Simon Dumenco
May 13, 2013
Media Guy Sees The Future and It Ain't Pretty
Adam Popescu
Apr 30, 2013
Fast forward to 2020. What job skill must you have? Coding.
Matt Burns
Mar 29, 2013
3D printing is still in its infancy. But, to use an overused phrase, it is the future. From home use to enterprise use, 3D printing will continue to grow and break into new areas.
Zak Stone
Mar 6, 2013
A new accelerator is looking for how we’re going to create and view content. What’s the future going to bring?
Samuel Arbesman
Feb 25, 2013
What if technology makes scientific discoveries that we can’t understand?
Doug Checkeris
Oct 12, 2010
As clients and agencies alike continue to enhance and solidify their digital-marketing competencies, there is an emerging challenge that has to be addressed and met now to ensure maximum growth in the interactive sector: How do we as an industry create -- and importantly, maintain -- a deep pool of qualified and sufficiently trained digital-marketing professionals, specifically at the junior and middle-management levels?
Simon Dumenco
Sep 27, 2010
Plus: magazines are making a comeback and VCs might be getting desperate.
Nick Bilton
Sep 13, 2010
If you pull out your smartphone and click the button that says “locate me” on your mapping application, you will see a small dot appear in the middle of your screen.
That’s you.
If you start walking down the street in any direction, the whole screen will move right along with you, no matter where you go.
This is a dramatic change from the print-on-paper world, where maps and locations are based around places and landmarks, not on you or your location. In the print world people don’t go to the store and say, “Oh, excuse me, can I buy a map of me?” Instead, they ask for a map of New York, or Amsterdam, or the subway system. You and I aren’t anywhere to be seen on these maps. The maps are locations that we fit into.
Matt York
Sep 8, 2010
Over the last five years, social media has evolved from a handful of communities that existed solely in a web browser to a multi-billion dollar industry that’s quickly expanding to mobile devices, driving major changes in content consumption habits and providing users with an identity and social graph that follows them across the web.
With that framework in place, the next five years are going to see even more dramatic change. Fueled by advancements in underlying technology – the wires, wireless networks and hardware that make social media possible – a world where everything is connected awaits us. The result will be both significant shifts in our everyday lives and a changing of the guard in several industries that are only now starting to feel the impact of social media
Aug 25, 2010
In part ten of a series of conversations exploring the state of social media, Chris Beck, founder of 26dottwo and I speculate on the future of social networks.
Social networking as it exists today is not scalable nor is it representative of how social beings connect and engage. We are complex individuals we are defined by what we share, consume, and to whom we connect. Our social graphs are woven with the fabrics of our interests, passions, and relations. One update does not resonate across the social graph. Networks will evolve to match content to context and allow us to seamlessly connect relevant information and people based on frames of reference and subjects.
Dan Redding
Aug 16, 2010
The Internet is a medium that is evolving at breakneck speed. It’s a wild organism of sweeping cultural change — one that leaves the carcasses of dead media forms in its sizeable wake. It’s transformative: it has transformed the vast globe into a ‘global village’ and it has drawn human communication away from print-based media and into a post-Gutenberg digital era. Right now, its perils are equal to its potential. The debate over ‘net neutrality’ is at a fever pitch. There is a tug-of-war going on between an ‘open web’ and a more governed form of the web (like the Apple-approved apps on the iPad/iPhone) that has more security but less freedom.
Emily McManus
Aug 6, 2010
Today’s playlist is about toys that inspire learning, innovation — and of course fun! These are the toys of the technological age: they are alive, they think, they perform magic. What were your favorite toys as a kid (or an adult), and what did they inspire in you?
Jul 30, 2010
Will we ever create our own Homer?
I am not being argumentative. This is an open question. The answer could be "soon" or it could be "never," and I'll be happy. However we answer this question, we will have improved our anthropological understanding of contemporary culture.
Jan Gardner
Jun 18, 2010
At the Center for Future Storytelling, researchers envision how technology can give people more control over TV programs they encounter and stories they follow.
