It's all going to be lost

The internet is almost 20 years old

Just under 30% of the entire population of the earth is hooked into it

All those people have pumped unfathomable amounts of effort and creativity into it… information, content, ideas, tools, services, art, science… you name it, it’s online.

It’s changed our world and how we live our lives by providing a whole new reality and environment

But none of it is real and the thing that amazes and enthralls us today, will have vanished without a trace by tomorrow

Sure various types of data persist, but eventually if someone severs the connection… it’s gone.

The creativity of the past is treasured in galleries and museums, our ancestor’s innovations are resurrected from the earth and marveled at, even the mundane records of our daily lives warrant a more permanent presence… but what of all the online brilliance, creativity and ingenuity? That incredible site, that fantastic new tool, that indispensible new service or community… how can we make the day they are superseded, which they all will be, from also being the day they are lost to history?

That’s why I love this idea: http://www.storyworldwide.com/digital-archaeology/

Meet the 'New Info Shopper'

This article is merely stating the obvious but it's good to have on record for any clients needing the facts.


New Info Shoppers
By MARK PENN thanks to WSJ

With so much attention on psychological marketing these days -- finding new ways to tap into people's heads -- perhaps the single most neglected trend out there is the move towards more hard-nosed information-based shopping and purchasing.

While elites were busy shoveling money into Madoff's black box these past few years, strapped consumers have been poring over product spec sheets, third-party reviews and expert blog sites. This past holiday season they watched every dollar. A special kind of consumer has taken a major role in the marketplace -- the new info shopper. These people just can't buy anything unless they first look it up online and get the lowdown.

These shoppers have the Internet at work, typically hold information-based or office-park jobs, have some college or grad school, and are often making ends meet with two jobs, kids, and pets on a middle or upper-middle-class income.

Forget about huge, sweeping megaforces. The biggest trends today are micro: small, under-the-radar patterns of behavior which take on real power when propelled by modern communications and an increasingly independent-minded population. In the U.S., one percent of the nation, or three million people, can create new markets for a business, spark a social movement, or produce political change. This column is about identifying these important new niches, and acting on that knowledge.

They have become highly suspicious of many TV ads: in a shoppers survey we did, 78% of them said that ads no longer have enough information they need. So many of them search online for virtually everything. Window shoppers have become "Windows shoppers." They want, in the phrase often attributed to Dragnet's Joe Friday, "just the facts, ma'am."

Of course, there is still a healthy role for big emotional brand appeals and mega-advertising campaigns. For every trend there is a counter trend. But that's not the real new thing in consumer behavior.

A whopping 92% of respondents said they had more confidence in information they seek out online than anything coming from a salesclerk or other source. They believe the information they find, not in the information that is spoon-fed to them, and the vast number of clicks today prove that they really are devoting time and energy to ferreting out detailed info before they buy.

A good example of how information can transform a marketplace is the series of ads a few years ago for the Dyson vacuum cleaner. Founder and inventor James Dyson took a commonplace item and explained how he had transformed it with new scientific principles. Consumers weren't bored with the technical approach. On the contrary, sales took off -- and changed the marketplace for vacuum cleaners.

When we asked shoppers whether they would do online research before buying a vacuum cleaner today, a surprising 58% said that's exactly what they would do. His ads helped turn vacuum-cleaner buying into a largely information-based marketplace.

We have seen many of the big market areas convert to an information-driven model -- cars, homes, personal computers and medical care are areas where nearly 4 in 5 shoppers say they gather information on their own from the Web before buying. "Do-it-yourself doctors" (that is, info patients) show up at their doctor with the Web-derived diagnosis in hand, and a list of the medicines they need prescribed. Customers appear at the car dealership with the wholesale price and the model already picked out.

Information-seeking is not just an activity, it's a way of looking at the world. New info shoppers are proud of the progress they have made in putting facts over pablum. More companies should treat their customers as Dyson did and let them in on the secrets of their unique success. And they should invest more than ever in helping form their consumers into citizen corps, arming them with PCs, cameras and even asking them to use the phone's new video cameras to document their product usage and put them online.

