The death of traditional advertising agencies...

Agency Saatchi & Saatchi Canada has created interesting viral video clip, which predicts the death of advertising agencies, unless they assimilate digital creativity, which is the future. Spot entitled “The Last Advertising Agency on Earth” is a somber two minute film that compares the death of advertising industry with the fall of the Roman Empire.

It accuses the industry that non-critically insists on old methods, particularly with reliance on television advertising, despite the fact that customers seek for new, non-traditional ideas. The development of technologies for high-speed Internet, mobile phones, MP3 players, online shopping and digitization of all types of content, opens the door into a new era. For decades agencies prepared their brand messages for consumers, but the key difference is that they stopped being passive. Now they can actually choose what they wanted to see, not what the advertising agencies forced them to. “So much was lost because of arrogance and ignorance and because agencies choose to ignore the changes going on all around them” says narrator in spot, which ends with a message that advertising industry, will be extinct, if they do not assimilate digital reality.

The fact is that advertising is loosing power and there is increasing trust in individuals. Understanding of upcoming consumer behavior is crucial, because of era where consumers have more and more power. But what can we expect after billboards and TV ads? What kind of relationship with consumer will be needed and how important engagement will be? Will traditional advertising methods really extinct?

PC in our pocket

A new generation of mobile processors and faster mobile networks combined to put the power of a PC onto the smartphone in out pocket.

Few days ago I run into an interesting article from Information Week, dated in 2008. It deals with expectations about smartphones capability in 2010. A number of technologies that have been in development for years jumped from lab to factory and straight into the next generation of mobile devices.

Authors exposed three main trends that caused a fundamental change in the role and nature of smartphones: broadband everywhere, digitization of all content and pocket computing power. These trends have turned cell phones into smartphones and are driving the evolution of smartphones into devices that are always connected, that have access to all our digital content as well as to the Web, and to provide a wider array set of personal services. I choose few predictions from this article; let see how accurate they were.

“Smartphones will be closer to becoming the single most important devices we own.” Smartphones offer a huge number of different functions, which allow us to do more things in more places but in my opinion, mobile devices will be, at least in next few years, important extensions of our PCs and other devices, but will not become a single device we own.

“The biggest opportunities and changes will come with broadband Internet connectivity that is available no matter where you are”. It is true that broadband connectivity became widespread, but in my opinion, authors forgot about digital divide, contributing to fewer options for some parts of the world. Broadband is not everywhere and will not be in the near future.

"The complete Internet experience that you have on your PC will be available in the mobile space”. Web 2.0 tools, social networking and GPS-based location and navigation on mobile devices presented many new opportunities for users, so this prediction is quite accurate. Many web sites and applications are already adjusted for use on mobile devices and this adaptation is becoming more and more widespread. Laptops, by comparison, may be mobile, but you do not use them when you walk down the street or drive to the same extent that you can use a mobile phones.

“A coming shift in how smartphones fit into our digital lives will be much less about getting the phone to do what other portable devices do today (camera, music player, gaming, etc.) and more about connecting you to your Web-ecosystem of apps, services, and content.”

“In terms of applications, anything that has to do with entertainment, music, and video is going to be big. Increases in memory capacity will play a large role in this. Either way, storage capacity is going to increase dramatically. "Flexibility for large-capacity cards, allows you to move content easier".

All these predictions came true, smartphones in 2010 really allow us to access to most of digital content as well as to the Web and provide a wider set of personal services. Some of mentioned things were already in use before 2010, but not in extent we can see it today. Options for accessing to our content and ability to display and transfer large amounts of it easily will let people do more with these devices. Smartphones can free us from our PCs to a great extent and enrich our experience with mobile devices.

Because we are using our smartphones in such a diverse way there are many other concerns about these devices. In my opinion one of the most important is their security and more about this topic in following posts.

Video Pollution on the Web

In the previous post I was writing about the long tail and the rise of niche culture. The democratization of production and distribution tools and integration of supply with demand led to the huge diversity of choice. Without filters, e.g. search engines, recommendations, blogs and user ratings, users can lost themselves in a multitude of products, because the long tail has a dynamic and wide range of quality.

Beside all the positive facts that new technologies brought, the impact of pollution on the web is becoming evident to society. In the last issue of First Monday, I found an interesting article called Video Pollution on the Web. Authors say that videos have become a predominant part of users' daily lives on the Web, especially with the emergence of video sharing services, such as YouTube. Part of the huge success of multimedia content in the Web is due to the change on the user perspective from content consumer to content creator. By allowing users to publicize their independently generated content, the long tail of videos is becoming longer but video sharing networks become susceptible to different types of pollution. As example, users can pollute the system spreading video messages containing undesirable content. Users can also associate metadata with videos in attempt to fool video search engines (i.e., popular tags, but unrelated to the content). Moreover, users can upload identical videos, generating duplicates of the same content on the system.

Authors identified following types of pollution:

• Redundant information (near-duplicates); since users can freely upload content in VSS systems, it is natural to expect that part of these videos is identical or very similar, this type pollute search results.
• Incorrect, noisy, imprecise, or manipulated meta–information (metadata pollution); one of the new trends of the Web 2.0 is to allow users to freely create and associate metadata to the content. The main problem caused by this type of pollution is related with content retrieval, as most information retrieval mechanisms rely mostly on metadata. If a video content is not well described by its meta–information, it can not be found in search results or appear in lists of related videos.
  
• Undesired or unsolicited information (video spam); in video sharing systems, videos can be used as objects of interactions between users. Similarly to e–mail spam, link spam, and spam in blogs and forums, conversations established in video social networks may contain video spam. Video messages can be considered spam if the video communication is unsolicited or is completely unrelated to the subject of the conversation or discussion.