May 25, 2010
How can Coca-Cola get from 2010 to 2020? Tom LaForge’s job is to identify where the world is going so Coca-Cola can can evolve within it. As Director of Knowledge & Insights, he studies key macro forces that will shape the next ten years include population growth, spread of capitalism, increased affluence, medical advances.
May 13, 2010
What’s a college to do? Building a brand isn’t the only solution, but it certainly must be a key part of any strategy based on attracting students in an increasingly competitive arena. A school that is known for something, whether that something special is academic, geographic, or even extra-curricular, will fare better than schools who have failed to establish their brand.
May 12, 2010
Global innovation firm Frog Design recently brought designers, futurists and journalists together to envision the future of computing in 2020. In 2020, the computer is not only incorporated into every aspect of our lives, but should become an integral part of ourselves. With this in mind, the workshop aimed to imagine how future technology would influence the key areas of Social, Travel, Commerce, Healthcare, and Media.
Nilofer Merchant
May 11, 2010
A great deal of my community has given up on large organizations, stating that the “true” innovation is now happening at start-ups. What that story misses is that many of the “free agents” we see around us as consultants, and so on are actually part of a larger enterprise, albeit in a loose relationship. Larger organizations will survive if only because of the human need to be apart of something larger and the efficiencies of those ecosystems.
Dean Crutchfield
Apr 23, 2010
The baleful consequences of the Great Recession cannot be resolved by maintaining the same approaches as when we created it. The "new normal" in business means many brand owners need to leverage something much larger than a re-take on marketing. They need to accelerate their collaboration with consumers, so that principles such as "for people, for planet, for profit," combined with tools of the web and next-generation media, can transform brands' role in the economy, society and business.
Vijay Govindarajan
Apr 16, 2010
Strategy used to be about protecting your existing competitive advantage. Today, it's about finding the next advantage. Strategy starts to decay the moment it's created. That's why corporations must develop strategies that address tomorrow's business realities. Strategic actions that companies take belong in one of three boxes.
Apr 13, 2010
Google wants to be the next big enterprise software company.
Truth be told, Google wants to be the next big everything. Monday's target was the budding Web-based enterprise software market, as Google pulled out all the stops to convince an audience of 400 CIOs and technology managers--plus far more on a Webcast--that cloud computing isn't so much the future as the present and Google can make it happen.
Umair Haque
Apr 7, 2010
Welcome to...the Roaring Teens? More than a few investors I've spoken to recently think that because consumption appears to be skyrocketing upwards again, all's well that end's well. And on the basis of that conclusion, they're ready to pump capital back into the same old industrial era assets and businesses.
Would that it were so. A slightly deeper logic suggests a very different conclusion.
Brian Solis
Apr 7, 2010
Trending topics reveal much more than the objects that captivate the hearts, minds, and keyboards of Twitter users around the world. Twitter’s trends is a cultural mirror that reflects the state of attention and intention. And as such, Tweets then offer an MRI that visualizes the minds of consumers and more importantly, serve as a crystal ball that reveals the future of products and services before and soon after they’re released.
For the most part, however, the vast amount of precious insight is widely untapped. Instead, businesses focus on volume and congregation, enticing brands to engage in the conversation rather than truly capturing and analyzing the activity that inherently inspires empathy and ultimately relevance.
I think that’s about to change…
Larry Light
Mar 24, 2010
Today's consumers are more intuitive, more informed, more skeptical and more demanding than ever. They live in a world of immense choice and personalization. They want the benefits of increased choice without the complexity of increased choice.
With the economic anxiety of our times, there is a growing generation of shoppers for whom frugality is fashionable. These changes are tailor-made for the talents of marketers. But marketers be warned: We need to be concerned about the degradation of marketing. We must redefine it--or be part of its deadly decline.
Feb 19, 2010
Is anonymity online coming to an end? The pervasive attitude says yes.
The Pew Research Center teamed up with Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center to survey 895 experts on the future of the Internet--and at the forefront of the discussion is the sticky topic of anonymity. Experts were nearly split down the middle, with 55% agreeing that Internet users will be able to communicate anonymously and 41% agreeing that, by 2002, "anonymous online activity is sharply curtailed." Not only are there divergent opinions on whether online anonymity will be possible in the future, there isn't even a consensus on whether anonymity is universally desirable.
