The other day I was chatting with a top executive from one of the advertising conglomerates about the current pressing topics in the advertising industry. Executives’ top-of-mind issues center on clients’ perception of value creation by agencies, which has continue to erode over the last years. Specific symptoms include pricing pressures from a procurement mentality, increasing competition from adjacent industries such as the new digital media companies and strategy consulting firms, and a drive to the commoditization of advertising creative within the array of services offered by the advertising and marketing communities.
I recalled that in 2000 I had written an article on the future of advertising for BOSS magazine which discussed all of these issues. It is often instructive to look back at the state of the industry to gain a better understanding of where it is today and where it’s going. Here’s the article, originally published in the July 2000 issue of the Australian Financial Review BOSS magazine. What it covers seems to be just as relevant and topical today as it was seven years ago.
Chasing the Play
If a potential client goes to London advertising agency St. Lukes and asks them to go away and create an advertising campaign, they refuse. Yet last year their billings increased 64%, more than twice as much as any of the other top-20 UK agencies. “We only co-create with our clients,” says St. Lukes chairman Andy Law. St. Lukes as a matter of course works closely with its clients to result in campaigns that have been created by the joint efforts of both parties.
The global advertising industry is in the midst of a dramatic transformation, and St. Lukes is one of the agencies at the vanguard of these deep shifts. Through the 90s traditional advertising agencies were squeezed hard both by new competitors and by clients, who often saw them as providers of commoditised services. Now the dramatic explosion of media and communications driven by digital technology is resulting in massive opportunities for agencies. However only those firms that adopt new ways of working with their clients and develop new skills will be able to take advantage of these opportunities, while the less dynamic firms will struggle at best.
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Extinction Timeline: what will disappear from our lives before 2050
By Ross DawsonWhen people talk about the future, they usually point to all the new things that will come to pass. However the evolution of human society is as much about old things disappearing as new things appearing. This means it is particularly useful to consider everything in our lives that is likely to become extinct.
Below is the Extinction Timeline created jointly by What’s Next and Future Exploration Network – click on the image for the detailed timeline as a pdf (1.2MB).
For those who want a quick summary of a few of the things that we anticipate will become extinct in coming years:
2009: Mending things
2014: Getting lost
2016: Retirement
2019: Libraries
2020: Copyright
2022: Blogging, Speleeng, The Maldives
2030: Keys
2033: Coins
2036: Petrol engined vehicles
2037: Glaciers
2038: Peace & Quiet
2049: Physical newspapers, Google
Beyond 2050: Uglyness, Nation States, Death
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Online bringing people together: Brooklyn Bridge Photowalk
By Ross DawsonWhile I was spending some time in New York recently, Dave Sifry, until recently CEO of Technorati, just happened to organize a photowalk on Brooklyn Bridge of a Saturday morning. He was in new York for a few days, so decided to organize it, posted it on his blog, got some other bloggers to mention it, and he mentioned it on his Facebook page. Around 10 of us saw it and decided to go along. At lunch in a restaurant in Chinatown after the event, we all told of how we came to be there. David had only met two of the people on the walk – I’ve known David for quite a few years now and have previously been to one of his photo exhibitions in San Francisco – while the rest had come across the gathering in other ways through blogs, social networks, or personal connections. It was a great example of how the online world easily enables people to get together to do fun things in the real live world away from screens. Get an idea to do something interesting, and you’ll likely find similarly inclined people to do it with you.
Below are a few of my photos from the day, including some of my wife Victoria and daughter Leda, who came along for the fun. It’s also well worth having a look at the complete set of David’s photos from the day.
Manhattan through the wires
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Bill Amelio, CEO of Lenovo, and Ross Dawson interviewed on global sourcing
By Ross DawsonMark Jones of The Scoop, a recently launched podcast series from the Australian Financial Review and MIS Magazine, recently interviewed Bill Amelio, CEO of PC manufacturer Lenovo (formerly the PC division of IBM), and myself in a discussion on global sourcing.
Click here to go to The Scoop podcast page.
Amelio has been a strong proponent of what he calls “worldsourcing,” laying out the ideas in a recent article in Forbes titled Worldsource or Perish. Some have seen this stance as a way of diverting attention from the significant Chinese ownership of the company. A more relevant perspective is that Lenovo is a harbinger of the truly global corporations of the future, which will be very different animals from the companies of today. Currently almost all large companies have very distinct single national identities (primarily American) that are spread across many countries, despite the common rhetoric of global organizational cultures.
In the podcast Amelio discusses Lenovo’s perspective on sourcing design and products from wherever they’re best found around the planet, and Lenovo’s current challenges.
Some of the issues I raise in the interview include:
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Fifth anniversary of Trends in the Living Networks blog!
By Ross DawsonToday it’s five years since my first post on this blog (see the posts for October 2002). Originally it was simply the Living Networks blog, launched to accompany the release of my book Living Networks, and was part of the book website. A book is static, and particularly on a topic such as living networks, it makes sense to make the topic alive and keep the conversation going. As far as I’m aware Living Networks was the first business book – and one of the first books – to have a companion blog. Since then I have relaunched the blog as Trends in the Living Networks as an ongoing conversation.
