I’m doing a quick browsing pass through my feeds again and of course, the live bloggings from Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote are hard not to read. We might be witnessing historical events here. The quote below is from Techcrunch’s blog:
Zuckerberg: “Once every hundred years media changes. the last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have. Advertising will change. You will need to get into these connections.”
Now, this is an important insight. This kind of phenomenon can move very quickly. Because not only are these mechanisms potentially very effective, they are also to a large extent stripped from economical risk. At least when it comes to high risk distribution (i.e. expensive television shotgun technique). What will probably happen over time however is that adverting agencies will understand the value of great content and push at least part of the economical risk back to the advertiser by raising prices of great content (which will by the law of relativity always be a scarce resource). But expensive broadcasting will soon be history. The medium is not the message anymore, the message is the medium.
And that is very good news for the advertising industry, and not so good news for the television networks. This time content is king for real.
My question now to the advertising agencies of the world is whether you are staffed for this or not? Will the same people who have delivered witty, cool or beautiful ads that have been forced upon an audience be able to truly entertain, inspire and provide services? I’m not so sure.
Oh, by the way – add the words “Beacon” and “Pandemic” to you professional dictionary.