“The website of tomorrow will function like a transformer, shifting into a new shape for each viewer and catering content apt to one instead of many.”
I once believed years ago the future of advertising was akin to an ad that brought together many brands and products and services to raise the bar of consumer interaction. In some ways, I saw it as…
Procter Gamble TV Commercial 2014 Olympics
…an umbrella company like Procter and Gamble. A sleuth of products and brands being used in unison to convey a lifestyle. The selling of a life not your own in a way that did not sell you one product but many. The camera would rove over your home as a user, a mom or dad, would use many brands with the same ideal in mind. In P&G’s case, an advanced state of family life attainable by quality products. Increased satisfaction and pleasure through an undeniable value on quality.
As internet advertising takes over (and TV ads begin to level out and drop until being consumed technologically by the internet), brand building techniques will go the way of the dinosaur. The idea of advertising that ‘we hope this will work’ is replaced by ‘we know this is working’. Companies may be considered citizens, but they act more like robots. If they know something is making money, it is valued over long term branding and longitudinal lifestyle shifts that yield no current, instant gratifying, shareholder inflating quantitatives in revenue, share of market, or ROI.
This of course will hurt the creative industry immensely. The place where long-lasting, brand building campaigns are made. Consumer metrics are increasing at an incredible clip. Because of the internet, and unregulated spying, we can see how a buyer interacts with its media to make a purchase, in addition to how they act in more general ways when he or she is just surfing around. This means a smaller gap between what we know and what we want to know. Media habits will become so understood in this environment as to negate a lot of the guesswork which accounts for a huge amount of wasted ad budgets. This, in turn, means more focused market information and an increased accountability on the advertiser to convert. A brief and a creative agency’s interpretation of it, will no longer be a loose targeted connection. A place where currently throwing that dart may be wildly off the bullseye if the idea is groundbreaking enough or smart enough or on-brand enough will become less acceptable and diminish. The creative creators will be less encouraged and less able to interpret their own visions for brands, companies, and campaigns (provided you buy into the fact that agencies have any power or influence here at all). And so the art will be leeched from the industry.
Content creators are the funnels for aggregating this information whether we like it or not. They hold the key. What we know now about consumers through metrics and bots and beacons and cookies is due to consumers visiting their websites. And so, with all that information at their behest, content creators will become the advertisers. Why not? They have the information. What good are they doing giving it away to advertisers, and outsourcing the work? It ultimately becomes a cost cutting maneuver.
And so I propose the technique of product placement we know today will be a fixture in the changing fabric that content creation will become. Metrics and data will be used to cater to users directly.Websites will become increasingly more powerful as the technologies advance.The website of tomorrow will function like a transformer. Shifting into a new shape for each viewer and catering content apt to one instead of many. What does this mean? It means we will consume advertising without being aware of it. Minority Report, with its eye scanning and prescience for our clothing preferences, will serve as an antiquated example of our ignorance and inability to tell the future. A direct assault on our presence is the current interface and it has never been anyone’s preference.
The future of ads will be subtle. It will be in the form of persuasion not selling. Imperceptible and underlying. Our products will be ingrained in our content. Persuasion will be the goal and will work at a meta-textual level. Fragmentation and the delineation of the internet landscape has created an ideal in the consumer psychology and thinking of their content. It’s there for ME. It’s MINE because? Well, because of the internet. This of course will change. Citizen Kane prevails again! as publishers will break loose from the ideals of the current internet age and dole out articles and news that make you believe in your free choice. (Wow, that got dystopic real fast.)
Point of purchase and purchase funnel placement will go extinct as the manipulation will have been done on a greater level and over a greater amount of time. (I’d say a lifetime if that weren’t already the case with, for example, cereal ads targeted to children and brands that capitalize into adolescence and beyond.) It will become a technicality. Content = Attention. And attention has always been the holy grail of advertising. The one metric unattainable. Here it is ingrained into the fabric of the users’ content.
Companies have the wealth of large towns and will soon have the wealth of large city’s of people. This means a vast agency of control and power. It also means the transformation of media in ways we can’t yet know. Advertising with its spiked form of interaction with its users in fits and starts will be smoothed out like peanut butter. Why? Because with money comes affordability of time, and with time comes the ability to learn.
“An ad is no longer an ad when it’s expertly targeted. It’s information.”
It only makes sense to me to buy the content and with new tech, manipulate it in a way that’s indistinguishable. An ad is no longer an ad when it’s expertly targeted. It’s information. That dividing line is already blurring rapidly, and doing so within a fragmented industry of technology, hackers, and companies all vying to ultimately do the same thing while taking a windy, segmented road to do it. Once that beast starts to focus and create partnerships with similar objectives, the technology will understand us in such a way as to know us.
Our media use and our need for information is only increasing. Once our current channel boom in media consumption evens (presuming it does), we will finally be able to look at media habits and gain real world perspectives and averages on what’s actually happening. Companies will be the only ones capable of bringing us knowledge in the billions of different ways we desire.
I was wrong. I was saw the unison of brands and products and companies coming together to sell an ideal all at once. And that may very well still happen over the current evolution of advertising.
Procter & Gamble Launches Corporate Advertising Campaign
Ideas like this are getting closer and closer to a more realized industry of persuasion. But why take the gamble to try to sell you something with a tiny ad in seconds, with impressions and glancing eyes, when I can sell you a philosophy over time? A philosophy that causes you to buy Procter and Gamble and not just sell it to you. How crude this model will look in the future. I think the real question, the one that will get us from there to here, that will ultimately decide how this works out, is will we prefer it that way? Or better yet, will I, singularly, me and me alone, prefer it that way?