Are We Too Cynical or Just Jealous
One of our favorite publications is Business Insider. Every direct marketer should read them not for information in the customer acquisition space but for their headlines. It is almost unfair how catchy they make their titles and the open / clicks that come as a result. While they don’t cover customer acquisition per se, they do cover the world of tech and startups. Like Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley has its fair share of tech startups, a fact that Business Insider won’t let you forget. It constantly likes to send articles such as, “The Hottest Tech Founders,” or “The Top 40 Startups That Matter,” and so on. It’s articles like those that just make us feel old. Then again, we kind of are, but there is more to this rant than that.
As we have said many times before, we are witnessing one of the most intense periods of development and wealth creation through internet enabled businesses. The world isn’t just changing. It’s going through a revolution. We cannot take credit for the phrasing, but we could not agree more with that assumption. The revolution taking place now involves what perhaps deserves the title Web 2.0. It is a much more seamless experience with internet enabled devices. It is a new paradigm of connectivity where using internet no longer involves just the personal computer.
Going from internet being a connected personal computer to an ever increasing number of devices might not sound like a revolution. And, in so far as it involved going from a desktop to a laptop it wasn’t. During that transition, business and the world of internet didn’t change all that dramatically. It was more like going from network television to cable. The experience of television improved, and it opened the door for a lot of wealth creation, but we still sat on the couch and watched television. It was still television only better. Following the television analogy, this looks more like going from radio to having television. If you grew up with television, then the improvements in television over time made the experience better and easier. If, however, you spent most of your time with radio, then the change to, and changes in, television would cause more dissonance.
We could argue the first real internet revolution began when it went from a walled environment, e.g., using AOL to connect and staying within AOL’s version of the web to the open web. If you were only used to the closed web, understanding the open web took time; those who came later, e.g., after it reached stasis with search. Those who came on board in 2004 have a distinct advantage over those (non-technical here) who learned to use the web as it was just evolving. The same goes within the microcosm that is advertising, we are witnessing a similar revolution, especially in display. We “grew” up in the early day of display, where it was fairly straightforward. It too was a closed system. The hardest part was understanding what cookies were and some simple html. The new world, though, is so hard to grasp for people who are used to a closed system where one adserver decides what to show based on data from its own universe.
This revolution encompasses so many different aspects of the connected web all coming together at the exact right time. Facebook didn’t invent it, but like Google with search, it was in the right place to grab a hold of the social graph and identity opportunity. They executed smartly, and whether they stay around or not doesn’t matter. They, along with Twitter and Foursquare have taught users a set of behaviors that will never go away. Apple provided the rocket fuel for these behaviors as well as the glue for the revolution that is the connected, social, geo web. It isn’t just the web anymore. It’s an entity on an x, y, and z axis. It’s a challenge and an opportunity for those of us used to operating on just a single continuum.
The issue that us old farts have is that while we may not understand the devices and the media. We can understand the businesses, not all but enough to know when we’re seeing the same thing before. A business might now solve an existing problem better because the technology has evolved, but if it’s a fundamentally flawed business, no amount of technology will help. That’s why at some level it’s hard not to be somewhat ready for this current world to contract, and for the adolescents to at least go off to college. They might be right on many occasions, but the conviction and lack of perspective can be really annoying.
