Key consumer trends for 2012
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Key consumer trends for 2012
- 1. THE YEAR AHEAD A COMPENDIUM OF TRENDS FOR 2012 BY PULSE
- 3. Top trends?
- 5. Tumultuous Times
- 9. Anarchy in the UK
- 10. Rice Riots
- 15. Which would you like first?
- 17. Young Fogeys
- 18. • Young Britons are looking for a respite - for brands to lend a helping hand – for brands to help them enjoy their youth. • Early adulthood is the point at which bonds are formed and broken between brand and consumer. • It’s hard to forget someone who helps you when you need it most. Similarly, it’s hard to forgive someone that lets you down when you need them most.
- 19. “Seven lean years” Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England
- 21. Marketing in the forever recession
- 22. 99 cents a bottle
- 24. • A consumer lost once is often a consumer lost forever. • When the New Normal doesn’t look like the old, work out how you can allow your consumers to stick with your brand.
- 27. Rolling out the Red Carpet
- 28. Smirnoff – Masala Marke Rolls Royce – Year of the Dragon
- 29. • The poles are shifting. Soon no brand will be able to pull down the shutters and block out the world beyond its traditional geographical regions. • Cultural connections will become even more important, and even more tricky. • Don’t just look to the developing world as a source of consumers, but also as a source of inspiration.
- 33. 2012 is great
- 34. • Make sure that your attachment to the sentiment that runs alongside the Games and Jubilee is credible. • Obvious bandwagon jumpers will receive the disdain of the Great British Public.
- 37. A Helping Brand – where PR meets ER
- 38. • Identify areas where you can credibly involve yourself at a grassroots level. • Be wary of short-termism and piecemeal initiatives – consumers are wise to these. • Look on your engagement as both long-term and mutually beneficial.
- 39. Micro Democracy
- 40. • Consumers enjoy being involved in decision-making processes – it helps them to feel a sense of ownership and affiliation to the brand. • It can also be a way of sharing the blame and softening the blow, enhancing a brand’s reputation as one that demonstrates transparency and openness.
- 44. The entire history of you?
- 46. Living in a one-faced world
- 47. Facebook – nearest and dearest
- 48. Twitter – all and sundry
- 49. • It’s crucial to establish which version of your consumer you’re interacting with, and which version you need to interact with. • Targeting consumers in aspirational sectors is easy – social networks are built around aspiration. • Targeting consumers in less aspirational sectors is much harder based on social networking information. • There are nuances aplenty and context is king.
- 52. DO NOT BUY
- 53. Totally Flawsome
- 55. "This is easily the worst movie of all time. It's a bunch of spaceships and special effects, but there's NO coherent plot." "I found it to be incredibly boring ... if your looking for an entertaining classic, I'd try Ben Hur or Cool Hand Luke ...it had no color and was uterly depressing."
- 56. • If consumers want information, they will get it. • Withholding it will not make a big difference to purchase behaviour. Giving it up freely will enhance openness and transparency credibility. • The level of pro-active openness depends on how much a brand feels it has to lose.
- 59. iOS 5 – Twitter boom
- 60. “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure” Clay Shirky
- 61. Twidiot Filter
- 62. • With the number of messages transmitted online growing exponentially, how will your brand survive the Twidiot Filter? • The race for relevance has never been more important.
- 63. On Auto-Pilot
- 64. • Shopping on Autopilot negates all that is non-rational in the purchasing process – the branding. • With our industry so focused on extolling emotion around a product, we should be thinking of how we help brands avoid auto-pilot. • Or indeed, how we sell our market as one that avoids auto-pilot (think CompareTheMarket and GoCompare)
- 66. • How will your brand help to bring surprise to consumers, in a world full of filters? • The key lies in being random but relevant. How do you use consumer information to go beyond what they would have found?
- 69. Digital First
- 70. A 21st Century printing press? “They appear not to have perceived the printed book as a fundamentally different form, but rather as a manuscript book that could be produced with greater speed and convenience.’ Cyberspace Renaissance, by Leah Marcus
- 71. Broken iPad?
- 72. Life of George
- 73. • Digital (it will take a wholly new generation to stop using this word) has to be baked-in from the beginning – especially when you’re dealing with the youngest audience. • Start with the tools then make the idea – not vice versa.