Feb 18, 2010
For many marketers, considering mobile marketing year after year is the same story. The year starts off with lots of hype about it finally being the "year of mobile marketing" ... and after a month or two, the excitement dies down and reality hits. Most teams realize that they lack the experience or knowledge on what type of messages people will actually engage with and bow to the fear that only a fraction of the people they care about will respond to advertising or marketing in a mobile environment. Predictably, their attention turns elsewhere and mobile marketing initiatives stall. Is this year really going to be any different?
Pete Blackshaw
Feb 3, 2010
My first exposure to the term "social media" came courtesy of Ted Leonsis, former VP of AOL, back in 1998. At the time, I was one of the leaders of Procter & Gamble's first interactive marketing team, and Leonsis was briefing us on a new tool called ICQ ("I Seek You"), created by an Israeli company AOL had just purchased, Mirabelis.
What Leonsis put on our lap was akin to instant messaging on steroids. He had no clue how P&G might take advantage of this curious tool. There was no "ad model," per se, and he even had doubts whether advertising was appropriate. He just thought we needed to internalize its capabilities -- what with tens of millions of global consumers, mostly teens, using an insanely wired and networked desktop device with so many hieroglyphic style icons, it would make your head spin.
Feb 1, 2010
What joy. This week, The Economist, every Capitalist’s favorite magazine, has published a special report on social networking: The Economist on social networking - world of connections.
A World of Connections, provides an excellent overview of the current state of social media for those still trying to get to grips with it.
Jan 28, 2010
For over a decade, with simple BBS systems to community platforms, support communities haven’t undergone much innovation. Often a silo and tucked away in a website, these communities are going to take center stage. With social technologies appearing on every webpage, and more existing systems starting to connect, expect to see interesting use cases evolve. Support focused communities will evolve to touch marketing, sales, channel partners, CRM systems, and even become a thriving platform in the next few years. Let’s explore the rapid changes coming together.
Jan 13, 2010
Ten years ago we thought wireless was another word for radio, Peter Mandelson’s career was over – and only birds tweeted. So what will life be like a decade from now? The Independent newspaper provides a glimpse.
Chris Dannen
Jan 11, 2010
Sometimes it takes a million square feet of gizmos to understand where humanity is headed. After all the pageantry and pixels, here's what the world learned about tech in 2010.
Ian Schafer
Jan 9, 2010
By now many marketers have probably played around Foursquare or Gowalla or know someone who has. For the uninitiated, these are location-based mobile applications that allow people to "check in" from stadiums, bars and bookstores and compete for "mayorship," collect badges and share tips. They are practical, addicting and lots of fun.
Users of these services number in the hundreds of thousands today. That's small by national advertiser standards, but it's significant for many local advertisers, which are offering discounts to frequent visitors and offers to people who are physically nearby. This is a trend in local marketing worth noting because it promises to give national advertisers the opportunity to conjure up or attach to an emotion among smaller niche groups.
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Dec 29, 2009
When asked what his title as president of Google’s sales operations and business development means, Nikesh Arora answers: “I’m basically responsible for the business side.”
At Google – whose engineers can sometimes be accused of being on missions unconnected with the bottom line – this means working out the future of advertising in the digital economy Google helped create.
Stan Schroeder
Dec 21, 2009
I’ve seen Avatar (the 3D version) over the weekend, and while I won’t go into the content of the movie, technologically it’s a must-see. Think you’ve seen 3D? Avatar truly takes it to the next level, giving us a glimpse of the movie industry’s future.
Bob Liodice
Dec 18, 2009
As we begin a one-year celebration of the ANA's 100th anniversary, we have created the Marketers' Constitution, which contains 10 essentials of marketing for the next 100 years. Its purpose is to ensure that our industry continues to thrive and contribute to the growth of the U.S. economy and to the well-being of our society.
