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.
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.
It is a matter of time, I think, until PR practices become common on the Net … network inhabitants’ understandings of their community and its relationship to the larger world will become less innocent as the stakes in their online discussions … begin routinely to contend with these types of professionalized interventions.
“Batman Forever” doesn’t look so great in a postage stamp[-sized] window … The time will come when the technology is there. Eventually this is going to be an important way of promoting movies.