The glass chin of the digital world was dealt such a vicious blow in 2009 that the most responsible thing to do is to take the 2010 count and get up with some chance of finishing the fight. So rather than talk in detail about exciting developments that are still on the horizon (and there are plenty of those), I want to spend some time focusing on the things that should have been developed in 2009 that will be practical for 2010.
A boxing analogy seems most fitting for the so called ‘digital’ advertising world in 2009. Like any up and coming boxer who’s worth is being realised and tested, the mismatch of digital opportunity against the economic crisis was a painful 12 month bout. 2009 held a lot of promise for digital advertising. Unfortunately, not a lot of those promises were delivered. Some promises were broken because people underestimated the impact of the global credit crunch, with a few agencies spending a lot of time on the ropes as the blows continued to rain down. For some this exercise in self preservation was almost fatal. A few notable agencies took the challenge head on and were determined to invest in the good digital fight.
2009 seemed to be the year of large scale illness and death, including but not limited to the suspicious deaths of pretty much everyone I ever saw on tv, film or heard on the radio growing up. (Frustratingly, this celebrity plague skipped the likes of the never funny Carlos Mencia and Dane Cook, the untalented Pete Doherty and the entire neighbourhood of Big Brother houses.) Or maybe it seemed that way because now that people are finally tweeting in decent numbers the human desire of being the bearer of any news found its ultimate platform in the form of Twitter et al.
So here is my list of what we should still try to do this year:
GPS and Realtime Locations. 2010 will be the year that websites, (i)phone apps, desktop/tv widgets, mobile campaigns get real down and dirty with WHERE you are. There was a little of this that tied in closely with Augmented Reality apps but what we saw is the tip of the ice-berg. In 2010, applications will have to be portable and cross-platform ready and relevant to where precisely you are. Services using geo-targeted coordinates will rely less on bulky hardware and instead smart programming will come to the rescue in map applications used in conjunction with visual data from camera-phones.
Web-Video. Stickam. Forget Youtube and Veoh and Metacafe recorded videos is so 2009. Realtime socially networked video content and Stickam is set to flourish. A few wrinkles need ironing out with content moderation, but if you don’t know what it is, you should try it out. Applications for this technology include live connections with your favourite gigs and stickam enabled tv shows that allow you to throw a stickam up on your iPhone or facebook page to show people where and what you are up to in all its gristly glory.
Crowd Sourcing. A lot of very worried advertising people are going to realise that the clients are more than able and willing to send work to whomever gets it done. Sans the glorious offices, lunches and celebratory bottles of Krug. Not that this will replace advertising agencies, not at all. I do expect a lot of flexibility being introduced to contracts especially where the agency is sending stuff out and ‘whitelabelling’ it as their own anyway. Eugh, ‘whitelabelling’.
Death of White-labelling If you can’t do something and get someone else to do it then just admit it. There is no shame in acknowledging the hard work of those partners who do the work that you say you can do and win awards for you and your clients, TV has been honest about this for years and if digital fails to adopt that transparency it will fast make fools of the countless new Chief Digital Officers. It wont die quickly but at the risk of being found out agencies will have to revamp their supplier relationships in 2010. At the risk of the clients doing it for them.
Web Enabled TV technology? The invitations from Intel and Yahoo were sent out and we are actively working on a few ingenious application for Internet enabled TV sets. To recap; You know how your mac has a cool dashboard widget? Well that technology exists and might already be built into your television. Intel and Yahoo are pairing up to finally deliver tasteful content presented in a slick way. Now we just need some progressive clients to encourage agencies to come up with some practical and relevant uses for it.
New Player! Surge in low cost high quality suppliers. People will be pinching pennies to keep costs down, expect a flood of new specialists that offer bespoke solutions. Honorable mention to Campbell and Lace’s Beta. Beta is already starting to feel like the advertising agency of the future. They have accepted that things aren’t set in stone and that in order to get it right you have to be open to getting it wrong. Old School advertising smarts with a New School DNA. Beta. I expect a lot of people will take a leaf out of Beta’s book this year.
Get your Sh*t together. People will not want to spend time and effort learning any new social networking services that do not automatically collate their social networking past. LinkedIn, Naymz, Facebook start looking indecipherable. Specialist, invitation only social networks like A Small World, WIYO, start to contract, some disappear completely.
Was it good for you? Demographics and user profiling will be scrutinized as it becomes apparent that people online are open to absolutely anything relevant. Traditional marketing personas and profiles will be almost redundant as we realize that online behaviour is affected and unnatural. Digital Years (kind of like dog years) of experience will determine online behavior of users more than traditional age groups.
Keep Out! With so much of our lives in cyberspace, consumers will demand more rigor in privacy and security beyond the browser. The good news is that the payoff is a far more robust and personalized experience. Once people get comfortable with the idea that they need to divulge certain peices of their private life, they will be rewarded with a more relevant experience. Smart apps and Predictive technology will start to become less clunky and open the doors to better quality engagement. 2009 will be the year that people demand customization, a specifically targeted experience that lets you cherry pick what you want and lets you ignore the rest. The illusion of not being advertised to.
It costs how much!? Transparency and Procurement. It will not be demanded it will be expected this year. If you are not working in an open way, expect pain by analysis. Slow approvals and subsequently affected work. Everything from what you do to how you do it and charge for it. Everything. This is not a bad thing, it will force latent organizations to enforce efficiency and due diligence. Simply put, you wont be able to bullshit your way around explaining why a competitor can do twice the work for half the price that looks better. Good.
Small is beautiful. Again. To accommodate the screens of mobile and notebook technology there will need to be more compact creative. Not a website that has been simplified to run on an iphone, but a specific, relevant and rewarding design for the mobile screen space. While desktop screen sizes increase, mobile saturation means that the smaller screen size is way more accessible this year and needs to be designed for accordingly. This needs to be addressed in 2010. It’s ludicrous what little bespoke design exists for the mobile space which is only set to gain market share.
Social Commentary. The overwhelming majority of people will continue to trust their peers over advertisers. The implications of this on attitude shift marketing will be monumental, as user generated content will get better and with it will come even more credibility. Blogs, Twittering will become less annoying as people turn to them for quality information and informed opinion. Fauxlogs - by which I mean Fake blogs by companies that attempt to humanize and get digi with it for their audience - will get better. This was my initial take on what became Crowd Sourcing but I do believe the two are slightly different.
Death of Digital. I will continue to petition for an alternative word to digital but like all things annoying it’s become the mainstay. The focus now is to at least get people speaking the same language. Instead of considering it to be a group, or a discipline if we treat ‘Digital’ as if it were a language we can have people from different disciplines who are fluent in ‘Digital’ having normal conversations about things other than definition. Kudos to B-Reel for getting the ball rolling on standardisation. When we are talking about various aspects of ‘Digital’ production and deliverables how refreshing would it be to all have the same word for ‘rich’. This impacts recruitment as well, I have heard repeatedly from frustrated MD’s that want to know where all the ‘Digital’ talent is. The truth is they are everywhere and they are natives, the generation that doesn’t need to read up on the benefits of social networking because all their social interactions are networked digitally as part of who they are. This generation is where your Account Men/Producers and Creatives/Technologists come from. Trying to retrofit the legacy guys with a new way of thinking will work as an exception but expect reluctance, insecurity and painful transitions without a few natives to help guide the way.