Mercedes Bunz
Nov 25, 2009
In digital media, as in fortune-telling, the future is pretty much treated as part of the present. "What is the next big thing?" is a question everyone who works with the internet asks continually. But after several years of boom, the question of what comes after social platforms is no longer so remote.
Luckily, some experts just gave us answers. On Monday evening, the Said Business School in Oxford had invited some very bright and successful entrepreneurs who spoke in front of a packed alumni audience as Silicon Valley came to Oxford for the ninth year. The event was chaired by the very lively and assertive Frances Cairncross, rector of Exeter college.
Nov 23, 2009
Amid some 200 analysts, investors and media last week, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent made a confession.
"There was a period when our company did lose its way," he said. "We were too internally focused and not focused enough on the changes taking place with our consumers and customers. In essence, we were too busy looking at the dashboard and were not sufficiently paying attention to the world outside of our windshield." While Coca-Cola remains the dominant beverage company in the world, and controls nearly 51% of the global carbonated soft-drink business compared to Pepsi's 22%, according to Beverage Digest figures, it had, perhaps, been too focused on soft drinks at a time when other beverage categories were on the rise, said Bill Pecoriello, CEO at ConsumerEdge Research.
Nov 12, 2009
I recently attended the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco hosted by Tim O’Reilly, John Battelle, and TechWeb.
One of the highlights of the conference was a discussion between Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and FM Media’s John Battelle. It was a revealing and enlightening examination of the rise, state, and future of a social network that has been nothing short of transformative in its few short years of existence.
What appeared pervasive with every question, answer, and observation is that Twitter’s success prevails in spite of its obvious hurdles, limitations, and absence of clear direction and vision. Twitter is a wondrous marvel and rare phenomenon whose surge to profound cultural prominence has completely transformed how people communicate, share and discover events and information. Its success is one that cannot be retraced.
Nov 9, 2009
As we look ahead to 2010 in the world of social media, we should first stop to appreciate how far we’ve come in this journey to new found relevance and presence.
Social media served as a great equalizer. The technology and the corresponding networks that freely connected us, democratized the ability to publish and share content, weave more meaningful relationships, as well reset the ecosystem for establishing and wielding influence.
Perhaps most notably, Social networks made the world a much smaller place. As such, it also set the stage for the emergence of a new caliber and genre of influencers and communities that support their mission and purpose. On any given subject, these authoritative networks can incite change and galvanize action to govern, change, and direct market behavior.
Nov 9, 2009
You wouldn't immediately suspect that Yelp's iPhone app might be a gift bestowed upon us by a benevolent superhero from the future. Load it up and the program's in its Clark Kent garb -- a useful-enough guide to local restaurants, bars, and merchants.
Then you notice a button labeled monocle in the right-hand corner. Hit it and the screen displays a live feed from the phone's camera, showing exactly what's in front of you -- with one big difference. Aim the camera at a local storefront and Yelp superimposes a star rating on the image. Use Monocle in a hot neighborhood, for instance, and point it at every restaurant for a quick appraisal of the best food in the area.
Yelp's app is one of the first "augmented reality," or AR, programs to debut on the iPhone, and though it can be handy, it's most useful as a sign of what's to come.
Jeff Jarvis
Nov 2, 2009
The future of news is entrepreneurial.
There’s a lot in that statement. It says: The future of news is not institutional… The news of tomorrow has yet to be built…. The structure – the ecosystem – of news will not be dominated by a few corporations but likely will be made up of networks of many startups performing specialized functions based on the opportunities they see in the market…. Who does journalism, why and how will change…. The skills of journalists will change (to include business)…. We don’t yet know what the market will demand and support from journalism…. News will look disordered and messy…. There will be more failures than successes in the immediate future of news….
Brian Solis
Oct 30, 2009
Prior to leaving Forrester to join Altimeter Group, Jeremiah Owyang, along with Josh Bernoff, Cynthia N. Pflaum, and Emily Bowen, published a report that attempted to bring the future of the Social Web into focus. If we viewed the content of his research as a social object, the conversations that would transpire could in fact expedite the development and implementation of the most valuable predictions and observations contained within.
Oct 28, 2009
Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.
