The Year Of The Internet Where You Live

Drive Carefully

A brief moment of storytelling. Indulge, if you will.

In January 2005, I was working at one of the world's most advanced online marketing companies. We served up behaviorally targeted work in a proprietary window, with fantastic targeting opportunities, cross-traffic analysis, and best-in-class reporting. I had the advantage of data driven insights in hundreds of properties and consumer categories, and it was incredibly fast-paced, with creative turns coming in a near real-time environment.

I was also in strong need of a vacation, especially at the end of the busy holiday season, and took one of the bigger ones of my life, a 2-week trip to New Zealand.

New Zealand in 2005 was, in terms of the Internet, about a decade behind the red-hot Silicon Valley scene that was my day to day. Wifi was in its infancy, cell phones (none all that smart) didn't work for much of the area, and connection speed was frequently open to question. I'd log in at cybercafes or in the evenings, clear my email, and took a couple of interviews with press and direct marketing companies while seeing the sights.

I also thought long and hard about emigrating. The country was (and presumably, is) incredibly beautiful, the food was great, and every time we went someplace new (we rented a car and went from the North Island to the South), it got even better. Professionally, I also knew that on some level, I had a tactical advantage of knowing what the future of the country would look like, and could use that to benefit clients. But in the talks that I had with many of the players there, it became clear that overcoming skepticism and conservatism would just be too frustrating, and starting over entirely new wasn't going to work on a personal level. If I had been 10 years younger, I probably would have decided otherwise, and my life would have been very different.

The broader point of bringing this up is the stark differences stayed with me as an opportunity not taken. Knowing when your industry, country or consumer category is, rather than just making the Naturalistic Fallacy of assuming that is what is true for you is true for all, is a strong consideration. And the relative when is only going to get more complicated with the advent of what's referred to as mobile today, and will be better understood later as the Internet of Things.

There are tactics (personalized recommendations, dynamic content, community and social media) that are done in, say, e-commerce... that have not come to pass in other categories or countries just yet. It's also possible that they might never; given the Web's downward pressure on profit margins for brick and mortar, you can see why some actors would prefer that this "progress" would not come their way.

But the same forces that made the lower fruit fall from the tree should, eventually, take care of most of the higher pieces. What happened to the music industry predicted, with cruel certainty, what happened to journalism. Connectivity across devices will speed things like showrooming, consumer reviews, social interaction into brand marketing, and so on, and so on. E-commerce efficiencies will start to intrude on last mile business where location has mattered more than connectivity. Targeting for lead generation and CRM was already used to great effect in the 2012 and 2014 political cycles, in ways that took many by surprise, but no one who works in high touch e-commerce.

So what does the savvy marketing and advertising pro do, to take advantage of this condition? Monitor not just your category, but others that match your demo -- especially if they are more technologically advanced or web-savvy. Consider how trends in the overall Web (social, mobile, changing browsers and platforms, wearable/IoT) might be used to impact your business, and lobby internally to have a proactive, rather than reactive, road map in development. Keep your eyes and ears open, because when the world changes, it doesn't do so with polite updates.

After all, we're thirty years and counting into an ever-widening role of connectivity changing our lives. If you can take advantage of being further along in the story, you've got a better chance of making that story work for you.

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