Want to know the future of media and technology? There are many who are willing to point the way. They can explain, with flawless logic, what the future will look like: The past, mired in inefficiency and confusion, will give way to a more streamlined, rational world.
They’re usually wrong. For innovation to succeed, it has to work with people. That’s easier said than done. People are strange, quirky, emotionally driven and often unpredictable.
Many technologists today are, in fact, anachronisms trying to revive a failed philosophy from centuries past. They are, in a very real sense, accidental Cartesians, who confuse the rational world with the actual one.
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It was recently announced that Facebook received a $500 million investment from Goldman Sachs that puts the total value of the company at $50 Billion. Wow! Congratulations Mark Zuckerberg!
However, a valuation that high begs the question: Is it really worth that much? I admit, I was skeptical at first, but having run some numbers, it appears decidedly less ridiculous than I first thought. In actuality, the price reflects some fairly reasonable assumptions.
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Happy New Year! I’m so glad 2010 is over! I can’t remember a year that annoyed me so much. Every time I turned around some jackass was proclaiming the death of something: Old Media, The Web, E-mail, whatever…
At first, I would be intrigued, click on Twitter links and read stuff that I couldn’t understand. Then I would brush up on my acronyms, check some facts and eventually realize that it was all crap. When I would point out the inconsistencies and non-sequiturs, people would write me nasty comments and say that I “didn’t get it” (which was true).
I do have greater hopes for 2011. The stakes will be vastly higher and that’s likely to engender more serious thinking and business-like approaches. The coming year holds great promise, lots of challenges and it’s only just begun!
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I’d like to thank everybody for their support in 2010, Digital Tonto’s first full year in existence.
80,000 of you visited the site, far more than I ever expected. (When I started, I was pretty sure about my mother, but that was about it). Many of you were also generous with sharing insight and expertise, which was very much appreciated.
Here’s a list of the posts that you most liked to read, tweet and comment on. Feel free to click on any that you might have missed.
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People often tell me that one of the things they like best about Digital Tonto is the wide array of sources I use. So just like last year, here’s a list of books I read and/or used for sources in popular posts in 2010.
I hope you find them just as helpful and fun as I did.
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Is brand marketing dying? Are we entering a golden age of “pull marketing.”
Many people think that while promotion can be effective in getting people to try a brand, once a purchase is made it is only the intrinsic qualities of the product that matter. Therefore as technology enables consumers, broadcasting brand messages is increasingly a waste of time and money.
Recent research, however, debunks this notion. Marketing actions like brand promotions and discounting can actually affect how consumers experience products. Moreover, follow-up fMRI studies show that this is a verifiable physiological process that we can see working inside our brains.
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Last April, I went to work at a global agency network, which was a new thing for me. For most of my career, I’ve been working for local companies on what agencies call, “the supplier side.” In other words, I have been mostly been figuring out how to create and sell media rather than what to do with it.
Nevertheless, I had built enough of a reputation in the advertising community that I was given the opportunity to start up a special strategic unit at ZenithOptimedia in Turkey. Unfortunately, mostly for family reasons, I had to resign my position in September, but stayed on till December.
Having heard much, and much untrue, about the how the big agency world was bureaucratic, impersonal and behind the curve, I wanted to relate my experience.
Does the ad model have a future? Many think not.
The arguments are twofold: one based on supply and one based on demand. On the supply side, pundits say that that consumers have grown tired of having their media experience interrupted and will increasingly avoid ads. On the demand side, they say that marketers are becoming more savvy and are learning that advertising never worked anyway.
Both arguments are specious and don’t hold up to scrutiny.
The Web has become the most consequential force for the spread of information and innovation since the advent of the printing press. The debate over its future is heating up, so it was inevitable that its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, would eventually weigh in.
He did just that in an article in Scientific American in which he lays out the facts as only he could. The online world as we know it is under dire threat from a variety of special interests who seek advantage at the expense of the rest of us.
The issues, although abstract, are far from esoteric and there is truly a lot at stake.
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It’s a tired old tale. A plodding industry, stuck on a conventional business model, blind to the new realities, digs in its heels and gets world upended by a young, tech savvy company. They never knew what hit them.
That’s what Ken Auletta, says Google is doing to traditional media in his 2009 book Googled. As the story goes, with powerful algorithms and a disruptive business model, the web upstart is killing the media business as we know it.
The book is a worthwhile read and he largely gets his facts right. However, he gets the media principles wrong. While Google has truly become a force to contend with, its effect has been a mix of positive and negative. Old media is prospering and, increasingly, it is Google who is having to adapt.
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