Gartner is the largest and most respected analyst firm in the world and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed specifically at business leaders, but we've excerpted 6 minutes that we believe is of interest to anyone who's touched by the web.
Oct 16, 2009
Every traditional marketing campaign is a customer purchase, that is no revelation: ROI and CPC, CPM, CPA are all standards. But I suggest there is something wrong with that mindset. In fact, with the uncertainty of the future of media, everything might be wrong with that mindset.
Oct 6, 2009
Health care is a personal issue that has become wholly public--as the national debate over reforming our system makes painfully clear. But what's often lost in the gun-toting Town Hall debates about the issue is a clear vision about how medicine could work in the future. In this feature article, frog design uses its people-centered design discipline to show how elegant health and life science technology solutions will one day become a natural part of our behavior and lifestyle. What you see here is the result of frog's ongoing collaboration with health-care providers, insurers, employers, consumers, governments, and technology companies.
Sep 30, 2009
Anyone who has followed Apple news/rumors/patents over the past couple of years has probably noticed a certain trend emerging: Apple seems to be slowly shifting its entire line of products to touch-based computing. That is to say, it’s moving its products away from buttons and keys, towards manipulation through a touchscreen interface.
While obviously, MacBook trackpads have used some level of touch for a long time, this trend really started with the iPhone, which presented the first excellent use of multi-touch in a consumer device. From there, Apple slowly began adding multi-touch support to the aforementioned notebook trackpads, to the point where they all now feature it. And then of course, there’s the iPod touch, which is an iPod with multi-touch support.
But where things really start to get interesting is when you look at Apple’s patents and the rumors that spin out of them.
Sep 29, 2009
As Citigroup mulls over closing some of its 1,000 or so branches in the U.S. and Canada, it has been exploring technology solutions in a project it calls "Bank of the Future." It hired someone from Travelocity.com to lead the project.
"Citi after all invented the ATM and was once a leader in consumer banking technology," explained CEO Vikram Pandit earlier this month. "It is our aim to make sure we regain that edge." He also said that the key to growth was "much, much better execution." Supposedly the company is looking at possible future Internet and cell phone tools.
I think it should focus more on the present.
Sep 10, 2009
Yesterday, Nokia released a well-produced video demonstrating what they apparently believe to be the future of augmented reality apps. If you haven't been keeping up with AR, it's just used to denote an information layer placed over what you see. And while AR will certainly be a part of all our realities in the next few years, Nokia has it all wrong.
Randall Beard
Jul 20, 2009
In a recent white paper, "The Future of the Social Web," Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang predicts the social web will soon morph through five stages, wreaking havoc on the way brands market. Owyang states:
"Today's social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them ... IDs are just the beginning of this transformation ... Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. "
Jul 10, 2009
Avatar bank tellers, e-wallpaper for your home and an electronic Memory Shrine that keeps the sounds, images and memories that are important to you are among the devices that Ericsson believes we could be using in the next decade.
Ericsson, the company that, with Sony, gave birth to Sony Ericsson in 2001, has unveiled its Life in 2020 project, which involved 450 experts from inside and outside the company coming together to predict how technology will be used in the future.
Jul 2, 2009
PSFK recently asked our global network of experts, The Purple List for their thoughts on the future of journalism. We received answers that imagine a variety of possible scenarios, though a common theme emerged which points to a system that combines crowd-sourcing with some kind of editorial curation and professional reporting.
Jun 30, 2009
How advances in mobile and gaming signal what's next for this virtual meets real world technology.
Jun 18, 2009
Things are moving very quickly now, in fact I was pleased to learn about these contextual ads from my new friend Corey Brien in SF yesterday.
In my latest report “The Future of the Social Web” we pointed that in the near future we’ll start to see web pages dynamically created based on user profile ID in social networks. Essentially, your corporate, media, or ecommerce site could provide contextual media, content, and advertisement based on users’ info before they login.
Jun 13, 2009
We're back with the final installation of this week's cell phone roundtable. We choose the topic, put forth a few questions to our panel, and bring the most provocative answers back to you. This week, with more details about the Palm Pre and Monday's iPhone G3 S announcement it seemed a good time to ponder some issues about our love affair with mobile. Today's question: What will cell phones look like 10 years from now?
