raced to update their platform and develop a more comprehensive and responsive mobile experience, the acquisition of Instagram gave them a significant position in the mobile sphere. Consider this: half of Facebook's page traffic now comes from mobile. Who knows if Facebook could have proven their mobile snuff without buying Instagram. Was that billion dollar acquisition about the potential revenue of Instagram or about building the perception and future of the Facebook brand? It's hard to argue that Facebook doesn't understand mobile today... and this shift happened in under two years. Who says it takes a long time to turn a big ship?
The future of Tumblr isn't Yahoo.
Back in February of 2011, The Huffington Post sold to AOL for $315 million. That seems like old news, but out of all of these acquisitions, it could be the best example of what Tumblr will become. AOL had many properties, but were still widely known as an Internet Service Provider by most, and the jokes about CD-Roms and "you've got mail" were hard to shed. Between the acquisition of The Huffington Post, new leadership, the purchase of TechCrunch and the realignment of some of their other digital properties, The Huffington Post became the catalyst that moved the AOL brand from CDs and mail to a modern day publisher. If Yahoo can acquire sites like Tumblr and Hulu while pushing beyond their history of being a Web portal, spending a billion dollars on a platform like Tumblr and/or Hulu could well be the cheapest way for a company of that size and magnitude to not only save itself, but rebuild its brand reputation as a leader in the digital world. Any revenue from that billion dollars that they can recoup from the Tumblr or Hulu platform, could well just be gravy in the grand scheme of things.
What's your take?
Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image - one of North America's largest independent digital marketing agencies. His first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His latest book, CTRL ALT Delete, is out now.
In the past short while, we have started to see what could only be described as "true online publishing" taking on a new (and pretty) look and feel. It started not too long ago when Fast Company did a full overhaul of their website. If you choose an article on their site, you will mostly see a big and beautiful image, a bold headline and that's when the scrolling begins. You intuitively move down the page for the content or left to right at the top of the page for supplemental images associated with the piece. The New York Times had a breakthrough with Snow Fall, which was their interactive coverage of the rise in fatalities from skiing. Reuters is currently previewing their latest web version and there are grumblings that a major redesign of The New York Times is on the way as well.   
In response to responsive design.
While the language of how we design the Internet continues to evolve (thanks to HTML5), we are also now seeing responsive Web design and parallax scrolling techniques take hold. Websites will now adjust to the user's experience (which could be happening on a computer, smartphone or tablet) and adapt (or respond) to the user's needs accordingly. While it's not as simple as it sounds in terms of the design and cost to get there, it's an excellent concession position for online publishers (instead of having to design native experiences for the web and multiple mobile app platforms). But, what makes these techniques most fascinating is the user experience. Instead of a fixed, square page buffered by banner ads, the user is actually moved through the piece because of the design experience it creates in flowing them along with the story. It's no longer about having those annoying page numbers to click through at end of each page, and much more about a page that is unencumbered by any physical page limitation.
Beyond paper.
When television first came on air, it was mostly people performing radio in front of a camera. There was no real acting as we see it today. There were no multi-camera shots. It was mostly live and, if we're going to honest here: It was boring. It was only exciting because we could see people and the technology was new. While the web wasn't boring beyond the recent changes in how we're designing and publishing stories now, it wouldn't be unfair to say that most online publishers were simply replicating the print experience. Copy and paste. We took our text from the newspapers and magazines and copy and pasted it on to a web page. Sure, links added depth to these stories and comments enabled people to add to the discourse (or, as Arianna Huffington likes to say about blogging and the Huffington Post: "Self-expression is the new entertainment"), but online publishing still looked and felt like traditional publishing. The thing is that now we're starting to see and understand the landscape in a much more profound and powerful way. A web page is not limited to the same constraints as a printed page, consumers are better at understanding how to manipulate digital spaces, while tablets and smartphones add a whole new perspective with hand gestures. Plus, legitimate designers are now starting to take the Internet more seriously as a design medium. So, we're moving beyond trying to make the Internet look, feel and read like paper, and this is the moment in time when it feels like the Internet is about to become a true publishing medium unto itself. And something a whole lot more interesting to look at.
No, it's not just Twitter.
Blogging, Twitter and more are original ways to spread, share and create content. Facebook, tumblr, YouTube and even the latest entry, Medium, are all doing their fare share of the work in creating new and fascinating ways for content to be penned and distributed, but the majority of the design still harkens back to the day of the printing press. What is about to make all of this digital publishing most fascinating will be more than the words, images, audio and video content, but in how it is designed to create something new. Traditional publishers are no longer just publishing content online, but working - harder than ever - to create a true experience that is native to a digitally connected screen. This the true power and opportunity of online publishing. Articles suddenly look like microsites and stories suddenly have three-dimensional depth to them that could have never have been achieved in the classic formats. For some, these new experiences may be too busy or have too much going on. Personally, these nascent examples are the bedrock of what will make digital such a rich and interesting next-generation publishing engine. It seems like we've scratched well beneath the surface with the content part of the equation in the past decade, but now it is time for the designers and user experience people to really up the ante and move us beyond the limitations of pages and fixed spaces to help stories flow in new and interesting ways. The challenge (and there is always a lot of them) will be in figuring out if things like banner ads and text links can maintain their dominance as the revenue generation engine that supports these more robust forms of content.
What do you think? 
Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image -- one of North America's largest independent digital marketing agencies. His first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT Delete, will be published on May 21st, 2013.
There are two trains of thought here that are important for media professionals to think about as we move forward into a world where screens are ubiquitous, cheap, connected and virtually everywhere.
Train of thought #1: Screens everywhere means advertising everywhere. This is the Minority Report scenario. Connected screens that are either physical or simply appear as heads up displays that know who we are based on quick retina scans of our eyes. All advertising is highly personalized and customized to match our experiences, wants, desires and more. Screens are also motion/touch sensitive so that consumers can interact, move and access more information through them. It seems chaotic, ridiculous and science fiction-y to even think about this world, but it also seems somewhat plausible as more and more screens get connected and more and more devices start having connected screens in them (think about major home appliances and more).