But how many marketers today work back from what this new consumer is thinking and doing? Not many. Based on the advertising budgets in the U.S. where a typical company will spend 60 times as much on advertising than they spend on generating publicity, most lag way behind in creating a new model of consumers and the steps they take before they buy.

Some industries got it right away. Movies and restaurants have huge word of mouth and impulse components, but they are also very information-driven. Zagat's pioneered the concept of survey ratings and reviews, and smart restaurants use them. We're seeing the same in entertainment, where Metacritic and others provide professional and customer ratings of every movie.

Now this trend is spreading down the product chain. In our survey, 24% said they are doing online research before buying shampoo. The Breck Girl is being replaced by a shopping bot.

And they have questions. How does this shampoo work on different hair types, thicknesses and colors? Are the bottles recyclable? Has the product been tested on animals?

It used to be that the only time people expected 30-page, pre-purchase, inspection reports was when they were buying a house. Now some people want them just to buy a tube of toothpaste.

The point is that advertising isn't just moving to the Web, it's got to grapple with an entirely new kind of shopper and way of shopping. Marketers now have to balance traditional media, online media, and content that is generated by experts, bloggers and consumers themselves. An astonishing 70% of Americans now say they consult product reviews or consumer ratings before they make their buying decisions. Sixty-two percent say they spend at least 30 minutes online every week to help them decide what and whether to buy. Among Americans under 45, that number shoots up to 73%. Seventy-three percent -- that's more than four times the percentage in that age group who go to church every week. For some, smart shopping is more than a hobby. It's a religion.

Information aggregation sites – the ones that don't generate content themselves, but link to others' content, weaving a story about the industry and its products -- will become even more important. Much as the Drudge Report tells its readers where to find stories they will like, so consumer aggregation sites could grow and do the same for car buyers, PC buyers, and other consumer groups. Most of the sites so far have been too cheesy to really catch on.

Information shopping also means manufacturers have to get back to generating more information on their products, even offbeat factoids that are highly memorable if not always useful. Timex sold a lot of watches by showing its watches were still ticking after being thrown into a washing machine. To catch the eye of the info-shopping consumer, manufacturers should start hauling their wares up to Mt. Everest, drop them out of windows, put them in boiling water and reporting on how they do. In an info-seeking world, facts can again become the great differentiator.

New Info Shoppers are bigger than a microtrend. They represent a broad shift in the marketplace brought about by the Internet, higher education, and changing economic times. But the question is when is the marketplace is going to really catch up to them.

Image thanks to: http://informedbuying.net/computer_shopcart.JPG

Digital technologies that will change how you market

By Matthew Klein thanks to iMediaConnection for helpful listings on tomorrow's technologies.

We know that tomorrow's media will be digitally integrated, but what will that media entail? Get the inside view on the next wave of digital media opportunities.

Steve Ballmer predicts that in 2015, there will be no media that is not IP-enabled. In other words, 10 years down the road, there will be no distinction between "traditional" and "digital" when it comes to media.

In this future world, I predict that much of the planning of media will remain the same. There will still be a human side to the equation of planning and negotiation. It is the stewardship that will evolve beyond the tear sheet reporting of traditional media and into the action and behavior tracking of the digital media today.

Print goes digital

Many people in the media believe they are currently witnessing the swan song of the newspaper industry. However, the combination of the advancements in e-paper and the proliferation of ubiquitous Wi-Fi leads me to believe that the newspaper industry will experience a resurgence -- once the term "paper" is redefined through electronics, that is.

