Well, I had to do it – everyone else was 
Here are some predictions from me for what we might see happening in 2009 from a digial marketing POV. (emphasis is heavily on the “might”)…
Display is going to take a big hit
OK – i’ll admit it. Whilst I do regularly get involved in banner campaigns, and I do even add them into the mix (sometimes) when I am working on stragegy, I feel well and truly that banners are failing us all. Whether we are on the inside of the industry, client-side or consumers clicking along happily on our site of choice, banners really aren’t doing it for anyone any more are they? And what with recent reports that TV CPM is dropping like a stone, even getting so low as in the £4 CPM region, digital CPM rates are as high as ever. I am sure they’ll come down as well, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that in these days of increased ROI and accountability, where every penny counts of that all important ad budget, banners do not deliver the scale per pound that you can get in other forms of digital marketing. Something like viral, whilst not being so applicable for all audiences I grant you, has a much better bang-for-buck than display ever can. I know, I know, they do different jobs, but for me, display is simply not cost effective. To be quite honest, I am amazed at times we still so it!
We’ll all get closer to the price point
So, what I don’t mean by this is that all marketing is going to become point-of-sale and we’re all going to need to learn how to make wobblers if we want to keep our jobs (god I love wobblers! they really are the ultimate expression of marketing genius stuck onto a transparent piece of bouncy plastic – when I come back I want to be the small adhesive patch on the back of a wobbler stuck to a shelf in Happy Shopper!). What I mean is that I think there will be a greater emphasis as we move further into 2009, and indeed into the credit crunch/recession/global-bank-hell-nightmare-retail-meltdown in which we find our postmodern-selves well and truly trapped, for brands to shift their advertising well and truly below the line, placing more emphasis on value and, dare I say it, price. it’s already started to some degree although it’s fueled by retail brands desperately trying to grab sales-dollars in the pre and post Xmas period – but I think it will continue to be a prominent feature for some time to come as companies try to maintain consumer spending patterns, grabbing hold of what spend is occuring as much as they can by persuading not so much on lifestyle, or features, but on value for plain old money.
Planning currency woes
So, there’s a new industry body to sort out this issue of a planning currency so the big boys, the likes of Unilever and P&G, can feel more relaxed about spending money on digital and will all of a sudden inject billions of dollars into the business. And with the likes of Microsoft, and other big “media owners” wading in and taking a seat at the table they might just pull it off this year – and as we all know, they’ve been trying to do it for long enough as it is! But, the real issue is – do we really care? Does a planning currency even make sense to us now in this digital world? How do you make up a planning currency for activity taking place in a social media space? When it extends beyond the original space which was purchased, or which a campaign was intended to inhabit, how does that affect the measurement? It couldn’t happen that easily in an oldschool print based world, or even TV for that matter, but we all know now it’s as simple as hitting Apple+4 and sticking it onto Flickr. So, whilst it might, MIGHT, get sorted out, we’ll probably end up making a rod for our own backs in the process.
Desktop Schmextop
Desktop computers will take a hit as we move more and more away from the “traditional” PC/Mac based interaction with the internet and the web, and transition to a more mobile, and a more converged method of dealing with digital and online spaces. A good friend of mine, Pete Trainor, told me the other night over a beer (actually I remember it being several beers, some cocktails and some really nice Californian Pinot Noir – but who’s counting!) that during a recent lecture he gave at a University, on the subject of the future of digital marketing, he realised at a certain point that he hardly mentioned a computer based interface at all, and found himself talking about mobile, outdoor, and other ways of getting online. I found this very apt. The more we get used to dealing with the web in other ways, the less important an actual PC will be to us. Hardware manufacturers like HP, Dell and Apple (and that’s another thing! What the hell are you doing Apple? You are SO run of the mill now it hurts us!) are seeing this as the shift away from dsktop machines to cheaper, portable laptops – and it won’t stop there. infact, I think we’ll move away from desktops and laptops substantially over the next year or so and find ourselves using the internet in more bespoke, niche ways with hardware and software specially designed to do small, very focused jobs. Mainframe -> terminal -> desktop -> laptop -> netbook -> smartphone -> ? You see where I am going?
X marks the spot
2009 may well be the year that GPS becomes a pocket-based household name and not just something you stick to the windscreen of your car to tell you where you live (seriously people, what is wrong with a map or road atlas?!) – as more and more phones start to add GPS as a key feature into the mix, we’ll see people naturally getting more and more used to it – coming to rely on it, and not regading it as “techy” any more – it’ll just be “the map on my mobile”. And it’s not just phones. Cameras are starting to get it more too. Geotagging your photos will become common place, especially as the online services like Flickr, and consumer facing photo software like the very recently announced iPhoto ‘09 include it as a basic part of their feature set. GPS is here to stay, and as it becomes more prevalent it’ll make it’s way more and more into the advertising and marketing we use and create. In the same way that brands are starting to use very focused keywords alongside SEO to drive traffic from offline to on (who hasn’t heard “SEARCH ONLINE FOR XXX” in a campaign recently? Although obviously searching online for “XXX” might get you some dodgy results!) I believe we’ll start seeing innovative uses of GPS in campaigns for driving people directly to retail locations and the like.
Search online for “adventuresdm”
Like I touched on in the above paragraph, I think the way we use search, and how it drives from off to online, is going to get more related to keywords and rely less and less on URLs. We all know that a search engine is more often than not the starting point for all user journeys online. And recently we’ve a seen brands like Orange, and indeed the Government, using “SEARCH ONLINE FOR XYZ” as part of integrated campaigns. The benefit is clear – a simple, memorable keyword is needed for users to find your site via Google or Yahoo. Rather than the user having to remember a URL, a microsite URL, or ever a subdomain or folder location – which are increasingly difficult to sort out and often seen as bad for SEO and brand URL consisency – they simply have to remember “orange” or some similarly cachy word, and stick it into google when they get home (hell, if you’re clever you’ll do a mobile version of the site so they can do it on the move!). I think we’ll see a lot more of this in 2009. I like it lot. I even wrote it down on a bit of paper today in a client meeting! Woot!
And finally…
Someone will make a tube station outdoor digital campaign featuring people going up or down escalators
I predict that someone, somewhere, in an agency, will think it’s a great idea in 2009, to produce a campaign for the london underground digital screens, that features someone, something, or any combination of, moving up or down the escalators with you.
Fun-un-ny!
There’s one out there now, for the ITV show demons, where the “hero” and some dog-faced hoodies (which are presumably these demons? – although they look like a scary combintion of Churchill the insurance dog and a kid I saw the other night hanging around outside the Spar) move up the escalators with you having a fight with a sword.
Yup – I predict that at some time in 2009 somewhere at some agency will think it’s a good idea to do another one of these detestable executions that are probably the first thing that springs to anyones mind when they think of digital outdoor screens. Please, I beg you, don’t do it. It makes my journey to work hell when I see one of these. First one was good. Second one was good too. Now, it’s a cliche. Stop – just stop.
and on that bombshell, I think I’ll get my coat…..
Howard
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