Train of thought #2: The main screen is the screen we wear. While still nascent, wearable technology is all the rage these days. From Nike FuelBand to Jawbone's Up and the pending public launch of Google's Project Glass and whatever Apple has up their sleeves for their own wearable technology, it is becoming increasingly obvious that our connected computers will be more a "part of us" than ever before. This won't just be devices or destinations for use as needed, but integrated into the very fabric of our clothing and accessories. If we are all sporting our own heads up display that puts a screen in our faces whenever and wherever we need it/want it, maybe the rest of the the physical world won't have a need for screens on every kind of surface? And, if they do, perhaps those public screens simply interact with and augment the wearable technology's screen and experience.
Crystal balls never looked so interesting.
Regardless of which train of thought becomes our virtual reality, we are beginning to see the technology companies that we know and love (Google, Apple, Amazon, etc...) all starting down the path of wearable technology. Back in February of this year, I had the chance to try on Google's new Project Glass and the experience profoundly changed the way I think about technology and how we connect to it. While many are quick to dismiss this form of wearable technology as a parlour trick and some are already calling those who use them "glassholes," we are missing the bigger picture. This is new technology. Any new technology will find its fair share of criticism. We're quick to call people wearing these devices glassholes, but we're equally quick to forget how many found the use of mobile phones in public socially unacceptable not all that long ago (and yes, those are the same people who now speak freakishly loudly on their smartphones in the most inappropriate places). What makes Google's Project Glass so fascinating is this: the connected device is no longer about using your hands and fingers to manipulate it. It is now all about using your eyes and voice to navigate and engage. Ultimately, the experience of wearing Google's Project Glass moved technology from hands and touch to eyes and voice.
It is profound, but it will get even more profound. 
From a business perspective, it has been reported, that Google will not be allowing advertising in the apps that are being developed for Google's Project Glass. As Technology evangelist, Robert Scoble, points out: "This is a huge shift for Google's business model. I believe Larry Page is moving Google from an advertising-based company to a commerce based company." This business play makes perfect sense. Why charge for advertising when you can earn more revenue as a master affiliate? Advertising is a supporting revenue stream for content, but in this very different world -- where voice and eyes are creating and manipulating the experience -- why wouldn't Google take a commission-based approach to successful experiences from making reservations to full on transactions? The ability to be connected at a social level (through Google +, Twitter or Facebook) coupled with a connected virtual wallet that can facilitate micro-payments also makes this business strategy that much more interesting (and lucrative).
But, from an advertising perspective, this creates a very different world than the one that is littered with screens just itching to dash a message in front of us, doesn't it? It also engenders a world where screens that do have advertising may be able recapture a core component of what makes advertising work in the first place: scarcity. With screens everywhere and ads everywhere we enter into the world of abundance in terms of inventory. If, suddenly, the majority of our content is being consumed through wearable devices where subscriptions, transactions and more are where the revenue is made (but is free from ads), perhaps when screens do have advertising on them, it is not only more relevant to the consumer but much more valuable to the advertisers buying the space?
What kind of marketing world do you think we're going to see?
Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image. HIs first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly-successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT Delete, will be in stores on May 21, 2013.
As a marketing professional, there is nothing I hate more than receiving any form of communication (email, Web experience, social media, mobile, whatever) and not see an obvious place where I can either opt out of the communication or protect how much information is being captured. As a consumer, I probably hate it more. There is plenty of psychology in that statement. As a marketer, I (think) I understand the business. I'm hopeful that the vast majority of marketing organizations are using my personal information to create a more personalized experience for me.
From that perspective, I have no issue with behavioral targeting so long as the social contract is fair and equitable. Namely: I get a great experience as a consumer and you, the marketer, make a lot more money because you're able to charge advertisers a premium for having such a keen understanding of your consumer. As a consumer, I simply don't trust marketers. They have crossed the line too many times (now, the government must be involved in terms of privacy and governance). There are spammers, dialers and nefarious online "marketers" doing some none-to-nice things that give consumers little choice but to trust marketers less than used car salesmen and ambulance chasing attorneys. There are advertisers making claims on products that simply don't live up to the hype and, ultimately, the entire industry suffers.
Let's not mess this up any more.
If you look to a brand like Amazon, you will see something very different. All of their data capturing is used to create a more personalized user experience. There are few online revolts about Amazon's data capturing and, their consumer satisfaction levels are staggeringly high. In fact, one could argue that Amazon knows more about most of us than we would care to admit (they know where you live, where you ship to, what you have bought, looked at, reviewed, wishlisted, oh... and all of your credit card information too). Now, they are getting that much more aggressive on the media side. What was once a quiet and growing giant is about to be ready for their close-up. After six years of building the advertising platform -- which includes powerful retargeting technology (see the Advertising Age article, Amazon: The Quietest Big Ad Business In Tech Would Like Your Brand Ads, Too, from last week) -- it is becoming abundantly clear that for brands to win the new media game, they have to understand their consumer like never before.
It's hard to understand anyone if they opt out.
On April 11th, 2013, MediaPost ran a news item titled, "New App Lets Mobile Users Opt Out Of Behavioral Targeting," that featured a free iTunes app by Evidon (a privacy compliance company), which enables consumers to opt out of behavioral targeting by mobile advertising networks. From the article: "Evidon isn't the only company that is offering ways for people to opt out of mobile targeting. TRUSTe -- which also is powering some icons -- has a privacy tool that allows people to avoid receiving ads targeted based on their mobile activity."
This is where things get even more complicated. From the consumer's perspective, we need to allow them to control (or, at least, understand) who has their information and what they are doing with it. From a marketer's perspective, this is very worrisome. Over the history of time, consumers will always say that they hate advertising. If you dig beneath the surface, what they truly hate is useless, bad and non-relevant advertising. Digital media, social media and mobile marketing is finally able to deliver relevant, targeted and useful advertising to consumers, but in the worry about privacy (which is valid if you look at many of the recent hacking issues that big brands have faced), we're confusing privacy with personalization.
A Target on our backs.
Whenever the issue of behavioral targeting (or retargeting or remarketing) is brought up, everyone points to the story about the pregnant girl whose online usage led Target to send her messaging about being pregnant (and her father was none to happy about finding out this way). It's an extreme case, but it points to the lines that can be crossed when companies try to mix big data and behavioral targeted advertising without truly understanding their power. The marketing concern should always be sensitive to issues like this, but we must also be vigilant in better educating the mass population about what all of this opt out truly means.
