a #TheFutureByDesign feature by Jarred Cinman. An article published in Newsweek exactly 20 years ago made the rounds recently, thanks to its brave, but wildly wrongheaded predictions about the internet. Amongst its many claims were things such as “no online database will replace your daily newspaper” and “These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training.”
Nowadays, the newspaper is already a living fossil. And schoolrooms — at least those that can — have transformed into multimedia centres. So much for predicting the future.
The future of internet advertising is no more clear now than the future of the internet was in 1995. However, there are some trends that are important to track, and failing to do so will leave a brand out in the wilderness in years to come.
Here are two.
Data-driven advertising
Marketing’s most profound shift is from planned advertising to computed advertising. We have already seen this revolution’s early forces marshaled by the likes of Google and Facebook, and by endless ad networks and automated buying platforms.
In brief, these technologies take the manual labour and guesswork about placing your ad in front of the people who need to see it. By collecting and processing huge amounts of data about users, and using matching algorithms to find ads they are most likely to engage with, programmatic platforms not only place ads dynamically but charge efficiently for those ads. This is a boon for advertisers who, in theory, only pay when their ad finds its audience.
Most radical at the moment are systems which dynamically create or modify the ad itself – to appeal to different user profiles or to tease out which version of a message is most successful. Horrifying as this is to agency creatives, there is evidence that this kind of agile advertising works.
Internet of everything
At its most basic, the internet is just a way to connect computers so that they can share data. It’s not this definition which is shifting but the definition of what a computer is. Today, it’s a desktop, laptop, tablet and phone. But it is rapidly becoming a watch, a fridge, a sprinkler system, a light bulb and a car. It will eventually become pretty much everything – it is hard to imagine an object or creature in the future that wouldn’t benefit, in some way, from being plugged in.
That is not science fiction. A casual search online for internet-connected devices will reveal a surprising number of products already being mass produced. (The catch-phrase, in case you didn’t know, is the Internet of Things, or IoT.)
Advertisers will benefit from this in two ways: the amount of data available about people and their stuff will increase exponentially, and the number of touchpoints will mushroom. However, people’s desire for privacy, and their distaste for irrelevant, intrusive messaging, is increasing just as fast.
Winning brands will be threaded through people’s lives, stitched into the fabric of their online devices. But engaging with people this intimately is going to take an unprecedented understanding of human motivation, and a commitment to authenticity which has been absent for much of the history of advertising.
In 20 years what has happened to digital advertising will have been impossible to imagine today. But there is no doubt that big data and pervasive computing will be two of the driving forces in that story.
Jarred Cinman (@jarredcinman) is the managing director (and one of the founders) of NATIVE VML. He is a longstanding member of the South African digital industry, having founded one of the first professional web services firms in 1995. Cinman is chair of the IAB SA and a member of the Loeries Committee.
This feature first ran in The Future by Design, which is published by Ornico with MarkLives.com as its official media partner. Read the full magazine via Issuu or download the pdf (24MB).
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Good piece Jarred, but I do wish you would desist from invoking unhelpful and generalised jibes such as “horrifying as this is to agency creatives”. It appears to be a feature of your writing – a put-down of sorts to anyone who hails from a traditional agency or marketing background (Insight: everyone over 35 does by default). Any responsible creative worth their salt revels in the ability to measure their work and wholeheartedly supports agile advertising opportunities. You may not have noticed, but the desire for recognised creativity underpinned by results has undergone a massive change in the past decade, a change driven by the creative segment of the industry. Perhaps you’ve noticed this in your work for the Loeries.
Similarly, your comment ” these technologies take the manual labour and guesswork about placing your ad in front of the people who need to see it” is barbed and directed at “old school” media planning. Just because offline media doesn’t have the detailed metric measures available to their online counterparts doesn’t mean it’s all guesswork. I trust the advice of someone who’s worked extensively across all media, new and old, before I trust a digital warrior for the simple reason that they are able to see the merit in all opportunities and have a well honed ability to refine media buys with both metrics and experience. No amount of programmatic buying will ever rid the media environment of experience, common sense and good judgment. AI has its limitations and mankind is rather difficult a species to predict when it comes to algorithms. They absolutely have their place, but so does good judgment.
I sense that you carry an underlying agenda, to promote digital first (no harm) but at the expense of non-digital (irresponsible). I’d suggest that you may find more purchase with a wider market were you not so demeaning towards the media that still serves 35 million SA adults rather well, and will continue to do so for a very long time yet. There’s room for everyone at this table, newspapers included. Yes, newspapers. Just look at the Caxton group’s results if you doubt my word. Or for that matter Naspers, where publishing and Pay TV still contribute 42% of trading profit. I think the time for the digital divide is long over. Once upon a time it was ATL vs BTL, then along came Digital vs Traditional. As long as the industry still speaks in these terms it will never get the respect it should.