Advertising is changing with traditional rules and expectations being apparently re-written by the Internet. So Mark asks what lies in the future for SEM, and what changes are current?

Imagine we wake up tomorrow morning, and there are no paid for ads to be found anywhere. No more pop-ups. No more click through fraud and manipulation. No more TV ads or billboards. No more need for SEO, outside analysing ‘organic content’. No more ad agency affectation: all gone!

The mother of all pipes

The main thing is that the Internet—that Mother of All Pipes-- and the Web would still be there.

So it wouldn’t be like the monochrome Soviet Union of the 1950s—where all women seemed to look like Ernest Bevin, and where the only food was potatoes and ice cream chased down with huge volumes of vodka. Would civilization collapse? Teenagers wouldn’t be too upset. They spend most of their online time gaming and instant messaging and joining such ‘social networking’ Sites as MySpace or NeoPets.

A fast growing population of young and youngish people—that is the under 35s—are members of what’s dubbed Generation C—that is online content consumers doubling up as content creators, including ads. Many of them share the ‘Linux’ crowd’s attitude of sharing, of working online to advance things for free, and expanding what known as the ‘participation economy.’ This, together with the rapid spread of ‘social networking’, is a truly ‘disruptive’ compound force.

Traditional rules re-written

It is beginning to re-write the rule that sets governing marketing and search—the latter is fast becoming a matter of people living and having their being in online ‘affinity’ groups swapping ideas about what’s ‘hot’, web sites and blogs to visit etc.

Photo source: Graham Jarvis ©

Not wobbled, but clean-eyed Many businesses, once they’d taken a clean-eyed look at the situation, wouldn’t be too wobbled by the evaporation of paid-for advertising, because most of their business is with existing customers, whom they’d better engage by other means anyway. Advertising is used in that case largely for making the existing customers feel good about having bought your product or service. But if your offering is any good and the customer’s ‘total experience’ with you is a winning one, ‘warmth’ through advertising isn’t needed.

For the rest, and forgive me for inserting a gentle plug here, with apologies to Seth Godin and Jakob Nielsen, much of customer engagement can be done, and I predict will increasingly be done, via ‘permission’ or ‘request’-based email ‘alerts’ and ‘notifications’ of what’s happening in and around the product or service. For me, the zeitgeist of the age spells word of mouth, viral marketing, ‘social networking’, ‘permission’ or ‘request-based notifications, and consumer content and product and service co-creation nibbling away at all forms of paid-for advertising.

Going Japanese?

I want to finish by noting an interesting development in Japan, where young consumers are post-graduates in the use of avant garde technology and embracing constant and frequent change. Go into any Japanese store and you’ll find people armed with cell phones reading bar codes. Well, Toshiba is piloting a service it hopes to bring to market next year, whereby you take a snap of a bar-code with your mobile phone and send it wirelessly to a database which holds a repository of comments, good and bad, on blogs and elsewhere, about the product concerned: and within a few seconds displays a summary of those comments on your phone. Talk about turning search-based marketing inside out and upside down!

By Mark Shee,
Director of Cambridge Convergence.

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