Jun 2, 2009
For those of you increasingly convinced that you're the last human alive who doesn't get the point of Twitter, I have comforting news: Nobody does. Not really. Sure, the twittering masses (17 million registered U.S. users, by latest count) have some idea what their habit is good for. For many, Twitter's steady stream of one-line updates — "microblogging," as the form is known — is a low-maintenance way to feel connected to family, friends, celebrities. For others, it's a marketing tool, a public diary, a communal news feed, or even, simply, a sort of brain game — a text-message Sudoku, where the daily challenge is to fit the maximum amount of cleverness into the minimal space of a 140-character limit. But knowing how people use Twitter isn't the same thing as knowing why they use it. And that turns out to be a puzzle even seasoned Twitter watchers have found difficult to crack.
Mike Laurie
Jun 1, 2009
In 2019, when you look back at the social media landscape ten years earlier, you might laugh at how hard you had to work. You had to type things into forms (ha! remember those?), type URLs in the address bar (how archaic!), and put up with irritating communications about irrelevant products. Social media in the future will be effortless and everywhere. Here’s a look at some of the new technologies in store for us over the next 10 years that will make our social (media) lives easier.
May 13, 2009
Pick up any of the trade papers or read any of the marketing blogs recently and you’re likely to notice Amara’s law at work: “we invariably overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies while underestimating their long-term effects”. We read a lot about the rush to do something ‘on’ the next tech phenomenon - do something on Facebook, have a presence on Twitter or (yes, still) launch a viral marketing campaign. But there is precious little conversation about the impact technology is having long-term on culture, and how this might challenge some of the assumptions we have built marketing programs on for the last few decades.
May 11, 2009
Since its inception in 2005, YouTube has opened up online video to the masses. Its embedding and sharing features helped make thousands of viral of videos. Today, YouTube has over 100 million unique viewers every month for everything from cute kittens to university lectures.
Innovation and change in the social media space occurs lightning fast, though. YouTube, once without rival, is feeling the heat from new competitors, primarily the fast-growing Hulu. Other innovations, like live streaming video, are also ratcheting up the online video stakes. So where exactly is online video headed? Let’s talk about the YouTube and Hulu models.
May 8, 2009
A guy walks into a search pitch meeting and says, "Thank you for inviting me here today. But I'm not in -- and you don't want someone in -- the search marketing space to be your search vendor."
Now the punchline to that could have been the guy ends up on a barstool in about 15 minutes because he was thrown out on his ear. But it wasn't. In fact, the reality was a two-hour discussion about the change that is taking place which has its roots in search, but transcends our business entirely.
Marshall Kirkpatrick
May 7, 2009
Firefox doesn't keep track of the number of users it has but Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, said today that the company estimates that there are 270 million people using the browser. That's 35% more users than Facebook has signed up for accounts (200 million), and almost triple the number of people Facebook says log in to the social network every day (100 million).
Why compare user numbers between a browser and a social network? Because there's every reason to believe that the two technologies are converging in the near term future. Here's why we believe that Firefox should be Facebook's biggest competition.
May 6, 2009
Ad agencies usually hang on their clients’ every directive. But when Intel was developing its biggest advertising campaign in years, it handed a carefully thought-out brief to the ad agency Venables Bell & Partners, which said Intel’s idea — to talk about the company’s role in everyday life — was, in a word, bad. Intel’s notion was, “we’re so important to your everyday life. Imagine a world without Intel. Your lights would go out. The world would stop revolving,” said Deborah Conrad, vice president and general manager of Intel’s corporate marketing group. “Venables Bell said, ‘You got that wrong.’ ”
May 6, 2009
There's a mindset out there that believes everything we are going through is just a temporary blip; a freak shower that will go away and be replaced by sunshine. The idea that normality will soon return is a pervasive storyline that you hear repeated over again in our media. There's simply no alternative expectation of a future other than a return to normality. What happens if instead of waiting for normality to return, we are lurching forward towards a new normal that looks nothing like the old one?
