I wrote about Media 2.0 a few weeks ago and I want to write more on this subject. I have been meeting with a lot of senior executives and clients these days and when I ask people what is Web 2.0, some are quick to list an inventory of tools (trust me, we have numerous debates on this among ourselves before we started idea couture and we were beating it to death on what is Web 2.0). I answered that these are only enablers, Web 2.0 or Media 2.0 is about emerging consumer/ cultural practices. Rather than saying Ajax or consumer generated content, we must start with understanding the underlying forces shaping the new media landscape which fuels Web 2.0. What does the new media landscape looks like? Media executives please read on.
Let’s start with better understanding the nature of our relationship with media is that “peer2peer networking”, “personalization” and “participatory” culture. Some think that Web 2.0 is sometimes misleading as that implies that the whole of the web has changed, the way a 2.0 service pack package replaces its 1.0 predecessor, but that's not really the case here. Some simply refers Web 2.0 to the Web's usability and the technologies behind it. This so-called new version is defined by blogs, social networking sites, wikis and RSS feeds etc. In contrast to Web 1.0, where users were largely restricted to simply reading web pages, Web 2.0 makes for interactions. Consider this metaphor: instead of just reading a book, the reader is helping to write it. Some will doodle on it and resell it. Some might tear off pages and bind them together as an art book.
Some executives will ask "what does this has to do with my company?
Many executives might be tempted to think that 2.0 won't affect their companies, other than a few angry customers posting their videos on YouTube . Indeed, Forrester Research, Inc. in March this year polled 119 CIOs at firms with 500 or more employees and found that a lack of current need stopped them from Web 2.0 adoption 47% of the time. A little more than half of these CIOs were most likely to view social networking and blogs as unnecessary. Think about it…. “A lack of current need?” Come on, what are these people thinking? They need a little imagination. This ad helps.
Media 2.0 is the number one driver of Web 2.0, it is about “innovation” that happens as a result of “convergence”. We are seeing a period of prolonged and profound technological change. New media are created, distributed, adopted, adapted, remixed, redistributed and absorbed into the culture at rapid pace. And that’s causing headache for all media executives. Everyone wants to know what’s next and what to do to prosper or survive this change.
Looking back at the last 200 years or so, the shift from orality to literacy, the rise of print culture, and the emergence of modern mass media during the last 100 years represent important paradigm shifts in the way we communicated and expressed our ideas. Generally a burst of technological change was followed by a period of adjustment. So Print 1.0 to Print 2.0 etc. The explosion of new technologies at the end of the 19th century started a period of profound self-consciousness which the sociologist called modernism.
This modernism is impacting all institutions (marketers and media owners), it is constantly reshaping all modes of artistic expression (24/7 and global), and is sparkling a series of intellectual breakthroughs of which the full extent of the impact is still unknown. If anything, the rate of technological and cultural change has accelerated and social networks are evolving into new entities. It is breeding a new generation of subculturalist. Many of these are the new creative classes of our societies. For the last ten years, my job required me to analyze the impact of these trends on business. I’ll be honest; it has not been an easy one.
The very nature of the digital space is the ability for brands to speak with – not to, but with -- the micro communities and individuals themselves. In the digital world, marketing will be about finding them, excites them, engages them, empowers them and builds relationship with them. Advertising over the past two decades has provided more and more production spectacle, more and more belly laughs but less and less relevance and information. Because information is core of digital, digital marketing will soon enough fill the vacuum. That's Agency 2.0.
According to ZenithOptimedia $10.5 billion will be spent on display, including video, but $14 billion will be spent on search for 2007. Why? Simply because search is contextual, measurable and information rich. As digital advertising itself becomes more targeted and measurable, it will be best deployed as a sort of street signage -- posted on extremely vertical social networks or served based on user profiles -- directing the audience to where the real information is: brand or third-party websites, or embedded in highly utilitarian content. That’s why we will see over 75% of all ads will be digital in 2-3 years. Case in point, the $500 million mkt budget Microsoft allocated to the introduction of its new Vista OS, 30% went online. Imagine, if all marketers decided to follow Microsoft and spend 30% of their budgets on digital tomorrow? This would be Madison Avenue’s worst nightmare.
The birth of new media technologies sparks social and aesthetic experimentation and as a result we see an ever-expanding menu of cultural choices, from devices to storages. How exciting? Because these emerging media and technologies have lowered or removed many barriers to entry into the cultural marketplace, everyone can easily participate much like everyone can be a merchant with eBay. The cultural marketplace is now opened for anyone and anywhere in the world as long you have a computer and a connection. It is no longer headquartered in Madison Avenue. This grand utopian movement of our contemporary age is headquartered in Silicon Valley, and is now around the world, I've met smart Indian, Brits, Dutch, French, Chinese, Korean entrepreneurs joining this march seeing the great seduction is actually a fusion of two historical movements: the counter-cultural utopianism of the '60s and the techno-economic utopianism of the '90s. This seduction is known to to the world as the Web 2.0.
The rapid diversification of cultural production inspires a diversity of aesthetic (we have seen that in graphic design) responses, as it gets taken up and deployed by different communities or users. Such transformations broaden the means of self and collective expression. Social networks then become storage of collective meanings. In a previous post, I wrote about the relentless commodification (and virtualization) of all areas of social life, and there is a lot of opportunities for brands to play a role. Unfortunately, not many marketers get this.
The birth of new media technologies sparks social and aesthetic experimentation and as a result we see an ever-expanding menu of cultural choices, from devices to storages. How exciting? Because these emerging media and technologies have lowered or removed many barriers to entry into the cultural marketplace, everyone can easily participate much like everyone can be a merchant with eBay. The cultural marketplace is now opened for anyone and anywhere in the world as long you have a computer and a connection. It is no longer headquartered in Madison Avenue.
So what is the new role of brands here?
Every bite of image, sound, story, brand, and relationship will play itself out across the broadest possible range of media (fixed and portable) channels and remixed by different people. What’s going on now is consumers are exercising their newfound power that empowers them to shape and control the flow of media in their lives; they want the media they want when they want it and where they want it.
The mass media era pushed amateur cultural production underground, in the form sub-cultures niche music and publications, though it were never totally destroyed by the rise of mass media. The web has brought this layer of amateur production back to the surface, providing an infrastructure where amateurs can share what they created with each other: this ability to share media has helped to motivate media production, resulting in a massive explosion of grassroots movement from expression to taste-making. So the "big media"--the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and international publishing houses--now represent the enemies of the Media 2.0 movement. In Marxist terms, the traditional media had become the exploitative "bourgeoisie," and citizen media, those heroic bloggers and podcasters, were the "proletariat". Welcome to the world of Web 2.0. Your thoughts please.
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