Ad Age Crystal Ball 2.0 Mention

Ad Age did a survey of their Power 150 bloggers list about what technology marketers should be paying the most attention to in 2008.  They were nice enough to include me.

Here’s my statement:

The single biggest issue/technology that deserves the most attention is not a site or an application, but more an organizational philosophy. It’s the content marketing movement — which is the philosophy of marketing services not by traditional methods, but by delivering valuable, relevant and compelling content to customers and prospects on a consistent basis. This is being done through all media platforms, and we are seeing companies like P&G and Nike put a large amount of money and resources into these efforts.

Here are some of the other ones that really caught my eye.

With the cost of production and distribution of digital content rapidly approaching zero, including distribution to the television platform, the opportunity to create branded micro-content that consumers will invite into their lives becomes a financial reality with a huge ROI upside; it’s advertising that people want to watch. This should be the single biggest trend to catch fire in 2008.

Online video/TV is the technology to watch in ’08. There seems to be a seismic shift toward digital distribution of video content, more and more video sites are being created, and there is a small camera revolution going on (which includes webcams) that portends a continued rise in user-generated video content. YouTube was just the beginning. Now, there’s ooVoo, seesmic, Revver, Jumpcut … the list goes on and on. Oh, and FastCompany.TV that Scoble just inaugurated. Add to that the fact that people are
scurrying to their computers in droves to watch television programs which, themselves. More than any other technology, including social networks, online video is it.

Micro-communication: Marketers need to focus their attention on messaging within internal workforce, as well as the external world.
Messages have transitioned from full-blown blog posts and email blasts to short and concise messages. Examples of this trend are Twitter and Seesmic, both of which provides users a way of conveying their messages in short text messages or videos that can be easily consumed by others.  As people have less and less time to read full-blown news articles and blogs, they will resort to communicating in as few words as possible. Messages that contain simple headlines and links to other resources will skyrocket in 2008 and beyond. Marketers have to be aware of this in order to sync their corporate messaging down to a level where people
can understand, react and make decisions faster than long essays.

What makes a site worth reading has very little to do with digital technologies or web applications, it has everything to do with content.  This is what encourages consistent readership and keeps visitors coming back for more. You ask what is most deserving of marketers’ attention in 2008 and why? The best illustration of this was at the AdAge IDEA conference, when the BBDO/GE presentation of their $350 million campaign was followed by the BlendTec guy who does $50 videos on YouTube. As he demonstrated, this increased sales by over 30%. There were no similar metrics given by the BBDO/GE team … But then again, that’s “Branding!”

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