Red Frog, Inc.

(from "Business Trends" by Josh Barinstein, Copyright 2004)

What about the next 5 years? The next decade?

Continuing trends

Let’s talk about a few continuing trends over the next 5 to 10 years stemming from the material we’ve covered thus far. One projection I’d like to make is—and this, I don’t think, will surprise anyone—that life will continue to speed up and become even more hectic. All you have to do is look back on history to know that that is very likely the case. We will continue (most of us anyway) to be fascinated with technology, wanting the latest TV set, cell phone, or desktop gadget. Yet what will also increase is an awareness of the self. We spoke about this earlier in terms of health: spiritual and health concerns will increase as we become conscious of the fact that in order to thrive in this excited state of being, if you will, we need the balance to support it.

It’s no surprise yoga, health food, and self-growth/spiritual books and tapes have become so popular. Yes, they are oftentimes trendy or fads of the moment, but they support a need out there, and many people are benefiting from the structure these means provide. Expect to see much more of this over the next decade, coming more out of a necessity for many than something that is casually picked up for one’s own good.

The Internet will get faster, no doubt about it. And marketing and advertising will tap into the appeal of such fast, immediate delivery of content. Rich media ads have taken off in a big way, and so we can expect heavier, interactive productions to reach the Web and email, hitting audiences through any avenue possible.

But this is still about bombarding helpless souls. What we have been questioning today is the effectiveness of this blanket approach. As soon as the Internet as a super fast medium becomes the norm, expect advertisers to become less interested, realizing this is no more effective as a standalone device than anything else ever tried before spam-style.

Adverscreaming, then, will get louder. Yet some, not many surprisingly enough, will discover creative (and truly effective) ways of reaching people that are founded in building relationships—profiling individuals in order to meet their needs, rather than pouring millions blindly into aimless campaigns. I hope those present here today will be a part of that minority. It’ll be interesting to see how many don’t take such necessary action over the next decade and continue wasting money… making it easier for the rest of us to cut through the clutter!

I won’t say anymore about understanding the power of cable and understanding the importance of fragmentation, but suffice it to say that that will pay off for those who take advantage, especially since many won’t take advantage… again, leaving room for many to win.

A "life stages" approach

Earlier we spoke about the importance of life stages, and an excellent book on the subject is "Cycles," by Maddy Dychtwald. The important thing to take away from this significant work is that we need to think in terms of stages in people’s lives, and not in terms of their age anymore. We covered this earlier, and it needs to be a key component of our mindset over the next 5-10 years.

For example, when it comes to education, people are now returning to school multiple times in their lives as they discover new directions and explore where they truly belong. It is no longer a linear model, where education was a once-in-a-lifetime gift and granted only to the young.

Maddy Dychtwald presents three forces that are at play here in affecting people’s choice to pursue education as a lifelong commitment:

Longevity. People are simply living longer, and as such having a greater need to stay current and update their skillset, particularly given the speed of change.
Knowledge power. We live in a world where more information, ideas, and concepts are produced than manufactured goods.
Love of learning. This will enable people to see life as a series of career paths, whereby one can make a change at any age in order to fulfill self-discovery at that stage.

Virtual universities will be a significant trend over the coming years. Individuals of all ages will prefer using the Internet and other interactive means to learn in the convenience of their home, away from the confines of the physical classroom. This area is growing by 33% yearly, with enrollment estimated at 2.2 million this year! Think alone of the need to update every 3-5 years in the corporate world in terms of training or career updating—this area will grow even more rapidly than over the last decade*. To put it differently, the 50 billion spent annualy by companies in education and training accounts for 50% of spending in higher education.

Expect to see much happening in the area of tools that combine entertainment with education, as people used to TV, the Web, and other media require this hybrid approach in order to remain engaged in the learning process.

VCRs, TiVo, and the Mute button

" VCRs, TiVo, and the Mute button." Sounds like a new Disney movie, but it is something to reflect on seriously. I spoke about these means for consumers to tune us out a bit ago, and you can expect more of it in the coming years. No matter if it’s cable or network, the mute button is always there and available.

In case you’re not familiar with the technology, TiVo is a digital TV recorder that has become a huge industry development. The ads recorded during a broadcast can be easily discarded by a consumer—so we know for a fact that they aren’t watching.

Text messaging—the next generation

The tide is changing—and change has not only been a theme today, but to be expected always. Everything around us is becoming more personalized, as we’ve been discussing—or needs to be. Advertising is about to jump on the bandwagon. According to Marketing Intelligence Expert Joanna L. Krotz, mobile-messaging may be the next target of the "Adverscreaming" Industry.

Test messaging has been huge with American teenagers, and a widespread means of communication in Europe and Asia. Krotz says, "it’s an extremely personal way (to send a message)—into someone’s pocket or purse." Imagine walking down the street and receiving a text message on your cell phone from Pizza Hut: "Buy any pizza today and get a free salad, offer valid until 8PM." And essentially, you could take your cell phone into Pizza Hut, that day, and get a free salad. That is what is on its way.