In the end, it spells the decline or homogenization of advertising. Without knowing what consumers are doing, it means that we have to practice the old "spray and pray" model. It means that none of the ads that consumers see will be all that interesting. It means that the deepest targeting that can be accomplished is to place ads on specific sites (Web or mobile) that are relevant to the brand's target audience. We have seen how non-effective this can be by simply looking at the advertising we get on network and specialty television. The point is this: unless marketers become more transparent about how tracking is being down (and what, exactly, is being tracked), consumers are not going to trust us. They are going to opt out because they are confusing privacy with personalization, and they are going to have a less than stellar advertising experience. This is going to hurt the ad business. It is going to drive relevancy and revenue down. This is a very unique moment in time, where marketers can (if they have the intestinal fortitude) create a movement around ethics to better educate and demonstrate just how relevant, personalized and powerful a great advertising campaign can be to compliment the content it surrounds, without breaching anyone's privacy. In the end, if marketers can't demonstrate the chasm between privacy and personalization, all could be lost.
I'm hopeful consumers will ultimately understand the difference and opt out of opting out. What's your take?
Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image. HIs first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly-successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT Delete, will be in stores on May 21st, 2013.
]]>From the article: Never has there been such a gigantic volume of advertising displayed in which professional agency creative types have had so little involvement... In the agency business, those ads are largely regarded as replacements for the old classified ads that used to appear in newspapers.
Then there's the other side...
The popularity of social media over the past decade-plus has attempted to convince brands that the only way to capture attention and engagement in these highly disintermediated and media saturated environment is to make the brand as human and humane as possible. The seminal business book on this topic, The Cluetrain Manifesto (originally published in 1999) said that "markets are conversations." Through blogs, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and whatever channel you care to think of, brands could connect with consumers and engage them in these conversations and meaningful relationships. So, how is that working out? We're closing in on 13 years of social media commercialization and some brands have done spectacularly well with it, while others are struggling to find the true return on investment. What we have learned is this: social media is not advertising, nor is it a replacement for advertising. There is a complexity in creating content as an engine of media, and in figuring out how it translates into an engine of direct response. The current iteration on social media marketing is now being dubbed "content marketing," while publishers - still trying to either stop the bleeding from their traditional ad revenue or the new digital-only entrants looking to gain revenue from brands - are turning to native advertising as a potential advertising windfall. Whether it is social media, content marketing and/or native advertising, all three of these venues require a lot of hand-holding for brands. They are not silver bullets with quick and easy wins. Any form of content strategy requires time, effort and ongoing maintenance that many brands never had to endure in the mass media advertising world of yore.
Three sides to this story.  
So, on one side, we have this newish form of performance-based advertising that is highly automated and driven by technology over creativity, where speed and real-time reactions play essential factors in the brand's performance. On the other side, we have content marketing and native advertising, which is driven by content sharing, the social channels and more to create a reaction that would be similar to a blog post or a YouTube video going viral. Where does this leave the people who create the strategy, design the ads and figure out the best place to put an ad - in both the physical and digital spaces?
We live in a world where marketing pundits will publish articles titled, Customers Don't Want Ads, They Want A Conversation, but these sweeping generalities may not be reflective of this new consumer. What is abundantly clear is that advertising - as we have known it to date - slides into the middle of the publicity channel. It is no longer the 800-pound gorilla in the marketing mix. This does not spell the end of the "big idea," nor does it mean that the current slew of award-winning advertising agencies will be boarding up their doors any time soon.
What advertising becomes. 
What we do know is that the truly effective advertising agencies of the day are having to up their game in relation to technology, performance, content creation and more. While it may be easy to rattle off those terms and put a checkmark against them in a credentials deck, being able to demonstrate expertise is going to be an entirely different story. We live in a world of retargeting and remarketing where brands can better understand the user's behavior as they are being tracked throughout their regular online visits and send them ads based on the content that they have consumed and the products they have seen. Again, the vast majority of retargeting efforts rely little on creativity and much more on data and automated services. Couple that with multivariate testing and suddenly, we're in a world where hip creative directors are being positioned against ad monitoring technology that is able to create and serve the best-performing ad... regardless of how lacking it may be of creativity and a big idea.
The trick to advertising's future is going to be in how well these three stories -- automated marketing, content marketing and advertising agencies' offerings -- tell a bigger and bolder brand narrative that drives economic value.
Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image. HIs first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly-successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT Delete, will be in stores on May 21st, 2013.
]]>There are many converging forces that could lead you to believe that the skilled craft of formulating words that raises the general public's IQ, informs the world and inspires us to be more -- on many levels -- is all but fading. It turns out that we are a nation no longer interested in depth and discourse around the topics of the day, but would much prefer to share a meme that involves an obscure character from the cult classic film, The Princess Bride on Facebook than we are in sharing an article about the advancements in micro 3D printing that could lead to many massive implications in terms of both how we manufacture products and how we can improve healthcare. Sure, one of those ideas plays in the shallow end of the intellectual pool, while the other one is more for the deep-end, but it turns out that in a world of 140-characters (thank you, very much, Twitter), the vast majority of the population isn't taking advantage of all of these published words... we're much more interested in what gets a click, share, plus one, tweet, and more (and, that's not the hefty stuff).
She's so heavy.
Is it any surprise that flashy headlines and fake celebrity death memes on Twitter get so much attention? From the early days of blogging, the content that got the most clicks were the ones with the catchy headlines. Some might argue that Huffington Post banks on this type of content in a race for attention and search engine optimization. The truth is that Huffington Post is not alone. It's not only competing with the regular slew of online publishers and traditional publishers trying to figure out how the digitization of media has forced their way to rethink publishing, but they are now competing with you and I -- the new publishers of content. Can you stand back and be the consumer for just a moment? We used to live in a digital world where AOL or Yahoo acted as our homepage/gateway to the Internet. These pages were carefully crafted and edited to ensure that you would not only come back, but that you would make it your personal destination of choice. Now, we have shifted towards our own Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profile pages as our gateway to the world.
Welcome to Digital Narcissism.
In this era of digital narcissism, where our gateway to content is through the lens of the people we like and admire most, traditional and digital publishers must now grasp for attention in an even flashier way. They are no longer just competing with one another for your attention, but they're facing a most powerful adversary in the struggle for attention: your friends and acquaintances. Now, stories like, "The 10 People On Twitter You Must Follow" are competing alongside your best friend who tweets out, "you have got to check this out..." with a link to whatever it is that has caught their attention.
