Have we become assholes?

People love to be part of tribes. The advertising community is not different. We have the traditional tribes, the digital tribes, the Web 2.0 tribes and and and.

In the last few months I've seen a lot of blog posts, heard many podcasts and overheard conversations where the Social Media/Web 2.0 guys sounded like arrogant hypocrites: The big agencies don't get digital, everything is about the 30 second spot, they're just trying to hold on to their riches. Traditional folks have become enemies. Outdated jokes we look down upon.

And, the digital guys are the Rambo's and Rocky's of the new era. We know the answer to everything, we know where the game is going, we know the future. In short: the traditional folks sit in dark-wooded bars sipping on their three martini lunches while we sip on organic fruit elixirs changing the world one pixel at a time.

By talking and acting like this, we have become the enemy. We act like arrogant 'know-it-alls' , stopped listening to the traditional folks and, basically, turned into the people we warned others about.

In the end, we need to understand that the advertising world is a community. Sure, there will be differences, discussions, fights, politics. And we will continue to see things from our point of view and will continue to struggle accepting the 'traditional' point of view. But we have to make this a productive process, not a destruction path that goes nowhere.

The advertising community has many problems: limited attention of people, dramatically changing media usage, overwhelming amount of channels - you know the drill. That's our real enemy (if you want to call it that), not the other side of the advertising community. High School attitudes and cliques won't get us any further in tackling this enemy.

Ultimately, we should take our own advice of listen and learn to the advertising community. It's not about who's right. It's about doing the right thing in this new marketing reality. At this moment, all of us are one eyed kings and queens. Let's work together to get the whole picture.

What's your digital identity?

Fred Cavazza listed on this graphic all the platforms that Web 2.0 offers to express yourself. The quadrants give you an opportunity to explore what you're focusing on:
Is it more about expression or profession? How about hobby and knowledge?
Your digital footprint gives you an idea about your digital identity. I wonder if your digital identity is in line with your real life identity.

In my case, my digital identity reflects 50% of my real life. My life as a husband and father is completely missing from my digital footprint.
What about you?

Shrinking Cities

Our human nature makes us focus on and celebrate booming cities like New York, Mexico City, Tokyo and Vegas.
But we're surrounded by cities that are disappearing in front of our eyes: Detroit, Venice and Leipzig come to mind. Rural towns in the Mid-West.

This phenomenon has reached virtual worlds as well: Second Life lost 2.5% of its population in June and some of the bigger corporations have left for now.
Leaving behind abandoned buildings and islands, marketing displays celebrating nothingness, and one of the largest banks in the virtual world, Ginko Financial, closing down because of insolvency. Abandoning urban areas seems to be a pattern of our civilization.

The German project Shrinking Cities focuses on this social, cultural and economic challenge. It started with the fact that in Eastern Germany since 1989 more than 1 million apartments remain empty and countless structures and facilities have been abandoned.
And the project continued with a global research on this topic, Second Life being one of the global players.

Currently, they are sponsoring a contest in order to reinvent Second Life.

This is an intriguing project since we tend to focus on the new, new, new thing and when that turns into an old, new, new thing, we forget about it quickly.
It might be too late for Second Life to get the major marketers back but it might be enough to catch a second wind.

What will the future bring?

When I grew up, the newspaper, the hourly radio news and the 8pm TV news (in Germany) were my main source of information. Entertainment came from movies, some TV in the afternoon (there was no morning TV in Germany until 1987), a bit of radio, and mostly books.

Boy, have times changed:

I don't think most kids today even understand the idea of broadcast/network TV. Their broadcast TV is the DVR. My kid holds still for a photo no longer than a nanosceond until she rushes to the camera to say 'See'. She will never get the idea of waiting for a photo to be developed. And one day she will look at me and say: "What is a DVD?" Most have teenagers have never set a foot in a CD store.

The new generation expects to have everything available at a moments notice: News, Entertainment, Reference materials, even friends. Being off-the-grid is not an option. That also means that they are available 24/7 as well.

This will change our whole marketing environment. Campaigns will cease to exist at one point because brands have to be available all the time. The Google model won't work anymore because the underlying structure of its knowledge (the algorith that determines PageRank) is currently a commercial secret. The new generation won't accept this. The Wiki-approach will become more and more important than the top-down corporate approach that Google uses today, wrapped in a user-friendly exterior.
But beneath that wrap is the typical approach of GE, Ford or today's politics.
Users will ask for more democracy, for more openess.

Sites like FaceBook, YouTube or Digg claim to democratize content and media. But, in the end, they just destabilize the current system: Music industry, movie industry, TV, radio, politics.
Without sounding like an old fart, my main concern and real prediction for the future is that this new world reinforces a lack of opposing opinions. Why read varied opinions when you can get support for your views on blogs, niche sites and social networks? The world might be flat but our individual worlds becomes smaller and smaller because we don't allow other opinions and values to interfere in our subjective world.
Exploratory information seeking was the real value of newspapers. Reinforcing your own value system and limiting your information input to subjective interests is the real challenge coming generations will face.
Microsoft asks "Where do you want to go today?" We might not know in the future because we're so wrapped in our own little world.

Travelling without moving

Sarah Morning has written an insightful paper about The Digital Consumer.

It's an insightful look at the current digital marketing landscape. Thankfully, she doesn't focus on the technology side, rather on the consumer POV.

She describes the curent media situation as "standing on the edge of a gigantic unchartered landscape, an unmpapped digital space."
And she recommends splitting the inhabitants of this space into two groups: A) Digitourists

Digitourists essentially look for embassies in the virtual world. They look for sites or brands that act as guides. Digitourists, like any tourists, know exactly what they want to see and what they want to find - whether it be a product or a piece of information.

And there are the Digitravellers:

Digitravellers are different to Digitourists - no less or no more technologically able in many cases, they want however to explore things for themselves. They want to navigate their own way around the wilderness of information and stories of the internet, roughing it unguided through the digital landscape. Their interest lies not so much in arriving at a piece of information or a particular site, as the Digitourist’s does, but instead on the journey itself. For the Digitraveller it is all about the people they meet and the unexpected, undiscovered places they stumble across along the way.

“A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
Lao Tzu

She desribes further how marketers have to approach both type of explorers differently: Utilizing the old media model of disruption only makes sense for passive tourist, active travellers need to be engaged and they are the real, strategic challenge of the digital landscape.