I'll try to critique this shortly, but I did want to get it up on the blog so I didn't forget about it!
Imagine this: While pushing a shopping cart through your local market, the cart's talking LCD screen points out products that might interest you.
Or this: Instead of buying a magazine at the nearest newsstand, you get it through your computer printer -- a bound, personalized edition, with ads tailored to your interests.
Or this: You're strolling down the street, and a billboard addresses you by name using RFID (radio frequency identification) technology to target you. (Yea, this is just what people want -- DBP)
This is the wave of the future, a future glimpsed in pictures such as 2001's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" and 2002's "Minority Report" that appears to be quickly becoming a reality. Indeed, Geoffrey Meredith, president of the consulting firm Lifestage Matrix Marketing, says some of the futuristic advertising concepts presented in those movies are already being tested by clients of his in the Chicago market.
Whichever of these concepts makes it through to the broader public, one thing is certain: Advertising as we know it will be radically different in the years to come.
"In the 10- to 15-year time frame, marketers are going to increasingly rely on brain-scanning imagery and neuromarketing," says Michael Schrage, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab's E-Markets Initiative. "We are also going to be seeing gene markers of the sort used to spot a propensity for cancer or heart disease and used to create databases to ascertain things like shyness or extroversion. And we are going to see market segmentation done on biological, neurological and evolutionary-psychological bases."
More immediately, staples like the 30-second commercial might cease to exist altogether. That is the belief of Joseph Jaffe, author of "Life After the 30-Second Spot," who cites two marketing trends likely to become increasingly important in the near future: advertising-on-demand and behavioral targeting.
"Advertising-on-demand is fully commission-based, self-selected advertising, where the consumer plays an active role in the targeting of a certain quota of advertising," he says.
In other words, says Jaffe: "Let's say you are looking to buy a car. You go to your Web, telephone and television -- which will all be connected -- and indicate, 'I am looking to buy a car in the next two to three months,' (while also naming) a brand or pedigree subset. Now in the hour you're watching (ABC's) 'Desperate Housewives' or whatever, you will be exposed to a disproportionate amount of auto advertising. And the more information you volunteer about yourself, the more likely you are to be exposed to the right ad at the right place."
These personalized experiences will reshape film and entertainment marketing in significant ways, Meredith says, noting that the future of successful marketing of anything lies in the ability of marketers to achieve depth -- the distance down a telescoping chain of communications a consumer will drill to learn about a product -- and duration -- the amount of time a person will devote to absorbing the content of an ad.
As it happens, both are "related to the salience of thematic content; that is, how big a role will the film play in a person's life," Harrison Group vice chairman Jim Taylor says. "When content relates to the experience and emotional predisposition of a consumer and his reference group, or 'tribe,' people will communicate with one another about what they have heard. That buzz factor thereby increases depth; they will spend more time with the content. An entertainment product becomes a point of reference within the circle of communicants that serves to reinforce their sense of connection and their sense of self," Taylor explains. This process, which he terms "socio-commercial," "is the key advantage to interactive, electronic-marketing strategy."
Jaffe's second notion, behavioral targeting, follows along the lines of current Internet ads, where advanced technology tracks a consumer's interests and helps target advertising specifically for that person, through all media -- whether cable, computer or the broadcast networks.
That, of course, is assuming these media even exist. Meredith, for one, believes the major networks will no longer be around in their current form 10 or 15 years from now, a shift that is likely to have an enormous impact on advertising.
"The commercial broadcast networks as we know them will be gone," he says, "simply because the economic model that has supported them since the beginning of television -- which is advertising -- is going away."
TiVo-like devices will be responsible for this, Meredith adds. "As everything moves to a digital footing, everyone will have the capability of fast-forwarding and pausing and rewinding -- everyone will have DVRs -- and the viewer will be totally in control of what he chooses to watch. Viewers will watch what they want, when they want."
Given that they will have the freedom to skip commercials, "The networks, which rely on advertising to pay for their programming, aren't going to have that revenue source," Meredith says.
Additionally, the networks are losing revenue to kids "locked into their digital cockpits playing video games, watching DVDs, IMing their, on average, 43 best friends, talking with their roughly two-dozen best friends and living in a new media world that fits in the palm of their hand," Taylor says. Web sites (see Xanga and its cousins, for example), blogs (now more than 60 million of them), pods and, more recently, "phlogs" (the Harrison Group's term for cellular blog communities) are all on the rise. In the battle for time, movies also are losing mind share.
How will traditional media handle this? One expert puts forth the possibility that content in the future might be available in two forms: either as paid entertainment without advertising or as free entertainment if the consumer agrees to watch the ads with technological controls on home-entertainment devices that prevent fast-forwarding.
Hence, "You could watch (Fox's) 'American Idol' for free by also watching a Coke commercial, or you could skip the commercial and pay 50 cents to your cable company," the expert says.
Even if commercials do continue in this manner, the firmest defenders of the status quo agree that the current format of a group of five to eight commercials will disappear.
This will partly be in response to the arrival of "switched" television -- that is, TV programming that comes over a line, where one program is ordered at a time. With no need to sit and wait for the next program to begin, there will be room for at most one commercial, which audiences will accept because "it is not worth the effort to skip it," Meredith says.
Without being able to depend on network commercials, how will advertisers reach buyers? Experts expect new or expanded media -- ranging from TV screens on everything from the microwave to the fridge, to electronic billboards that can change their ads at will -- to play an increasingly important role in the future.
They also expect digitization to hold additional benefits for advertisers. Already, advertisers can place "cookies" that evaluate a consumer's likes and dislikes by following their Internet activity. Amazon.com uses cookies to make product recommendations. In the future, these will allow a much closer link between advertising/sales and the buyer.