Who do you think wins?
It turns out that we have to be careful in these brave new times. Earlier this week, The Pew Research Center released a new report, The State of the News Media 2013 looking at the current state of American Journalism. Poynter has an excellent recap of the report with some additional insight in their news item, State of the News Media 2013 shows how industry is responding to 'continued erosion' of resources. Some key findings in the Pew Research Center are:
The silver lining.
The silver lining in these times of purgatory for traditional media may be the uptick and growth for smartphone and tablet users -- which continues to grow in readership at a strong pace -- but is struggling to find the advertising revenue that supports this model. Poynter calls the revenue for smartphones and tablets "largely a no-show." Ouch.
The bigger problem.
The idea that we're consuming content in 140 characters and driven by wild headlines is not a divergent concept in relation to the state of news media in 2013 as Pew Research Center has laid out. In fact, if you combine these two thoughts, you may find yourself staring down the barrel of a very boring gun. From the Poynter article: "The toughest news comes in the digital chapter, where Pew researchers found that the big dogs -- Google and Facebook -- have staked out the growing ad segments of mobile and video. Google is now the leader is digital display advertising as well as search. And if, as analyst Gordon Borrell and others predict, the next big thing is local advertising targeted to preferences revealed by a person's Internet choices, one has to believe Google and the others have awesome artillery in hand." For the record, Google nor Facebook employ journalists in a newsroom, do they?
Be careful of the content you consume.
If you record Charlie Rose on your DVR as a way to cleanse all that Dancing With The Stars that you're watching, imagine what your digital consumption might say about you. We are all drowning in a sea of tweets, links, status updates and more that may keep us informed of our broader social graph, but is probably not making any of us that much smarter or expanding our world view beyond our own myopic borders.
As traditional media outlets struggle to maintain a viable business model and the online publishers battle to compete for attention while generating income from the banner ads or sponsored content that they're producing, we could well find ourselves in a world where the depth and breadth of text-based content gets drowned out by everything that was just mentioned above along with the massive growth of online video, audio and more. According to the MediaPost news item, Nearly 4 Billion Minutes Of Video Ads Streamed In February: "Continuing to break records, U.S. consumers spent 3.8 billion minutes streaming video advertising in February. Consumers viewed 9.9 billion video ads, last month, with Google sites (YouTube) serving an all-time high of 2.2 billion ads, comScore found." How long do you think the average video view is on YouTube? Further proof that we're not getting too much depth?
Perhaps all this fast, free and short form content has actually changed the news consumer. Perhaps we are no longer digging deeper into issues and have taken on the speed of information exchange as the the true value? Still, it feels like something is missing. As the discourse changes and everyone publishes more and more across multiple platforms in front of different screens, we could well be at the very beginning of the end of written content as we have known it to date. If you made it this far, you may be one of the last few who want to dig a little deeper and, it may well be a good skill to start instilling in others.
Content as we know it is radically changing and adapting to a new time. Will you miss a world of long-form text?
]]>Most people interested in media, marketing and technology think of smartphones as the device that is putting the PC world to rest. Yes, personal computers are still pervasive, but the growth of smartphones has been exponential and astounding all in one breath. Because the technology has become so advanced, so quickly, we often look at what these smartphones are replacing in terms of the next generation of consumer's wants and needs, but there's something else happening as well.
Take a look at this in another other way.
On Monday, March 4, 2013, Cellular News published the news item titled, "Smartphones expected to outship feature phones for first time in 2013." From the article: "More smartphones are forecast to be shipped globally than feature phones in 2013, the first such occurrence in the mobile phone market on an annual basis. According to IDC, vendors will ship 918.6 million-smartphones this year, or 50.1 per cent of the total mobile phone shipments worldwide... By the end of 2017, IDC forecasts 1.5 billion-smartphones will be shipped worldwide, which equates to just over two-thirds of the total mobile phone forecast for the year due to these primary factors."
How the landscape shifted so quickly.
According to the article from Cellular News, the shift to smartphones at such a rapid pace is happening for many reasons:
So long to the feature phone?
For many years, mobile pundits have lauded the feature phone and developing text messaging platforms that can be used in markets that don't have the sophistication in terms of devices, networks and raw dollars to purchase these devices. As the price of smartphones continues to drop and the penetration continues to rise, it could well be not only the post-PC world that we have entered into, but the post-feature phone world as well. As those interested in mobile, smartphones and more, we often don't look at these changes in terms of how it affects the feature phone.
This is a dramatic shift. It's not a sudden shift. We will not be seeing the end of the feature phone for some time due to infrastructure, cost and more (specifically in developing nations), the change is afoot. Smartphones aren't just replacing PCs or putting an end to the feature phone. Smartphones are also showing us -- in raw power -- what exponential growth looks like. It can be scary to some. It will make others skeptical about how quickly this growth will happen. It will prove to be a massive opportunity for many smart entrepreneurs and established players. Regardless, the story of smartphones, their growth and the evolution into wearable technology is happening before our eyes, and it's a multifaceted  story that runs much deeper than how smartphones are outselling PCs.
Television, radio, print, out-of-home, Internet and mobile devices all have components of advertising that acts, smells and feels the same. It either interrupts your content experience or wraps itself around it. You can look at all of the innovations that digital brought -- from the Internet to social media and beyond -- and while many media pundits are excited about the opportunities that could happen in places like native advertising or content marketing, the form, function and factor of advertising still does the exact same thing hat it has always done. It's unlikely that this model will change, so businesses might soon be forced to figure out what happens when how consumers engage with these screens becomes a smaller component of their lives. Pushing that even further, many of the newer devices that are coming out (some with screens and some without) are making the traditional form of advertising inoperable.
What does that mean?