Consider that major companies such as LG Phillips, Bridgestone (QR-LPD), Fujitsu (Clerk Browser and Fabric PC), Siemens (color flexible displays for packaging), Samsung (carbon nanotube based e-paper) and even Hearst (FirstPaper) are all moving rapidly towards the development of thin, LCD screens that will one day be flexible enough to roll into one's back pocket. While on the morning commute, people will consume news from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times or the The Chicago Tribune with the click of a button, all wirelessly transmitted via ubiquitous Wi-Fi networks.

Outdoors gets more interactive

The future of outdoor advertising will also be digital, and thus interactive, according to a presentation, which profiles technology from a company called Catchyoo. Catchyoo is in the "interactive out of home" space, like Reactrix and Bubbloo. It provides not only outdoor interactivity products, but back-office scheduling and remote management software that allows for mass distribution to multiple locations simultaneously. This creates a new media business model for outdoor advertising akin to the way we distribute ads on the web today.

Another example of the digital shift in outdoor comes from Inwindow Outdoor and their Interactive Storescapes. With the ability for people to interact with the outdoor advertisement via motion, speech or Bluetooth, the day will come when media companies are being asked to report on the engagement time, downloads or views generated by their outdoor media buy.

Radio plays

Now, consider the evolution of radio. You've probably seen the Ford Sync commercials profiling technology that is powered by Microsoft Auto. Ford Sync is a voice-activated mobile phone and digital music system for your car. With digital music, the technology is currently taking advantage of what is essentially an in-dash MP3 player or MP3 player plug-in. But with interactive radio, there may come a day that you get into your car and plug a memory card into the dash of your vehicle. As you are driving along, you hear a song you like, but the artist is not announced. With two-way digital radio (check out U.S. Patent # 6990312) and the interactive voice response capabilities that you find in Ford Sync and OnStar, you may simply say "song information" and your radio will read the metadata (yes, as I said in my last article, the word "geek" will be applied to media of the future like never before) from the digital broadcast signal and tell you the artist, title and album. You then say "bookmark" and this information is stored on your SD card for later retrieval.

Translate this capability into the advertising world and you get a scenario much like online marketing today. A commercial comes on the radio, which may be behaviorally, contextually or geographically targeted, and you say "bookmark" because you want to check out the service or product at a later time. The advertising information is stored on your memory card and you continue on your day. Later, you plug your memory card into your home media hub (today's IP-enabled game console) and the day's requested follow-ups are presented in some sort of browse-able format. If we continue the trend we are on today, the advertisement was served via an ad-server with digital radio ad-serving capabilities, so the media company that placed the ad has the ability to report on the number of "listenings," "bookmarks" and "conversions" for a given spot. Forgive the "listening" and "bookmarks" metric term assumptions -- these are to be figured out by the IABs and Web Analytics Associations of the world at a later date.

The new TV

Television has been the medium that is most often referenced when discussing the convergence of IP-based technology and media. Given the technical and adoption hurdles required to implement the digital outdoor, digital print and digital radio visions previously mentioned, interactive TV is also the nearest to becoming a reality.

Cox Communications, Comcast and Time Warner are already experimenting with nascent forms of this in key markets, and are expected to begin implementing targeted, on-demand and personalized forms of advertising through their systems in 2010. Personal TV: The Reinvention of Television is a great whitepaper from Forrester on this topic. Needless to say, one day television advertising will also be targeted, interactive and measurable.

With this future vision in mind, it is clear to see that web standards are becoming advertising standards. The language of online media marketing today is the language of the media marketing of tomorrow.

In my last iMedia article, I discussed how crucial it is that the major components of digital media marketing (online display, email, organic and paid search, mobile and web analytics) must be integrated. It is equally crucial that the digital and the traditional media be planned and managed in an integrated fashion. Today we recognize this because of scenarios such as measuring the traffic of a print or TV ad based on a special URL, ensuring that our paid search is aligned with our offline advertising or measuring the cross-media effectiveness of our whole campaign. But it is even more crucial that traditional and digital is integrated because entrepreneurs and engineers are working diligently to ensure that tomorrow's media will all be digitally enabled.