Pollution can cause negative impacts on system aspects such as content distribution networks, and video search engines. The impact on the user caused by this type of content may include:

• loss of interest in using the system, as some of the retrieved information is mostly redundant or does not match well to an expressed information need or interest;
• distrust in the system, as some of the retrieved information is clearly not related to the current interest or navigation pattern, being perhaps offensive or being included only to take advantage of the user;
  
• impatience, as some resources are very difficult to find or due to the low performance of the system, among many others (Benevenuto et al. 2010).

Authors have also suggested pollution control strategies, which may be applied to all of the three types of video pollution, video duplicates, metadata pollution and video spam.

1. Automatic approach is widely used to control several types of pollution in Web environments and relies on machine learning algorithms (e.g., supervised classification). Basically, special purpose algorithms are developed to automatically detect and fight polluters and polluted contents.
   
2. Another filter or control strategy is feedback from users. By allowing users to flag a video when they encounter pollution, the system is able to remove some sort of undesired video objects.
   
3. The third is collaborative approach. Current popular video systems such as YouTube organize videos around online communities structured as personal (or “egocentric”) networks, with the individual at the center of their own community. One interesting approach to tackle pollution consists of empowering members of online communities with mechanisms to clean or report members that do not contribute positively to the community. This approach builds on the idea that each user should take care of the system and the content that other users upload, editing the content and associated metadata of every video uploaded to the system, like users do to articles in Wikipedia.
   
4. The fourth approach is “make life harder for polluters” by increasing the cost of sending spam or creating pollution (Benevenuto et al. 2010).

Beside all the positive examples that new technologies have brought for individual there are also issues that can deteriorate our experience with them. All the filters that authors are listing, are really important because a dynamic and wide range of quality of products and services in long tail of video sharing networks.

Resource:
Benevenuto, Fabricio, Tiago Rodrigues, Virgilio Almeida, Jussara Almeida, Marcos Goncalves, and Keith Ross. 2010. Video pollution on the Web. First Monday, vol.15, issue 4. Available at http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/current.

The Long Tail - How new technologies are changing consumerism?

Today, enterprises are often in dilemma, where to find more and more whimsical consumers. Few years ago, when mass culture dominated, this was not a difficult issue. Fewer things competed for our attention, and hits managed to attract a mass audience. But this is no longer the case. “The age of one-size products for all ends, and there comes something new, niche market,” says Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, where he is reconstituting a map for 21.century economy.

The development of technologies for high-speed Internet, mobile phones, MP3 players, online shopping and digitization of all types of content, opens the door into a new era, where instead of “hits” culture, “niche” culture is dominant. Networks enable access to culture and content of all kinds, from mainstream to the most marginal. This trend challenges the economic power of hits. The market is broken into countless niches and consumers are becoming more and more diffuse.

The essence of the long tail theory is in the removal of physical restrictions of the shelves and others bottlenecks of distribution, which ensures that goods intended for a small target audience are the same economically attractive than those for the masses. New technologies incredibly quickly reduce the costs of achieving niches, and although the sale of products in each niche is relatively small, due to their abundance, these products make up a market that can compete with the hits. The long tail is therefore a culture that was not refined by economics of scarcity.

Although we are all trained to look at the world through the hits, new diversity and new environments thoroughly change our view on the world. More than we get away from mainstream, more we realize that our taste does not fall so much in the mainstream, as advertisers, culture, or simply a lack of choice were able to convince us. The diverse interests of consumers are working their way into the spotlight. Although niches always have been here, their economy is changing because of digitization and networked consumer. Market that was invisible until now rises to the surface. Price of saving bits is negligible, so everybody can find their audience.

Anderson noticed that the fastest growing part of the online business of content providers such as Netflix, Amazon and Rhapsody is coming from the sale of products, which are in traditional physical stores not even available. This was made possible because of trends of democratization of production tools, which enabled volunteering and amateur work (Wikipedia, blogs), declining prices due to the democratization of distribution and the increasing integration of supply with demand. Integration is crucial, because consumers would be otherwise difficult to tackle with the expansion of the diversity of choice. With filters we can discover items that are more attractive than items with the lowest common denominator, occupying the narrow channels of traditional mass-market distribution. Without filters, there is a risk, that in the long tail there would not be anything else than noise, because it has a dynamic and wide range of quality. If you want something that is appealing to all, you have to make some compromises, that is why niche products are attractive only to a narrow range of tastes. Without search engines, recommendations, blogs and user ratings, users can lost themselves in a multitude of products.

Anderson also talks about fundamental changes that transform relations in advertising industry. The fact is, that advertising is loosing power, and there is increasing trust in individuals. Communication is now controlled by a society, as a top-down communication is becoming less popular, while bottom-up rumors are increasingly influential.

This new economic policy is not only subject in the media and entertainment industry. Anderson also shows principle of a long tail in others industries, e.g. in the sale of used items (eBay), kitchen mixers (KitchenAid) and many others. All industries slowly recognize that hits were wonderful, but next big market will be composed of niches. Of course, the hits will not go away, and the same applies to the stores with a limited space. They will retain on the surface, because of the convenience of instant gratification and other tangible benefits that are important when we are buying something in a traditional stores.

The long tail book is an interesting reading for anyone interested in future business and society in general. Understanding of upcoming consumer behavior on the markets with an unrestricted choice is crucial, and sales challenges are growing because of era where buyers have more and more power. Excellent added value of this book are picturesque interpretations of the cases from the real business world and this book is an excellent opportunity for both merchants and consumers to learn how to exploit numerous advantages of the digital age.