The current vogue of technology is not about the Internet as we have known it or a browser-based experiences. The hot topics du jour are about 3D printing, the maker movement, wearable technology, the Internet of things, connected appliances, robotics, telepresence and the ilk. None of these are truly media platforms. They are the digitization of other industries (beyond media) and in this digitalization, these things will be connected and will have screens with them (though some may not). Think about the Nest thermostat (an Internet-enabled thermostat for your home that can help you better manage your energy efficiency). Think about the Nike FuelBand or Jawbone's UP bracelet (both sit on your wrist and gather health and wellness information about your day to day activities). Think about Apple TV or Boxee (both connect you to the Web and -- if we're going to be raw about it -- provide many entertainment services that allow you to avoid traditional commercials with ease). This doesn't mean that advertising -- as we have known it to date -- goes the way of the dinosaurs. It does mean that marketers, brands and media agencies are going to have to scramble to develop newer and more interesting ways to deliver a brand's information to a consumer.
AirPlay demonstrates the disruption.
In its simplest form, Apple's AirPlay functionality allows you to throw your screen anywhere. If you're using a MacBook and have Apple TV, it's simple to toss your computer screen on to your TV screen and more. Does it seem so far-fetched that you might throw that screen over to a connected appliance like a fridge? It's not. What about tossing your phone content to your car stereo? Many consumers already do this all of the time. We currently deliver ads with the sole desire to drive an impression that creates an impact that (hopefully) makes the consumer take some kind of transaction with a brand (anything from talking about it to buying it), but as those moments become fewer and farther between, what is a brand to do?
The place to have the space.
What becomes abundantly clear as you start hacking away at the current media models and layer them on top of the emergence of wearable technology (it can be anything from Google's glasses initiative to the UP band to Pebble's watch to the pending iWatch that Apple and Samsung are rumoured to be producing) is that the space that we have traditionally used to send a message continues to change, shrink or go away. Google's AdWords still acts as a ray of hope because the company was able to devise an advertising platform that matched the media that consumers wanted to consume (in terms of context, engagement and even performance). Facebook marketing and leveraging the newsfeed is demonstrating some prowess and hope as well, but it still needs time to optimize, mature and capture consumers desire for it. To think that all of these newer and connected devices and technologies will do so as seamlessly is to have more hope for brands than I do.
What this all means.
Brands will need to not only leverage someone else's platform to deliver their message, but they will need to build platforms of their own. Transient media moments does not equal a strong and profound place to deliver an advertising message. In short, the past century may have been about maximizing space and repetition to drive brand awareness, but the next half century could well be about advertising taking on a smaller position in the expanding marketing sphere as brands create loyalty not through impressions but by creating tools, applications, physical devices, true utility, and more robust loyalty extensions that makes them more valuable in a consumer's life. It's something that the vast majority of brands could never do before, but suddenly it has become an amazing white space filled with opportunities and creativity... for those who dare.
It will be interesting to see which brands embrace media beyond the screen.
It's the time of the year when brands are glued to their social media analytics to try and decipher if the millions of dollars spent for a 30-second spot was extended, enhanced and otherwise optimized by the traction that it may (or may not) have received in the social media space.
Media planners the world over are neck-deep in Excel spreadsheets trying to show the extended reach of these spots by counting up YouTube views, tracking the numerous blog posts critiquing the line-up and drilling down into Facebook and Twitter to see which ads got the proverbial nod by getting re-tweeted, shared, commented on, plus one'd, liked, friended, followed, etc...
It's still fairly traditional, isn't it.
When marketing professionals talk up the merits of digital marketing and/or social media, there is a common trend to regress back to the traditional metrics that advertisers have been leaning on for far too long. As deep and as rich as the new analytics truly are, we're still looking at all of this dynamic media with a fairly traditional mindset. We're wondering if people noticed, saw and cared about our messages. We could spin this in a myriad of ways (by using the words like "amplification" instead of "reach"), but in the end, the majority of brands and media companies are still looking for that quick hit and big uptick in sales while making some kind of splash.
There is a new digital experience in town.
Well, it's not so much "new" as it is an "untapped reservoir of opportunity." Instead of showing things (in an ad), brands can actually do things. But, the mass majority aren't. What's a "thing"? Think about it this way: a brand can advertise on Huffington Post or a brand can create their own publishing platform like Huffington Post.
Pushing this idea further, if the future is all about a brand's ability to have a direct relationship with the customer (and yes, I believe this to be one of the major forces that will decide a brand's fate moving forward), how will that brand manage to survive if all of their media it is creating is driven through a third-party?
We live in a day and age when any brand can put a thing out there in the world. The thing could be a mobile app, a service, a publishing platform, a place to collaborate with their consumers, a true utility, a dynamic loyalty program, etc... And yet, with all of this opportunity and ability, we all sit idly by on a Sunday evening, once a year, to either applaud or lament the creative work of a brand and their representative agencies.
Don't get me wrong, I love a great ad like the next person who claims to hate advertising and skips all ads on their TV, but this is a great moment to look at all of these ads and push beyond what the sentiment was on Twitter and ask ourselves a very tough question: if it's getting harder and harder to get consumers to pay attention to our brands and convert that into a sale, what are we truly doing to connect with them? Not in an advertising kind of way, not in a "let's get them to sign-up to our email blasts" kind of way, but in a deep, meaningful and connected way.      
What does a "thing" look like.
It could be a Nike Fuelband, it could be the SitorSquat app by Charmin. The point is that some brands are pushing their marketing thinking out beyond the realm of advertising into a world where they are creating meaningful things (or, at least, attempting to make them meaningful).
For my dollar, this is the moment in time when marketing can start to truly get interesting if brands can get over themselves, tone down the narcissism and begin to think about what it means to be a brand in a world of hyper-connected and untethered consumers that are engaged with their own social graph in ways that nobody could have ever imagined (something tells me that late at night, in the darkest of nights, even Mark Zuckerburg must be amazed by what people are willing to share and connect to on Facebook).
It's not that brands and marketers are squandering this opportunity. We're just not capitalizing on it. It's hard to get out of the daily grind that is our jobs. It's hard to challenge the brands we represent to be brave and to try daring things. But, here's the thing: what were the best two ads you remember from last year's Super Bowl? Any idea? Did it roll off the tip of your tongue? Are you currently a valuable customer of theirs? Now, think about the brands that truly mean something in your world today. Is it all about their advertising or are they doing more? Amazing, isn't it? Advertising is not dead. Advertising still does the job it was always meant to do (inform a public). Let's just be sure to remember that as brands we can now actually create things. Meaningful things. Valuable things. Not just meaningful and valuable messages, but actual things that consumers would use, would share, would connect to and, who knows, maybe even pay for?
