Tomorrow’s digital advertising will be inextricably woven into networks and VR fabrics. The digital David Ogilvy may not have materialized yet, but cyberspace’s commercial future is inevitable. There will be billboards along the Information Superhighway.
The future of media is the future of advertising; the future of advertising is the future of media … The design philosophies of digital media will exert a greater influence on traditional advertising than traditional advertising will hold over the design philosophies of the digerati. In other words, tomorrow’s soft-ads are going to reflect the values of the Net more than tomorrow’s Net will evolve into a digital regurgitation of today’s advertising.
To appreciate tomorrow’s multimedia networks, don’t look to the Bob Metcalfes, Ted Nelsons, and Vint Cerfs for ideas and inspiration. Those techno-wonks won’t set the agenda; the Paleys, Sarnoffs, and Disneys of the world will. The economics of advertising, promotion, and sponsorship – more than the technologies of teraflops, bandwidth, and GUI – will shape the virtual realities we may soon inhabit. Wherever there are audiences, there will be advertisers. As media evolve, so do audiences. Time and geography – more than human nature – separate the captive crowds at the Roman Colosseum from user lists on the Internet.
Support [for exchanging digital audio and multimedia data] needs to be in HTML and in the transport protocol, but it is not possible with current Web. It needs to be included in a new standard.
The next generation of tools will give you one interface to even more information services. Now you may use two different applications for e-mail and news. Mosaic would combine those programs into one interface. It would make information retrieval not dependent on a particular protocol … Mosaic is essentially a browser. The hypertext language will let you produce information. Users will become content providers as well as consumers.
What we need is not more innovation, but a change of direction. The question is not whether we become a little richer and have a few more toys, but whether civilization, or indeed life on Earth, can survive. What we need is not just any technological innovation, but innovation in the interest of environmental protection of health and safety and of infrastructures that can secure a civilized existence. We must turn our attention to real social problems and away from the twin illusion that technological innovation can achieve economic growth and that growth can solve all our problems. Let the market cater for technological innovation, and let governments get on with their task of securing the public interest that markets cannot secure. Civilized survival is at stake.
“Let the plumbers build the pipes, and we will use them” – Sorry, but thatÕs not good enough. That retreating battle cry has only sustained a gigantic bandwidth, protocol, and network management quagmire. It will get worse, too. Think about all the video, audio, and other data that you will soon need to send across a WAN … Add to that the ongoing efforts to push more and more data out to branch offices to empower those staffs. Soon you can imagine the tremendous demands that business – your business – could place on the data highway. None of us has all the answers, but collectively we can offer some pretty sound advice on what a data highway ought to be.
Broadband ISDN is what the future will hold. It will put everyone’s communications on high-speed digital links that will carry voice, video, and data simultaneously … When will this happen? Not tomorrow, but my son just turned two, and I’ll bet he’ll never know what a modem was.
In another three years, it will be common for people to make money. There’s a market for people who can sell information [subscriptions, access] at $35 to $50 a year.
The rise of client/server computing and groupware will further alter our way of working: Instead of using your own personal computer and then sharing data with other people, you will use the network for what Steve Jobs calls “interpersonal computing.” Both the location of the data and the means by which it is obtained are quickly becoming completely transparent.