Archives: Expert Predictions

In an era of targeted marketing, might not the human genome be the best database of all? … The real future of advertising and marketing may rest in the new ecology and the interrelationship between genes and memes … What are the memes that urge us to purchase and consume? How do you splice two or three seemingly disparate memes? What is the appropriate medium to transmit certain memes? VCR? TV? CD? Radio? Do some cultures diffuse advertising memes more efficiently than others? These are the kinds of questions that the meme paradigm will force advertising agencies and their clients to address explicitly. Forget demographics and psychographics. Think memegraphics.

Are ads destined to be little more than the shards of targeted databases mating with personal agents and ingenious viruses infecting the Net? More likely … advertisements will feel and play like visual conversations, video games, and simulations … So, the focus of advertising design shifts: Ads become a medium of collaboration between potential buyer and potential seller. Indeed, if the interaction and information is crafted appropriately, even the term “advertisement” becomes passe, replaced by a new genre of commercial communication.

The rise of smart networks and programmable agents/filters means that advertisements will become more targeted and selective. Databases will drive many ads over the Net, with smart databases responding to queries by curious consumers. Advertisers and buyers will negotiate for information over the Net.

A … system would be technically capable of offering its customers not just pay-per-view but TV-sans-ads. How many viewers would be willing to pay their local cable system an extra five or ten bucks each month not to see any advertisements? … Subscribers could program what kind of ads they wanted to receive … and screen out the ones they didn’t … Needless to say, a media distribution company could charge advertisers a pretty penny to identify the households that wanted to see their offerings. As telephone and cable companies merge and smarten up their networks, they inevitably become powerbroker intermediaries between the advertisers and the viewers. They become the royal gateways for the next generation of advertising.

No doubt, some netcrawlers will be virulently anti-advirus. They’ll want Lysol-like software to scour and disinfect adviruses from any program before it can be displayed. We’ll see an epidemiological battle between the forces of digital commercialism and purists who think commerce has no place on The Net. Of course, we all know who’ll win that battle, don’t we?

Where you could once send only strings of text on the Internet, you can now transmit still pictures, sound, and video imagery. This all makes for a rich multimedia broth in which to grow precisely the sort of adviruses that could create a network of cyberspace commercialism.

Brin envisions a global computer network teeming with viruses both lethal and benign. The Net becomes the key medium for both community and commerce. If an Emilypost virus were to monitor civility, why not a Coca-Cola virus circulating through the Net and attaching itself to any program using the phrase “The Real Thing?” How about a Miller Lite virus that sneaks into any video image of bronzed yuppies frolicking on the summer beach? … Of course, it would be nothing short of an art to design ad viruses that were just appealing enough to be noticed and remembered, but never so intrusive as to be obnoxious and alienating.

There’ll be a nice market in software that screens out the junk and highlights what PDA owners want. Advertising – not just innovative technology – may be the best hope to turn PDAs into the next major medium.

We’ll see these new media renegotiate the power relationships between individuals and advertisers. Yesterday, we changed the channel; today we hit the remote; tomorrow, we’ll reprogram our agents/filters. We’ll interact with advertising where once we only watched; we’ll seek out advertising where once we avoided it. Advertising will not go away; it will be rejuvenated.