The new digital experience will be about the things that brands create. So, what are you waiting for? Start making things.    
Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image. HIs first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly-successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT Delete, will be in stores on May 21st, 2013.  
The other week, I was on a busy flight out to the West Coast. It was a cold, winter's day on the east coast and as the plane started to board, the flight attendants were already making announcements about how crowded this flight would be and where to best stow our cabin luggage. I'm one of the fortunate few that was upgraded to business class. Being able to board first, sit down, make oneself comfortable and get ready for the six-hour journey makes the long flight that much more tolerable.
As people were attempting to stuff their winter jackets away and power down their smartphones, I spotted a well-dressed business executive one row ahead in the aisle seat reading one of those For Dummies guides. You know the ones I am talking about. They make them for everything these days. From Social Media Metrics For Dummies to Weight Loss Surgery Cookbook For Dummies (and everything in between). It seems like our world is full of dummies.
I couldn't make out the title, but the form factor of the physical book and the yellow and black design of the cover was a dead giveaway. I felt somewhat embarrassed for this individual. On one hand, good for them for having the self-confidence to read a For Dummies book in public. On the other hand, I couldn't help but wonder what passengers would think as they walked by this person. Who reads a For Dummies guide in public? After decades of being in the workforce, this was my first encounter with one of these books out, in the wild... as it were.
That story was a lie.
I made that story up. The truth is that I have never, ever, seen an individual reading a For Dummies book out in public. And yet, these books have sold millions and millions of copies over the years and is one of Wiley's most popular and lucrative publishing imprints. In fact, I own a ton of these books and often find myself buying more and more as topics of interest come to mind.
That trip out west that I described above? True story. I was in Las Vegas speaking at the New Media Expo. As I was wandering through the tradeshow floor, I noticed a Wiley booth where they were selling books. They had many of the For Dummies guides on hand as well. As I was scoping the bookshelves, I came across Scrivener For Dummies. It stopped me dead in my tracks. Scrivener is a word processing software specifically designed to help writers put their books together. After writing my upcoming book, CTRL ALT Delete with it, I have no idea how I wrote my first book, Six Pixels of Separation, on Microsoft's Word.
If I ever run into someone working on a book, my first question is usually, "are you writing it with Scrivener?" As someone who didn't have the time or resources to dig deep into what Scrivener could really do, I watched a quick video tutorial and went at it. Now that book number two is off to the publisher's, I had made a note to myself to familiarize myself better with the software. Scrivener For Dummies came into my zeitgeist at just the right moment.
Don't be a dummy. 
As I was speaking to the Wiley professionals manning the booth at New Media Expo, I begun talking about all of the scenarios that I find myself in where their For Dummies guides have been helpful to me (as if I was attempting to justify why I was buying a book that most people think are just for dummies). It occurred to me, that over the years, the For Dummies guides have been an integral part of learning and development (along with everything from blogs and podcasts to more traditional business books and trade publications).
I'm often asked by individuals where they can go to acquire specific skills and knowledge about a unique topic in the new media landscape. More often than not, the For Dummies guides are the best place to start. When I am asked to speak on a specific topic or give a more formal training session, I always refer to the For Dummies guide's table of contents on the topic to ensure that I have not left out some core components. When a question comes up in a meeting about a unique feature or function of a specific type of technology or area of interest, I usually defer to my For Dummies guide when Google fails to deliver a substantive answer (which is more often than one might imagine).
This is no infomercial.
Don't worry, this is not a case of native advertising gone wrong. While the good folks at Wiley often offer me complimentary copies of their trade publications, I'm probably buying four times the value of those books for friends and business peers when I'm asked about information on a varying array of topics.
The Scrivener For Dummies book is sitting right here on my desk as I type out this column, and acts as a reference book as I manicure and stress over another long-form piece of content that I'm nursing. And, while I would probably never take one of these books with me on a flight, this book series has been my default destination to either get-to-know a topic or ensure that I have covered all of the bases.
So, while they're obviously not the coolest books to trotting around (wouldn't you much rather be seen reading Malcolm Gladwell or Susan Cain?), perhaps the time has come to change all of that and embrace the fact that we're all dummies about something. Because sometimes, the best media hack is to go back to a trusted and simple book that covers all of the basics in a way that a bunch of random articles or video tutorials on YouTube (from people whose level of experience is hard to quantify) can never fully satisfy.
Dummies unite!
Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image. HIs first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly-successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT Delete, will be in stores on May 21st, 2013. 
]]>I was driving on the highway and spotted a billboard. It was your average, run-of-the-mill type of billboard. It could have been for a local restaurant, something from the tourism council, a car dealership, or even for a bottle of fine hooch. I can't remember. We see thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of messages on any given day. Our immunity is impressive. Some want to quantify all of these message as visual pollution. There are ongoing debates, along with areas of the world that are doing their very best to either cease the placement of new billboards or completely eradicate them from the landscape, to end the constant messaging.
There is no escape.
The sad truth is that marketers have -- for decades on end -- done ourselves in. No area is safe. They have advertising in the urinals and there is advertising in the security bin where you place your shoes as you make your way through airport security. Even the media channels that you love: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and here, at The Huffington Post, there are many fine marketers behind the scenes doing everything they can to figure out how to make you, the product.
Yes, you: the product.
Tom Webster is a senior executive at Edison Research, and recently he had one of the more salient thoughts about media, marketing and communications. It was a simple line, and it goes like this: "if you do not pay for a service, you are the product they sell." We find ourselves in a world where we reject the notion of advertising on Twitter or chide Facebook for attempting to monetize their experience, and yet we -- the loyal consumers -- pay nothing for the product.
It's a paradox of epic proportions for media companies. If they charge for the service, odds are that less people will play along. This makes the advertising revenue drop, because brands and media companies are looking for as many human beings to target a message in front. But, if users -- who are getting a free service -- become inundated with advertising that isn't relevant or worthwhile, they either leave (which means "bye- bye" ads!) or stay, but do their very best to hate the brands that are disrupting their experience (which means the ads are not as effective).
For years I've recommended a more balanced and integrated approach that would blend traditional advertising with non-advertising driven marketing initiatives, coupled with the brand's new ability to tell a better story in hopes of making that message connect. What does that translate into? Real interactions between real human beings.
Advertising is not dead.
