by: Idris Mootee
I
wrote about Media 2.0 a few weeks ago and I want to write more on this
subject. I have been meeting with a lot of senior executives and
clients these days and when I ask people what is Web 2.0, some are
quick to list an inventory of tools (trust me, we have numerous debates
on this among ourselves before we started idea couture and we were
beating it to death on what is Web 2.0). I answered that these are only enablers, Web 2.0 or Media 2.0 is about emerging consumer/ cultural practices.
Rather than saying Ajax or consumer generated content, we must start
with understanding the underlying forces shaping the new media
landscape which fuels Web 2.0. What does the new media landscape looks
like? Media executives please read on.
Let’s start with better understanding the nature of our relationship with media is that “peer2peer networking”, “personalization” and “participatory” culture.
Some think that Web 2.0 is sometimes misleading as that implies that
the whole of the web has changed, the way a 2.0 service pack package
replaces its 1.0 predecessor, but that’s not really the case here. Some
simply refers Web 2.0 to the Web’s usability and the technologies
behind it. This so-called new version is defined by blogs, social
networking sites, wikis and RSS feeds etc. In contrast to Web 1.0,
where users were largely restricted to simply reading web pages, Web
2.0 makes for interactions. Consider this metaphor: instead of just
reading a book, the reader is helping to write it. Some will doodle on
it and resell it. Some might tear off pages and bind them together as
an art book.
Some executives will ask “what does this has to do with my company?
Many
executives might be tempted to think that 2.0 won’t affect their
companies, other than a few angry customers posting their videos on
YouTube . Indeed, Forrester Research, Inc. in March this year polled
119 CIOs at firms with 500 or more employees and found that a lack of
current need stopped them from Web 2.0 adoption 47% of the time. A
little more than half of these CIOs were most likely to view social
networking and blogs as unnecessary. Think about it…. “A lack of
current need?” Come on, what are these people thinking? They need a little imagination. This ad helps.
Media 2.0 is the number one driver of Web 2.0, it is about “innovation” that happens as a result of “convergence”. We are seeing a period of prolonged and profound technological change. New media are created, distributed, adopted, adapted, remixed, redistributed and absorbed into the culture at rapid pace. And that’s causing headache for all media executives. Everyone wants to know what’s next and what to do to prosper or survive this change.
Looking
back at the last 200 years or so, the shift from orality to literacy,
the rise of print culture, and the emergence of modern mass media
during the last 100 years represent important paradigm shifts in the
way we communicated and expressed our ideas. Generally a burst of
technological change was followed by a period of adjustment. So Print
1.0 to Print 2.0 etc. The explosion of new technologies at the end of
the 19th century started a period of profound self-consciousness which
the sociologist called modernism.
This
modernism is impacting all institutions (marketers and media owners),
it is constantly reshaping all modes of artistic expression (24/7 and
global), and is sparkling a series of intellectual breakthroughs of
which the full extent of the impact is still unknown. If
anything, the rate of technological and cultural change has accelerated
and social networks are evolving into new entities. It is breeding a
new generation of subculturalist. Many
of these are the new creative classes of our societies. For the last
ten years, my job required me to analyze the impact of these trends on
business. I’ll be honest; it has not been an easy one.
The
very nature of the digital space is the ability for brands to speak
with – not to, but with — the micro communities and individuals
themselves. In the
digital world, marketing will be about finding them, excites them,
engages them, empowers them and builds relationship with them. Advertising
over the past two decades has provided more and more production
spectacle, more and more belly laughs but less and less relevance and
information. Because information is core of digital, digital marketing will soon enough fill the vacuum. That’s Agency 2.0.
According
to ZenithOptimedia $10.5 billion will be spent on display, including
video, but $14 billion will be spent on search for 2007. Why? Simply
because search is contextual, measurable and information rich. As
digital advertising itself becomes more targeted and measurable, it
will be best deployed as a sort of street signage — posted on
extremely vertical social networks or served based on user profiles —
directing the audience to where the real information is: brand or
third-party websites, or embedded in highly utilitarian content. That’s
why we will see over 75% of all ads will be digital in 2-3 years. Case
in point, the $500 million mkt budget Microsoft allocated to the
introduction of its new Vista OS, 30% went online. Imagine, if all
marketers decided to follow Microsoft and spend 30% of their budgets on
digital tomorrow? This would be Madison Avenue’s worst nightmare.
The
birth of new media technologies sparks social and aesthetic
experimentation and as a result we see an ever-expanding menu of
cultural choices, from devices to storages. How exciting? Because these
emerging media and technologies have lowered or removed many barriers
to entry into the cultural marketplace, everyone can easily participate
much like everyone can be a merchant with eBay. The cultural marketplace is now opened for anyone and anywhere in the world as long you have a computer and a connection. It
is no longer headquartered in Madison Avenue. This grand utopian
movement of our contemporary age is headquartered in Silicon Valley,
and is now around the world, I’ve met smart Indian, Brits, Dutch,
French, Chinese, Korean entrepreneurs joining this march seeing the
great seduction is actually a fusion of two historical movements: the
counter-cultural utopianism of the ’60s and the techno-economic
utopianism of the ’90s. This seduction is known to to the world as the
Web 2.0.
The rapid diversification of cultural production inspires
a diversity of aesthetic (we have seen that in graphic design)
responses, as it gets taken up and deployed by different communities or
users. Such transformations broaden the means of self and collective
expression. Social networks then become storage of collective meanings. In a previous post, I wrote about the relentless
commodification (and virtualization) of all areas of social life, and
there is a lot of opportunities for brands to play a role. Unfortunately, not many marketers get this.
The
birth of new media technologies sparks social and aesthetic
experimentation and as a result we see an ever-expanding menu of
cultural choices, from devices to storages. How exciting? Because these
emerging media and technologies have lowered or removed many barriers
to entry into the cultural marketplace, everyone can easily participate
much like everyone can be a merchant with eBay. The cultural marketplace is now opened for anyone and anywhere in the world as long you have a computer and a connection. It is no longer headquartered in Madison Avenue.
So what is the new role of brands here?
Every
bite of image, sound, story, brand, and relationship will play itself
out across the broadest possible range of media (fixed and portable)
channels and remixed by different people. What’s going on now is
consumers are exercising their newfound power that empowers
them to shape and control the flow of media in their lives; they want
the media they want when they want it and where they want it.
The mass media
era pushed amateur cultural production underground, in the
form sub-cultures niche music and publications, though it were never totally
destroyed by the rise of mass media. The web has brought this layer of
amateur production back to the surface, providing an infrastructure where
amateurs can share what they created with each other: this ability to share
media has helped to motivate media production, resulting in a massive explosion of grassroots movement from expression
to taste-making. So the “big media”–the Hollywood studios, the major
record labels and international publishing houses–now represent the enemies of
the Media 2.0 movement. In Marxist terms, the
traditional media had become the exploitative “bourgeoisie,” and
citizen media, those heroic bloggers and podcasters, were the
“proletariat”. Welcome to the world of Web 2.0. Your thoughts
please.
Original Post: http://mootee.typepad.com/innovation_playground/2007/10/web-20-media-20.html
