Web 2.0 Meets the Senior Set

I have seen the future, and it looks a lot like me — with a little less hair, a few more age spots and a nice Florida tan.

Computer and application developers have long talked about the “grandma test”: If their hardware or programs were intuitive enough for older relatives to use, they knew they had something a broad swath of the everyday online public could find value in.

I’ve always relied on the Joe Quinton test. My 84-year-old dad is far from a techno-geek. In fact, we had to shame him into accepting his first Dell computer in 1995 by assigning a 14-year-old grandson to put it together for him in about 20 minutes. “See?” we said. “Now, are you going to let a kid beat you at learning something new?” He didn’t, and soon we were receiving almost daily e-mail updates about the weather in Florida and the state of his golf game.

Let’s not even talk about the instant-messaging scare of 1997, when the whole family started receiving text messages asking why we were up and online so early or so late. We all learned to turn off IM within weeks of its rollout.

The same thing happened with cell phone technology. He’s not perfect at it; occasionally I’ll get a voicemail message from him that goes on for 10 minutes because he forgot to disconnect the call. But hey, this is a man whose childhood encounters with technology were a phone in the apartment hallway and a cabinet-sized Atwater-Kent radio that lit up like a pinball machine when it was turned on.

I bring this up because I’m in Florida visiting the folks for the holidays, and I’m flabbergasted by how far my father’s tech education has come. Dad’s just bought and installed a Web camera on his computer, taught himself to use his broadband provider’s video mail service and started bothering friends and family with online video accounts of his golf game.

And my father’s not alone. Here in the real-life version of Jerry Seinfeld’s Del Boca Vista Phase III, a surprising number of residents are living what we’ll call the “assisted Second Life.” They read Ann Coulter’s blog and the Smoking Gun Web site. They learn about cruise deals through e-mail newsletters, book their trips online and share travel tips in chat rooms and newsgroups. When they offer to show you photos of the grandkids, they’re as likely to whip out a cell phone as a billfold.

All this tells me that marketers that are hanging back from a serious commitment to Web 2.0 trends — online video, social search, and mobile marketing — should stop persuading themselves that there’ll be a chance to strategize these channels later. If my father and his cronies are any indication, they won’t have that luxury of time to adapt.

The online communities for some of these services are already bleeding out beyond early adopters and gadget-worshiping teens into the blue-haired mainstream. Advertisers that depend on reaching any of these broad audiences should be thinking now about their new media campaigns, or they risk being lapped by better-prepared competitors.

Obviously, many of the channels still are in construction mode. Online video ad formats are far from stabilized, for example. The blank spaces in the mobile marketing picture are even more glaring, given that search, messaging and transactions can happen either on the phone carriers’ platform or on the broader mobile Internet.

User equipment also plays a big part. Google and Yahoo! recently sped up delivery of their e-mail services to some of the newest handsets, which is great. My own phone doesn’t fall into that category, which isn’t. For me, it’s still easier to wait to get home or to my laptop to check e-mail.

As for local search, I still feel foolish laboriously keying in URLs and search queries and waiting for slow, partial results pages when I could just as easily ask the cab driver, hotel clerk or Starbucks barista in front of me for the nearest Thai restaurant.

But those infrastructure factors could change quickly. So when I do buy a new phone, it’ll be with an eye to catching up with the latest wireless features. And I’ll be fair game for marketers that want to reach me away from my desk, either with mobile search ads, banners or video — just as I now am on the Internet.

Of course, if Joe Quinton upgrades to a smartphone next spring, my own timetable could speed up. I can’t afford to get out-teched by an octogenarian.

NL

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Save the Trees

B-to-B advertisers are shifting ad dollars into online marketing, mostly at the expense of print trade pubs, according to eMarketer. The researcher recently looked at B-to-B ad spending projections from Veronis Suhler Stevenson. Its conclusion?B-to-B spending on trade print ads will grow at a compound annual rate of 2.9% from 2005 to 2010. At the same time, spending on digital ads should rise by a CAGR of 21.4%.
— BQ