Greg Verdino is graciously sharing some of his good thinking on emerging technology trends … and while he has taken out some of the detailed thinking and analysis, there is enough there to get your brain firing.
I particularly like the section on kids … it is clear that kids no longer make a distinction between real/virtual personas in the way that we/I do (the older generation). As Greg says, "virtual identities are the real deal for youth".
The implications for brands and marketers are profound. As consumers shift their mindsets away from traditional channels and methods of brand engagement/product selection, those businesses that have not begun the long task of understanding emerging media will find themselves in danger of irrelevance. More importantly perhaps, the gaps left in the market will be filled by new brands eager and willing to play in the spaces inhabited by this new generation of consumers, leaving the late-comer brands out in the cold.
Will there still be a place for the late-comers? Of course … but the size of the market will shrink, with the audience base simply drifting away to new brands/technologies/platforms. A good example is another of Greg’s trends — the shift in the focus of digital video. Driven by multiple need states demonstrated by the rise of timeshifting/on-demand and user generated content, what we now consider "television" will continue to lose contact with its shifting audience base, allowing new operators such as Joost to CREATE a new market space potentially more lucrative (and targeted) than the old free-to-air network.
Makes me feel older just thinking about it 😉
Thanks so much for sharing this Gavin–I’m no marketer, but I do basically live 🙂 on the the internet, so it all sounds spot on to me.
The thing that particularly hits home is the observation that today’s internet dwellers have expanded their concept of what is “real” to naturally include everything virtual.
We don’t regard the virtual world as a fantasy land, but rather as another dimension in which to live/work/play.
It’s amazingly interesting that real life (RL) marketers are now trying to figure out how to get a business presence in Second Life (SL) and that many of them are seeminly having some probs adjusting to the fact that they can’t market in SL in the same way that they market in RL.
In case you haven’t seen it yet, I’m loving the SL avatar 57 Miles’ (aka Nick Wilson) new blog called http://www.Metaversed.com, which is all about business in virtual worlds. It’s just fascinating, and I’m learning a lot about virtual marketing there.