Hi Frank - With regard to the ideas being discussed perhaps I can offer some explanation of the underlying thought.
Since '99, I've been occupied with turn-of-the-century comparisons, especially between 1900 and the present. Economics is an obvious source of interest, and there appear to be some obvious (though inexact) parallels. However, an outstanding example would be the geopolitical, technological and industrial issues orbiting around the the battleship.
The answer to the battleship was not bigger battleships. It was aircraft carriers, which were a combination of technologies nascent or existing around the turn of the century. They didn't come into their own until WWII, but they changed the face of naval warfare and national force projection.
Unfortunately, that didn't stop many nations from nearly bankrupting themselves to produce military technology that turned out to be a complete waste of resources.
From the turn of the century, we saw the march of many other technologies: electrification, the automobile and personal transportation, mass production, and telecommunications - all underwritten by virtually unlimited access to vast quantities of cheap energy.
This was the Golden Age of capitalism; it was America's century.
---
Metaphorically, my objection to the linked article was that it speaks from a battleship. It addresses issues from the standpoint of America's acknowledged dominance in marketing, global media and telecomms, even as we see them passing.
The article provides examples of ingenious and adaptive approaches to marketing and advertising in the digital age.
"Marketers, ad agencies, and media companies need to partner in conceiving, executing, and monitoring winning marketing strategies. Various models will emerge that are tailored to the unique dynamics of the company–consumer relationship, but the dominant model is likely to be led by marketers."
Well, maybe. Besides instantaneous access to content, the net offers individuation and granularity. Marketers work back from the product to the consumer, which implies consumer acceptance in the first place. If consumers are rejecting advertising, how will they become aware of new products or new companies in the first place? I offer this home-brewed survey: among questioned users of Firefox, the leading reason for adoption is the ability to block advertising. I don't have acceptable data to corroborate this but suggest it's true, anyway. Anybody who's used the TV remote to skip ads will believe it.
Efforts by the RIAA are futile: they're trying to protect an outmoded model, created when the US dominated entertainment and the media. That dominance is over. The recording industry had a chance, a window of opportunity, to catch end-users if they had only recognized that their prices were far too high, and had offered end-users a convenient way to access and pay for content. They missed it, and now they get nothing. And once again, artists will sing for a song.
The fate of newspapers and their advertising revenues is known to all; what's not known is whether we'll see Internet equivalents offering content written to journalistic standards.
Farewell, Willie Lomax. P2P and Craigslist are writing your obituary.
Finally there are global trends, increased internationalization, and still-waiting inputs and models from other actors on the ascendant. Mostly, all coming through the browser.
---
What I was trying to address was not the failings of the article, but what I see as a battleship mentality. The time of the US business model, in which demand was successfully created by huge advertising budgets exercised on controlled mass media, is passing. For that conclusion, there are indicators everywhere.
Digital survivors will think differently: more so than the article imagines, because business itself will be different.
Jim |