May 6, 2009
As a follow up to our recent webinar, Facebook Bootcamp for PR, you’ll see five blog posts in the coming weeks exploring the five trends set out in our presentation. This installment looks at the quickly evolving role of Facebook Connect and reviews how brands can use this open ID to enhance their Facebook presence and expand other social media programs.
Apr 14, 2009
Madison Avenue has come a long way. Since the emergence of modern advertising in the 1920s, defined by the shift from text-based to visual advertising and the use of psychologically sophisticated messages, ads began to resonate powerfully with consumers. Madison Avenue represented the new and the modern (until the emergence of social networks and media), and ads helped consumers figure out what they needed to live a certain lifestyle. Consumers were eager to embrace the cultural authority of Madison Avenue. But by the late 1950s, they were feeling differently.
TED
Apr 3, 2009
Newspaper designer Jacek Utko suggests that it's time for a fresh, top-to-bottom rethink of the newspaper. (At this point, why not try it?) In his work, he's proved that good design can help readers reconnect with newspapers. A former architect, Utko took on the job of redesigning several newspapers in former Soviet Bloc nations, starting from basic principles.
Mar 31, 2009
A new study by London-based market research firm Hall and Partners that examines how the economy is affecting consumer trends in the U.S., the U.K. and mainland China finds few surprises -- the UK and U.S. are pessimistic, while Chinese citizens see a bright future once the economy goes through short-term turmoil.
Mar 23, 2009
Someone blogged that South by Southwest Interactive is just like the Internet itself: disjointed, decentralized, scattered, fast, aggressive, random, fragmented, and so on. In fact, the main commonality between the two may be that the number of attributes to describe them is infinite. Like the Internet, the annual tech conference here is an echo chamber of an echo chamber, a place where original thought and commentary get mixed up and mashed up in a highly self-referential meta conversation.
Jonathan Salem Baskin
Mar 20, 2009
What if one of the futures coming after our miracle of the Internet and the madness of our economics is a model of living and investing we last saw about a hundred years ago?
Mar 18, 2009
I've tackled some heady questions over the years as a Search Insider -- "Why Can't Everything Be Searchable?" "Will Search Personalization Create Self-Fulfilling Prophecies?" "Should We Fear Ambient Findability?" "Is MyLifeBits the Future of Personalized Search?" And who could forget, "Is Search Rocket Science?" Today, I'll go for the jugular: What's the point of search?
Seth Godin
Mar 18, 2009
Marketers are good at looking ahead. We predict/create the future, working to build an idea or a product into something that will matter more tomorrow than it does today.
Mar 5, 2009
Robotic systems continue to evolve,
slowly penetrating many areas of our lives, from manufacturing,
medicine and remote exploration to entertainment, security and personal
assistance. Developers in Japan are currently building robots to assist
the elderly, while NASA develops the next generation of space
explorers, and artists are exploring new avenues of entertainment.
Collected here are a handful of images of our recent robotic past, and
perhaps a glimpse into the near future.
March 2009 Trend Briefing
Mar 3, 2009
While severe financial woes may hold back some eco-initiatives, the
future has never looked greener. Mainly because creating more a
sustainable economy is not an option, but a necessity. Which is why
this month, amidst crumbling banks, G20 meetings and stimulus plans, we
highlight 12 eco trends that any marketer or entrepreneur can act on today.
Mar 3, 2009
Ford Motor Co.'s campaign for its redone 2010 Ford Fusion new hybrid
model is aimed at people who aren't in the market to buy a car -- at
least not today.
Bruce Sterling
Mar 2, 2009
By the garbled reportage, I'd be guessing some of those kiwis were having trouble with my accent.
Here are the verbatim remarks.
Mar 2, 2009
Microsoft and its longtime partner, Intel,
have accelerated their exploration of new computing fields. Last week
at its headquarters near Seattle, Microsoft showed off a host of
software systems built to power futuristic games, medical devices,
teaching tools and even smart elevators. And this week, Intel, the
world’s largest chip maker, will elaborate on plans to extend its
low-power Atom chip from laptops to cars, robots and home security
systems.