The opening words of Living Networks, launched in November 2002, were:
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Why Web 3.0 is a meaningless term
By Ross DawsonA couple of months ago when I was spending a few packed days of meetings up and down the 101 in Silicon Valley, several people asked me about Web 3.0. I told them pointedly what I thought, and at the time I determined to write a blog post on why Web 3.0 is a meaningless term, but never got around to it.
This seems worth coming back to, since Jason Calacanis has just proferred his own definition: “Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”
Which is a fabulous illustration of my point: that when people refer to Web 3.0, it means whatever they want it to mean. In other words it’s a meaningless term until the point that there is a reasonable degree of common understanding of its meaning, so it can be used in a sentence and actually convey something.
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APML gains momentum – this could transform the personalization of advertising
By Ross DawsonI’ve written before about attention profiling as one of the major trends in the online world. One of significant initiatives in the space is APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language), an open standard for how people’s attention profiles are described. Having this as a standard will, among other things, enable applications to refine how they provide information to users based on their interests, and allow people to publish their profiles so that they are better served by suppliers and information providers.
Bloglines, the top or second placed feed reader, has just announced that it is looking at supporting APML in future releases, while Chris Saad, a founder of APML, says that they expect a number of other similar announcements from major players over coming months. While Bloglines has not yet included APML support in the product, voicing its interest indicates this is very likely, and is no doubt intended to spur other companies to follow suit. There is little value to an open standard unless it is widely adopted.
One of the interesting things about APML is that it operates at a fairly high-level, giving a framework for people’s degree of interest in topics on a scale of +1 to -1 (accurately reflecting that people have negative interest (revulsion?) in some topics). Anyone who uses APML can use whatever means they wish to uncover what people’s attention profiles are. In this case, whichever companies are better at determining attention profiles will win, while the standard for sharing those profiles remains the same.
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Video interview on Enterprise 2.0 by Melcrum/ KM Review
By Ross DawsonThe other day Alex Manchester, Editor of the Melcrum publications KM Review and The Internal Comms Hub, did a video interview of me, covering a broad range of issues relating to Enterprise 2.0 and the application of social media inside organizations. The video is posted on the Melcrum Blog as well as below. Soon Melcrum will post a slightly longer version on their site – I’ll post the info on this when it’s available.
A brief summary of the questions and answers in the video are below.
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Developing Knowledge Based Client Relationships popular in Consulting and Customer Service
By Ross DawsonMy book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships has popped up again on a few Popular lists on Amazon.com, notably on Consulting and Customer Service. The first edition, which came out in January 2000, was for two months #1 on Amazon.com from Australia, and spent two years in the top 20 book purchases from Deloitte & Touche among other topseller lists. Sales of the second edition have been solid and consistent but not spectacular so it’s good to see it get some more prominence. While one of the chapters is devoted to how technology is used in professional client relationships, very little covered by the book dates quickly, which means it continues to be relevant over the years and has a long shelf life. Maybe a third edition in 2010 or so?
Dennis Howlett of AccMan fame recently wrote a brief review of the book, excerpted here:
Deconstructing the press release: how tagging will change journalistic workflow
By Ross DawsonOne of the big debates in PR over the last couple of years in has been whether the press release is in the last throes of death, or still healthy and thriving for years to come. Tom Foremski, formerly of the Financial Times and now publisher of SiliconValleyWatcher, has no doubt on the matter, and wants the press release to be terminated with prejudice, writing a blog post titled Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die!
However rather than leaving a gaping hole in how organizations communicate to the media, Tom has a specific proposal to succeed the press release. In summary:
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Creating the Future of Advertising – looking back to look forward
By Ross DawsonThe other day I was chatting with a top executive from one of the advertising conglomerates about the current pressing topics in the advertising industry. Executives’ top-of-mind issues center on clients’ perception of value creation by agencies, which has continue to erode over the last years. Specific symptoms include pricing pressures from a procurement mentality, increasing competition from adjacent industries such as the new digital media companies and strategy consulting firms, and a drive to the commoditization of advertising creative within the array of services offered by the advertising and marketing communities.
I recalled that in 2000 I had written an article on the future of advertising for BOSS magazine which discussed all of these issues. It is often instructive to look back at the state of the industry to gain a better understanding of where it is today and where it’s going. Here’s the article, originally published in the July 2000 issue of the Australian Financial Review BOSS magazine. What it covers seems to be just as relevant and topical today as it was seven years ago.
Chasing the Play
If a potential client goes to London advertising agency St. Lukes and asks them to go away and create an advertising campaign, they refuse. Yet last year their billings increased 64%, more than twice as much as any of the other top-20 UK agencies. “We only co-create with our clients,” says St. Lukes chairman Andy Law. St. Lukes as a matter of course works closely with its clients to result in campaigns that have been created by the joint efforts of both parties.
The global advertising industry is in the midst of a dramatic transformation, and St. Lukes is one of the agencies at the vanguard of these deep shifts. Through the 90s traditional advertising agencies were squeezed hard both by new competitors and by clients, who often saw them as providers of commoditised services. Now the dramatic explosion of media and communications driven by digital technology is resulting in massive opportunities for agencies. However only those firms that adopt new ways of working with their clients and develop new skills will be able to take advantage of these opportunities, while the less dynamic firms will struggle at best.
Read more →