The next lurch in media and marketing
Chances are the next killer business in media and marketing will emerge from the Internet of Things (IoT).
This sudden, explosive value creation probably won’t advance the state of IoT technology one jot. More likely, successful media innovators will identify some powerful yet unarticulated demand for a new experience of entertainment, learning, communication and community. They will use the Internet of Things to serve that demand.
As media and marketing professionals, we must learn about IoT. But the Internet of Things itself isn’t our next media business. Our next business comes from discovering a core demand just before it becomes conscious. Only with that knowledge, can IoT become a true innovation platform rather than a digital fashion statement.
All this talk about unarticulated needs sounds theoretical, right?
Climb into your time machine and go back to 1995 to ask people about their online search habits. You might find a few people at a UNIX conference who could give you a decent answer. Good luck finding anyone who cared about search in the studios or advertising agencies in Hollywood, London or Madison Avenue.
Fast forward five years to 2000. Internet hype is deafening. The money is gushing. New companies bloom like algae. Search has become important. But the search market is largely locked up by Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite and especially Yahoo! And besides, everyone knows that push technology is the next big thing.
Fire up your time machine again and travel to 2005. What a rocky ride you took through stock market implosions, terrorism, war, and the meteor strike of Google’s IPO. The 1990s are a sepia toned memory. But the search market is well established. We have a currency. We know digital is the future. And we know that bidding on keywords will get us to that future.
Our time machine accelerates over the past decade to 2015 as we watch social networks, smartphones and the real-time web repeatedly scramble the conventional wisdom. We see transportation companies grow without taxis. We see lodging companies grow without rooms. We can see fantastical creatures through our glasses and locations now remember us personally.
Make no mistake. The future has NEVER been a smooth march to the upper right corner of the chart.
FUTURES LURCH…
When a future lurches in a different direction, many market analysts and executives assume that successful businesses will be based on meeting today’s needs faster, better, and cheaper. Sure, you can make money doing that. You might even get rich.
But you won’t make a killing.
To make a killing, you’ve got to radically upset the prevailing balance of productivity and investment in a given industry. Before electricity came into the workplace, 19th century manufacturing productivity largely tracked investment in steam power and machinery. But a 20th century capitalist re-organizing work around electricity and electric machinery could realize huge efficiency gains without making a near equal corresponding investment.
And once customers understood that they really “needed” electric irons, refrigerators, transportation and power tools, it didn’t matter that your water wheel, steam engine and belts were fully amortized. It didn’t matter that there were still plenty of applications for traditional power sources and methods. Try as you might, you could no longer make a killing by using water or steam power. Competition had lurched in a different direction.
I believe the Internet of Things will lurch media and marketing competition in a new direction faster than either can handle it at present. This is because IoT will flip differentiation in media and marketing from distribution to storytelling.
IoT will decisively solve the media distribution problem once and for all. We will be able to package and distribute digital content and communication literally any way we want. But that also means that the content of our communication is more important than ever before because it’s just as easily filtered and discarded.
Brands will move away from crafting a small set of the “right messages” for millions of people in favor of engaging millions of people with massive set of right messages. This requires human creativity with AI smarts and cloud computing scale.
The new organizational models required by IoT will rip most media and marketing out of the piece-work orientation that dominates today. Connected objects will enable mass customization of media on the production side and direct-to-consumer on the distribution side. The barriers to entry will never be lower. The barriers to success will never be higher.
The most important things won’t change, however. Before designing or embarking on a campaign, marketers will still need to answer who buys, why they buy and how they buy. No intelligent media creator will try to substitute technology for a compelling story, vivid characters, and unique takes on age-old human dramas. IoT won’t change those imperatives and thank goodness for that.
However, the Internet of Things will transform the environment in which the media and marketing industries approach these challenges.
When you’re in the midst of a lurch, the crucial test isn’t engineering.
It’s imagination.