Mar 2, 2009
At a time when newspapers, Hollywood and the network business are
struggling to find the future, two goofy guys who put foul words in the
mouths of cartoon cutouts seem like visionaries.
Damian Joseph
Mar 1, 2009
Things are looking pretty bleak right now. But, the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. So BusinessWeek
asked several futurists, including Futurist.com's Glen Hiemstra,
consultant David Zach, and author Howard Rheingold, to describe what
they'd like to see arise from the current downturn. Notably, our
experts didn't think of innovation merely in terms of products or
services. These ideas will change the way humans interact with the
earth—and with each other.
Feb 27, 2009
If I encountered Craig Mundie on the street, met his kind but humorless gaze and heard that slight southern drawl, I'd guess he was a golf pro—certainly not Microsoft's Chief of the future.
Mundie is a living portal of future technology, a focal point between
thousands of scattered research projects and the boxes of super-neat
products we'll be playing with 5 years, 20 years, maybe 100 years from
now.
Fast Company
Feb 13, 2009
Even in these tough times, surprising and extraordinary efforts are
under way in businesses across the globe. From politics to technology,
energy, and transportation; from marketing to retail, health care, and
design, each company on the following pages illustrates the power and
potential of innovative ideas and creative execution. These are the
kinds of enterprises that will redefine our future and point the way to
a better tomorrow.
Feb 4, 2009
A future for newspapers? The French government has announced
a ten-fold increase in its support for the country's print media, in an
effort "...to make sure an independent, free and pluralistic press
exists," according to President Nicholas Sarkozy. While there's
some grumbling that Sarkozy's motivations might not be so pure, I
understand the problem he's trying to address. One of the elements of
that response is that the government will underwrite a year-long
newspaper subscription for French citizens when they turn 18.
Jan 30, 2009
The comments from my post crapping on the New York Times for buying remnant advertising are telling. Lots of people agree that advertising is “broken.” They just don’t know what they want to do next. Do you?
Jan 29, 2009
The party is over for the fancy labels that once scored big on $600
stilettos and $1,500 "It" handbags. This year, world-wide sales of
luxury goods are expected to fall between 3% and 7% from a year
earlier, according to a Bain & Co. study. Moreover, many fashion-industry veterans believe last fall's steep
discounting of European designer goods by 70% or more did lasting
damage to the perception of luxury.
Jan 28, 2009
While today's terrain can be pretty treacherous for any marketer, a
new report is encouraging them to look ahead to 2015. The What
will the role of marketing be in the year 2015? report was
created by the American Marketing Assn. in conjunction with
Decision Strategies International.
Joan Voight
Jan 16, 2009
In 2018 we will look back with bemusement at the industry before 2010, when most
advertising meant ads - brief, static bits of promotional info on TV video, Web
sites, radio, paper or big flat outdoor posters. These repetitive ad messages
were everywhere you went, and people quietly tolerated them and went about their
day. Before 2010, most ads offered little opportunity to complain, ask
questions, collect more information, meet the people involved, or play a game.
How ridiculously boring, really.
Jan 15, 2009
Over the last months, we’ve analyzed numerous Web designs, observing
emerging trends and weighing the merits of numerous design decisions
and coding solutions. In this post, we present Web design trends for 2009:
recent developments, new design elements and new graphic approaches. We
also discuss situations in which these trends can be used and present
some beautiful examples.
Jan 15, 2009
"We are all direct marketers now, whether we
know it or not," states Michelle Tiletnick, research manager of the
Direct Marketing Association, to conclude the executive summary of the
DMA's new 78-page qualitative report, "Future of Direct Marketing."
Jonah Bloom
Dec 8, 2008
Steve Forbes believes "capitalism will save us." You know he speaks on behalf of a generation of businessmen who believe
that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the system; that what
we're seeing right now is simply another of those cyclical periods of
correction and Darwinian winnowing of the weak.
Nov 26, 2008
IBM has created a list of five innovations that will change the way we all live over the next five years.
Davis Thinking