Now let’s talk about what’s ahead…

A San Diego based company that has capitalized on this Short Message Service, or SMS, technique—which is still in its infancy—is SMS.ac. After only six months, they registered over six million users in over 220 countries. Its co-founder says that this technology "will allow small and medium sized advertisers to select the demographics for the audience they would like to target." This includes, location, age, gender and interests. From a cost perspective, marketers and advertisers would be crazy not to jump on the bandwagon. Sending an SMS runs as little as two cents per message to ten cents per message sent.

From a marketing perspective, it is an opportunity not to be missed. Specific targets, personalization, low cost, and modern. But, is it another way to "Adverscream" and bombard consumers with messages in places they did not ask to receive them? For now, SMS marketing in the United States has not spread like spam for reasons of incompatibility with cellular carriers, and requiring that consumers pay to receive marketing they didn’t ask for. But of course, this will soon change.

And interestingly enough, the demand for SMS capabilities (from the consumer end) is growing—we all love gadgets. Mobile text messaging revenue is booming—in 2000, text messaging generated $571 million in revenue and, according to marketing consultant Frost & Sullivan, it is expected to generate of $5 Billion by 2008.

As invasive as it may be, it is awfully effective. But as I've been suggesting all along, if it is not part of a campaign that reaches out and communicates effectively with its audience, this is just a gimmick that eventually will drown as everyone else jumps onboard.

Another important thing to note is that moving forward, those who respect privacy will win. If you use SMS and don't allow people to opt in, you will only be annoying people with information they will likely discard, much like the junk mail that we all automatically toss because we know that that's just what it is—pay attention next time you go through your mail.

Though 100 million cell phones have SMS capabilities, it is still on the fringe of marketing strategies. However, experts believe the even newer Multimedia Message Service, or MMS, will catch on and spread rapidly. MMS will allow text messages to include rich video, audio, color and graphics—commercials for your phone. Joanna Krotz says, "some marketers see the move from SMS to MMS as revolutionary for mobile phones as the shift from DOS to Windows was for the PC."

Get ready for nanotech!

If you have not heard of nanotechnology yet, you’re about to. It is huge. And it is the future. According to Mike Rocco, Senior Advisor for Nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation, "Because of Nanotechnology, we will see more change in our civilization in the next 30 years than we did during all of the 20th century."

But, what is it?

According to The Next Best Thing is Really Small by Jack Uldrich with Deb Newberry, "Nanotechnology is the art and science of manipulating and rearranging individual atoms and molecules to create useful materials, devices and systems." Seemingly unrelated areas of science are beginning to merge: biology, chemistry, botany, physics. Stronger products and lighter materials will be built from the bottom up—atom by atom because of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology will affect everything. These amazing developments in technology will benefit everything from medicine to the environment to the global economy—including the benefits developing countries will reap because of nanotechnology.

And how big is a nanometer? It is one billionth of a meter, making working at that scale absolutely fascinating, particularly given the powerful changes that will result. If you’re having trouble processing this, think of it this way: a nanometer is to an inch, what an inch is to roughly 16,000 miles!

And nanotech has already started. And it is growing at a rapid pace. Ten years ago, there were no patents for nanotechnology. In 1999, there were 45. In 2001, there were 180. By March of 2003, according to a report by Nanoscale Science and Engineering, the United States had 56,828 nano-related patents and there were nearly 90,000 nano-related patents worldwide. Nanotechnology has already introduced itself to consumers. Stain resistant and wrinkle resistant pants by Lee Jeans, Levi Strauss and Dickies are already on the market. These miraculous features are possible because of nanotechnology. IBM recently announced the development of "The Millipede Project"—a data storage device that has come into existence because of nanotechnology. This revolutionary mechanism will make it possible to store 25 million textbook pages on a surface the size of a postage stamp. And that is not even the tip of the iceberg. Self-repairing and cleaning windows, medical breakthroughs that will improve patient care and drug effectiveness, the radical speed at which information will be able to be collected and transmitted… nanotechnology will affect every industry, everything and everybody.

Here are some recommendations:

Start with an awareness of nanotech’s potential and how it might impact your business.
Monitor and participate in promising development in this area to stay abreast of changes.
Know what your competitors are doing!
Determine the levels of investment appropriate to your business.
Begin preparing now for its imminent arrival, for what it might mean today and over the next ten years in your particular industry.

Certainly, you cannot know the future, but as you’re doing today with this teleconference, the future favors those who are prepared…

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Josh Barinstein is President of Red Frog, Inc., the Southern California ad agency that provides worry-free experiences and powerful results in the areas of Marketing, Print design, and Web/CD-ROM development.

Learn more at www.RedFrogInc.com or by calling 888-955-0550.

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