Digital advertising is still in its infancy. Imagine that highway... that billboard. Imagine an experience where whatever is shown on it is bought and sold in a very different way. Right now, this is how it's done: the out-of-home placement is booked. The advertising and media agency ensure that the creative (and production of it) is both finalized, delivered and installed.
Then, those agencies do their best to figure out the data and analytics behind the worth of that entire experience (which, to date, is primarily done by measuring the volume of traffic and correlating that to where the drivers are going based on the surrounding suburbs and businesses and then prophesying on a demographic).
We've seen some minor adjustments to this with the introduction of digital signage. It is much easier to swap creative in and out, but the rest of the process is primarily the same. All marketers are excited about real-time bidding (the ability to purchase media, in an auction-like environment, that is both fully digitized and in real-time). Think about it this way: you want to run an ad, you plug in your parameters and -- in real-time -- you can bid on and place creative in as short of a timeline as it will take you to make and upload the file. This type of engagement will, without question, come to all media channels once they are both digital and interconnected. The new network of these ads is going to make the current process seem archaic.
The Internet of things for media.
Everything is getting connected to the Internet. Not just these billboards, not just your smartphones, not just the signage at retail. Everything. From your toaster and home thermometer to your fridge and your car. As these appliances do "come online," can you even begin to imagine the media opportunities that arise from such a wealth of human information? When these connected devices understand everything from what's in your freezer to your driving trends (and are able to connect the dots), those boring billboards could (finally) come alive.
The AdWords of life. 
People don't mind Google AdWords because the message is contextual (based on the search) and it doesn't interrupt the user experience (it is above and to the side of the content you are trying to engage with, and it looks and feels the same as your search results). Brands like it for other reasons (and yes, there are some that feel that AdWords is no longer what it used to be).
Brands like it because it is pay-per-click (if no one clicks, the advertiser doesn't pay) and it's performance-driven (if not enough people ever click on the ad, Google bumps you off). This constant, real-time refinement of messaging has not only created an entire new industry within the marketing industry, it has also shed a light on what other media channels can do. If they are brave enough. If they invest in technology, If they truly understand and respect their consumer (and their privacy). If they take the time to innovate on the creative and how the story can unfold across multiple media channels. If only...
There's a lot of "if" in there.
What will be the breaking news coming out of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) this week from Las Vegas? The major hype that the CNN's of the world will focus on, may be self-driving cars or a thinner TV for your den, but the real story will be how many devices will suddenly become connected. Not just to the consumer, but to one another. And that, my dear media hackers, is going to create a whole new industry that is going to make things more exciting than they have ever been for marketers. We're at a point in time where social media, content marketing and more will blur away into the world of context through connected devices and individuals. Creepy? Yes. Opportunity to get it right? Absolutely.
So, how do you think the marketing industry is going to respond?
Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image -- an award-winning digital marketing agency. HIs first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly-successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT Delete, will be published on May 21st, 2013.
]]>Whether you're watching a panel discussion at the Cannes Lion or reading an article in AdWeek, the majority of the discourse revolves around three things:
Sure, there are nuances. Some agencies will talk about the brand's ability to truly allow the agency to spread their wings, then there's the heated discussion over important details like the casting and time spent on the copy.
I was walking through the shopping mall and came across a perfume store. The main advertising in the window was Chanel No 5. It was a massive headshot of Brad Pitt with a small Chanel bottle in the bottom right corner. I just laughed.
Much has been written about the TV commercials and advertising following Chanel's decision to use Brad Pitt as their spokesperson (the first male to be chosen for this particular perfume brand). Even more has been written and created surrounding the somewhat laughable debut commercial featuring Brad Pitt.
Is it true that the ultimate insult was delivered by Saturday Night Live, when the late-night live television sketch comedy and variety show decided to parody the commercial by actually running it as is? They figured, nothing could be funnier that what Chanel No. 5 considered to be a legitimate form of advertising.
The point of laughing.
This isn't about being overly critical of a brand or a choice of spokesperson or advertising creative and more. I laughed as I passed this point-of-purchase advertisement, because it occurred to me that what makes great advertising -- in it's entirety -- is the right fit. That's what makes advertising so hard, so random and so challenging.
The right fit isn't just about the right face for the right product, it's about everything. From the start: is the brand and agency the right fit? Are the team members the right fit? Is the strategy the right fit for the brand? Is the creative the right fit for the strategy? Does the media buy fit? You get the idea.
How often do you think about the right fit?
Media professionals have a million excuses when a campaign fails. "Fit" is sometimes mentioned in the excuses, but not frequently enough. As we all head off into the holidays, take a break, regroup and come back in January with a new zeal to do better and more remarkable work in marketing. It would be well-advised to spend some time during this break to think about whether or not you have the right fit -- in each and every thing that you are doing.
This doesn't mean to start from scratch, and it also doesn't mean that you can't, through the power of effective conversation, stir things into a more productive relationship. What it does mean is that great ideas, luck and managing a budget become somewhat arbitrary when you have the right fit.
Chanel No. 5 probably has some thinking to do about whether this deal with Brad Pitt produced the results that they anticipated. My guess is that your brand probably has some thinking to do as well, in terms of drilling down into the work to make sure that you have the right fit across the board.
Now, over to you: is there anything more important than the right fit when it comes to your marketing?
Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image -- an award-winning digital marketing agency. HIs first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly-successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT Delete, will be in stores on May 21st, 2013.
By all accounts, it is already happening. When Tim Cook (CEO at Apple) took the stage in the company's first post-Steve Jobs product launch to announce the iPad 2 in 2011, Cook's staggering statistic was that the iPad had already outsold all of the desktop and laptops sold by their competitors in the previous quarter. That piece of data still holds true as Apple currently has the fourth generation iPad in-market.
Beyond the tablet, smartphones have also been steadily outselling desktop and laptop computers as well. While no media pundit is quite sure when (or if) the "year of mobile" happened, we are in the era of the smartphone. Beyond patent debates and legacy OEM manufacturers struggling to keep up, Apple and Android have set a furious pace as brands like Amazon, RIM, Microsoft and others continue to evolve from a personal computer business into a smartphone/tablet offering. It seems like we're moments away from the computer becoming an appliance as the smartphones and tablets become the remote controls for our lives.
The question is this: how long will this last?
Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, can often be found about town wearing his Google Glasses (aka Project Glass). While still in the prototype phase, the promise of Project Glass is a wearable (and highly portable) pair of glasses that gives the user a heads-up display to help connect them to their digital content while blending the information that they're seeing live and in-the-moment with Internet knowledge. Imagine things like taking pictures or seeing directions not by looking at a screen, but by simply seeing it in front of your face without distraction. Imagine being at a holiday party and being able to connect the face of someone whose name you should know to not only their contact information, but their entire social feed.
Sounds creepy? Most new technology does.
What will Apple do next? What is the technology that will disrupt the iPhone and iPad business? If you have read Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography (and I strongly recommend that you do), there was a very telling (and compelling) line from Jobs: "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." Do you believe that Apple will now let Google take the lead in the future of connectivity? Do you think they're going to let Samsung, Nokia or even Microsoft leap ahead? You can be certain that deep within the industrial design studios of Jonathan Ive on Apple's corporate campus lies advanced prototypes of technology that either resembles or trumps Project Glass.
Things are about to get weirder as science fiction becomes reality.
You may be moaning that you would never wear a stupid looking pair of glasses that has you blinking, twitching and speaking to activate commands and information. Odds are that you never thought you would need email on the go, a fax machine or any other form of technology until everybody else started using it. Can we clearly point to something like Google's Project Glass and proclaim the end of the smartphone? Not yet, but it may not be as long off into the future as you suspect.
On December 3rd, 2012 Business Insider ran a blog post titled, "Apple Is Quietly Working To Destroy The iPhone," that points to Apple's penchant for wearable technology mixed with some patent fillings from the summer that Apple calls a, "head-mounted display" or "HMD." From the article: "...computers have been getting smaller and closer to our faces since their very beginning. First they were in big rooms, then they sat on desktops, then they sat on our laps, and now they're in our palms. Next they'll be on our faces."
The end of touch?
We went from controlling technology with keyboards, a mouse and buttons to touch in a flash of the eye. As touch continues to be the focus of smartphones and tablets, perhaps the introductions of technologies like Siri and Xbox's Kinect are really where we should spending more of our attention.
The problem, of course, is that should wearable technology that is enabled and enhanced by Siri and Kinect-like technologies become the norm, marketers are (pardon the expression) screwed. As smartphones and tablets take hold with more of the population, marketing professionals are struggling to figure out how to transpose advertising and marketing messages in a succinct and successful way.
To date, there are no clear winners in the realm of mobile marketing. Everything is still up for grabs. Just imagine what that could look like once wearable technology over-takes the smartphone and tablet. Many won't even begin to think about this because they believe the event horizon is too far off in the distance. If history (and technology) has taught us anything, it could happen tomorrow. Welcome to the era of exponential growth in business, technology and marketing.
Could the end of the smartphone also spell the end for digital advertising?
Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image -- an award-winning digital marketing agency. HIs first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly-successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT DEL, will be published in Spring 2013.
]]>A friend recently told me that he's nervous about Apple and their ability to deliver products that people can't get enough of. It seems like a ridiculous statement, doesn't it? Then again, one look at your investments and you may think otherwise. The speed with which our world now lives could well put an end to the world of iconic brands. Before all of this connectivity, a great brand could stand the test of time. Books like Built To Last by Jim Collins created blueprints for a company that could last forever. Investment advisors would have you invest your money in companies for the long haul. How often have you sat down with a financial planner and they spoke about investing in a company for over 20 years? It wasn't that long ago, that this type of thinking made rational and frugal sense.
It now seems like insanity.
Do you think Apple will continue to be as strong, powerful and resilient in 20 year's time? Ask the folks at RIM (BlackBerry) what that type of event horizon now feels like. Does it make any sense that Kodak implodes around the same time that Instagram is bought by Facebook for one billion dollars (give or take a buck or two)?
Do we think that Chrysler will have what it takes to be relevant in 20 years? It's easy to chalk up the brand disasters that we have see to poor management or a lack of innovation, but at a macro level it just seems like the pendulum is swinging with faster momentum. From a media perspective, we all know that what's hot today may well be cold tomorrow. From a Twitter perspective, what's hot right now may be cold before dinner.
An over-dramatization to make a point.
Sure, Apple could still be relevant in 20 years and yes, Facebook may very well be the place where we're all connected, but the ability for a brand to have a enduring legacy looks less likely as the speed with which consumer interest evolves. As media people, this is a trend that should both fascinate and terrify us. It gives room for new and interesting players (fascinating) while killing off brands we would consider iconic in short order (terrifying). So, this raises two important question:
A brand has value... today.
Perhaps we have to re-imagine (to steal turn of phrase from Tom Peters) how we define value in the now economy. Perhaps we have to agree (and accept) that the brand of today may not be the brand of tomorrow and prescribing value can't be done by looking 20 years into the future, because the pace of change and disruption is increasingly happening faster and faster.
We can all admire the work that brands like Apple, Starbucks, Red Bull and more have created and continue to nurture, but perhaps these brands will disappear into our ether, having been relevant for a brief moment in history. What this could mean is that more and more brands fill these voids over less and less time. So, will memory serve or fail us in terms of brand perception?
The Beatles were iconic. Some may argue that Nirvana was iconic too. Do you believe that any of the musicians today that we admire will be able to leave this kind of legacy? As "Gangnam Style" becomes the most viewed video of all time on YouTube, do we believe that Psy becomes an iconic brand, a one hit wonder or just an indicator that the world of iconic brands may have seen their final days? Why not prescribe that same kind of thinking to business? Perhaps a great run for a company that lasts a decade or two won't qualify them for iconic status.
The end of iconic brands.
When I think about the end of iconic brands -- which I believe will become a reality -- I realize that with it, comes a natural thought that this means we cannot invest too deeply in a company's future. This, is where the true rub lies. This type of thinking (no matter how salient or foolish) spells a very scary story for the stock market. Not the stock market of today that is littered with high speed algorithms making most of the trades happen in milliseconds, but for the true stock market of tomorrow that is counting on the rise of the iconic brands for the wealth of nations.
What do you think? Will our future have iconic brands or simply a mass of companies that made good money during a short period of time?
Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image -- an award-winning digital marketing agency. HIs first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly-successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT DEL, will be published in Spring 2013.