Live from NCDM: The Digital Economy Will Rise Again
“Everything will go digital – the dot com world will come back with a vengeance.”
This bold prediction came from David D. Thornburg, the opening keynote at the National Center for Database Marketing Winter 2001 Conference Sunday evening.
Thornburg, founder and director of global operations for The Thornburg Center, pointed to Generation Y as leading the return to embrace the digital society. As this population matures, their attitudes and activities will shape communication, marketing and media.
Hallmarks of this generation include the ability to interact simultaneously with multiple channels. Already many Generation Y-ers are comfortable carrying on several online instant message conversations at the same time, while surfing the Web, listening to music and watching television.
According to Thornburg, this group is more interconnected than any other. Some marketers are already taking advantage of this. Movie marketers, which recently had fought unauthorized online fan Web sites, are starting to embrace them, providing unique content and generating buzz through viral marketing.
Generation Y-ers view technology as a friend, not a foe, and are the first generation to believe that if a technology does not work, it is the fault of the machinery and not the user. Lose these consumers because of a balky Web site, he cautioned, and marketers will not have a second chance to win them back.
These people want – and increasingly expect – to take an active role in designing products and services for themselves. Thornburg illustrated this attitude by discussing “Build a Bear” shops, where consumers design a stuffed animal right down to the stuffing from bins of component parts. The process can take upward of two hours (including the wait to get into the shops) and costs more than off-the-shelf animals.
It is a generation that responds to graphics first and text second – “something good catalog designers have known for years. Thornburg summed up this generation by pointing to two keys on a computer keyboard – shift and control.
Not even the dot com bust from earlier this year dissuades Thornburg. He points to the growth of the Internet in Brazil, where investors looked at traditional business metrics before investing, as a model for the next wave of dot com investment.
Thornburg anticipates this wave as cresting sometime within the next two to three years (he pushed back his earlier estimates by a year after the events of Sept. 11) as broadband connections become standard within households.
The National Center for Database Marketing conference is being held in New Orleans and runs through Tuesday, December 11.
