However, as search engines became smarter, this stopped working well. Besides, the few surviving search engines where exploring the mechanisms on how to make more revenue and would for that reason alone want to control the results more actively.
Thus, a change happened in marketing. Even before this happened I did make a bold prediction that we would have this new aspect of marketing appear. The human to machine specialist. Marketing before this was mostly an affair of humans trying to convince other humans to do things or spend money on things and services they presumably did not think to be needing otherwise.
The common incarnation of the human to machine marketer was the search engine specialist. Now, here was a marketer blissfully unconcerned about any human audience, rather focusing his energies on how to influence a system (search engine), which in turn would yield the outcome (higher search results). Whole companies specialized in this and are still today providing these services to others.
Banner companies appeared, and a sophisticated system of banner advertising that was content sensitive appeared. Things evolved and no one in their right mind wanted to click on banners any longer. Google ads was begotten and as most things Google, it drowned everything else out. Google rules the masses with Add text banners.
Now, we have this Web 2.0 happening and some of the paradigms with sites and submissions went out the door. So, then, you may ask, what with this web 2.0 stuff happening, whatever that is, will happen to the human to machine people? Will this have any impact on how marketing will evolve? Of course, thanks for the lead in .... If I were free to opine (which I am) I am going to make a prediction. Marketing will change once more to adopt to the next level of message delivery. Machine to machine marketing, or more specifically machine to machine Micromarketing, will emerge.
Sure, obvious you say; maybe so, but let me explain my particular take on this. Imagine a web application in new web 2.0 style, highly interactive, highly social (high stickiness). Maybe you and your buddies are watching a bike race unfold online. As you are looking at the leader riding his Schwinn bike to victory, in the background systems (machines) are negotiating advertising rates with Schwinn based on this event, i.e. sports (special section bike related), audience (your buddies, target group size, average incomes and ages, etc.); Schwinn's systems may have to bid automatically against a competitor (automated market rate auctions) to gain the rights to transparently overlay a marketing message on the race as the race unfolds. This happens several times, as leaders change position, new Marketing messages are negotiated. This is target advertising driven to a next level, highly personalized, informative, automatic, integrated. Wow! You are right, there is no escape now, we will be truly slaves to our passions and exploited for our whims ;o)
However, we are not there yet. There is a lot of work needed to create this next level of reality for marketing. Infrastructure and systems and protocols are just a few things.
- Negotiation protocol for marketing events. Probably something on top of WS standards, containing event information, exposure times, audiences, bid information.
- Advertising systems that can recognize types of events and are policy driven (executing against a pre-defined marketing strategy) to react to 1000s+ add requests per second.
- Micro-payment system: The ability needs to exist to pay for impressions or executions (clicks, seconds of videos watched, games played, names captured); maybe a quarter cent per incidence.
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