The Curve of Common Sense

Note: This was first published on my other blog on June 8, 2007 and also in Social Computing Magazine.

The role of mediation is a biggy in social media. If, as seems likely, the influence of the traditional media is going to decline in the face of huge growth in citizen media or consumer generated content , who is going to perform the role of guardian, gatekeeper, arbiter of standards and quality – and all the other things most traditional media players like to think it is they do? Is there a risk that everything will slip to the level of the lowest common denominator – not so much the wisdom of crowds, but the stupidity of the herd?

PR is dead

 

I have written this as a follow-on / adjunct to the piece I wrote on the future of advertising – and also as a build to this article by Dan Greenfield. I have decided to call it PR is dead shamelessly following the link-baiting success of a piece also posted today called Microsoft is Dead.

My view would be that PR doesn’t have a future collectively speaking. Defining PR has always been difficult, and there is no other communications discipline which encompasses such a wide range of specialisms. There is a tenuous glue which holds the bits of PR together, which is either the fact that it isn’t advertising, or the fact that it operates primarily in non-owned or controlled channels. This isn’t strong glue – especially since operating in a non-owned channel is now where everyone is headed.

The future of advertising

There seems to be a lot of conversation about the future of advertising going on at the moment. See Pete Blackshaws’ post of yesterday, the rather lengthy Bob Garfield article in Advertising Age Pete refers to – and also the consistently stimulating Hugh Macleod.

Here’s my take. The 30 second ad has a healthy future – but not the sort of 30 second ads upon which the ad business is currently based. In the future there will be small specialist agencies which will knock out 30 or 60 second visual stuff for placement in paid-for channels for a fraction of the price traditional ad agencies currently charge. They will be able to make a living out of this because they won’t have the vast bloated infrastructure of planning, account management and hugely paid creatives to support. The content they produce won’t be “creative” in Cannes award-winning sort of sense. It will be basic, good old-fashioned, product benefit, information and price focused stuff. It won’t struggle (and fail) to carry an entire brand narrative in the way that most of current advertising is struggling (and failing) to do. The agencies that produce it will just be one segment of a whole swath of specialist content creators out there.

A brand manager’s social media manifesto

Something I submitted to Hugh Macleod’s Gaping Void blog as part of his campaign to collect manifestos.

The future isn’t what it used to be

The future isn’t what it used to be is a piece I have written that is an attempt to focus on the bigger picture of the world of social media. It does this by making ten semi-serious predictions of what the marketing and communications world could look like in five to ten years time.

These are:

1. The price of traditional media will be cut in half within 5 years
2. The world’s leading media organisations won’t actually produce content
3. The 30 second TV ad will live
4. The rise of specialists and aggregators
5. The death of the brand proposition and the rise of the brand story
6. Marketing departments to split into story departments and conversation departments
7. The emergence of the category consumer franchise
8. The rise of the global micro-brand
9. The rise of brand watch communities
10. The emergence of Digital Identity Stress and Digital Schizophrenia as recognised medical conditions

Apologies for the length of the article – I hope it stimulates some thinking. I also promise that I will not frequently post my own work to the network!