- 75. M-Commerce
- 78. Smart TV
- 83. Big increase in QR code usage
- 85. • Much of the innovation mentioned deals with linking up technologies rather than creating new ones – à la Hyper Island mash-up. • Be aware that your brand exists in an ecosystem, not in isolation. • Be wary of digital red-herrings – for every winner there are two losers.
- 86. 2012 • Turbulent? • Positive? • Most likely both. • Personal brand management is key. • Order of the day - engagement and transparency • Surf the data deluge • Think ecosystem
- 87. Read more http://britain2012.mccannlondon.co.uk/
- 88. Stay in touch @mccannpulse magic8.mccannlondon.co.uk
Editor's Notes
- Welcome to Pulse’s look at the year ahead.
- Today I’ve got six main areas to talk to you about – a little bit about trend lists (which is basically a disclaimer) and then onto…..A little bit about trend listsTumultuous TimesCheer up and get involved Managing Brand MeWarts and AllNavigating the World of Big DataDigital First, Digital Everywhere
- Asking trend analysts for a list of their top trends is a lot like asking film critics for their top 10 films of all time. You’ll get a fair amount of crossover, but you’ll never get identical lists. So there might be things you expect to see that aren’t here. What you should get, however, are broadly the same macro-themes coming through.
- In this presentation, we aim to cover what we consider to be the most important macro-themes in 2012. We’ve used the trends from our ‘Britain in 2012’ manual that we’ve recently produced as the basis for our themes, but we’ve also incorporated the most interesting and pertinent trends we’ve come across from other sources.
- So where shall we start? Well, let’s begin by looking back to look forward.2011 was a stormy year.
- On a global scale it was the most turbulent for many years. There was political upheaval all over North Africa and the Middle East.
- There was the death of Osama Bin Laden.
- There were natural disasters – most notably the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan.
- In the UK it was also a turbulent year – the most obvious example being rioting on the streets of English cities in August. I’ve decided not to go with the obvious photos of people throwing petrol bombs and buses on fire, and instead chosen my own favourite riot images. I feel these really encapsulate the spirit of the disorder. On the left you have a young man ‘mooning’ the Skycopter (in HD). On the right you have a Curry’s employee STILL IN HER UNIFORM being arrested for looting her (now former) place of employment.
- Of course, one of the key triggers of the political upheaval in North Africa was rising food prices. Let it not be said that our own riots did not have a food element to them, as images of these young men ‘liberating’ sacks of rice would attest to. The chap on the left has got it all wrong clearly – the gents on the right have correctly chosen a branded rice. There was a joke going around at the time that people were looting rice because their friends were looting Currys.
- Apologies.
- At an economic level (and a consumer level), it was tougher than even the most pessimistic of analysts had anticipated, and there doesn’t look to be a great deal of promise for the economy in the near future.Just 2 months ago, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility cut its forecast for 2012 GDP growth from 2.5% to just 0.7%, with a strong possibility that the economy could go back into recession in the first 2 quarters of 2012.
- With this in mind, we have to address these straitened conditions. A dark economic cloud looms large over 2012, and a good number of consumer trends this year will be influenced by this cloud.
- It would be crazy to neglect the current economic weather. However, luckily we have another dedicated medium to the broader social picture. So I shall try to keep this as upbeat as possible!
- I am, however, going to start with the trends that stem from these turbulent economic times. I’m doing this on the basis that if someone tells you they have bad news and good news and ask you which one you want first, people almost invariably choose bad news. And, as we know, in crisis there is often opportunity. You’ve just got to know where to look.As I mentioned earlier, the impact of many of the factors that will influence British society in 2012 are yet to be determined. We don’t know the degree to which the Eurozone crisis or public service cuts will affect the country.
- One thing we can be sure of, however, is that fewer young people will go to university in 2012 than in 2011.
- And this leads in to our first trend – which we’ve entitled ‘Young Fogeys’The footloose and fancy-free nature of youth has been eroded of late, as young people are being forced to make very serious choices at a very young age. With such high stakes, it’s hard to be on anything other than a dead cert. We’re seeing the rise of a new conservative youth. There is potential to see long term trends – such as rising marriage age – go into reverse. After all, one of the biggest drivers behind the rise in marriage age was university attendance – essentially starting your adult life at 21 or 22 rather than 18.It could also impact on creativity – which relies on a willingness to make mistakes in order to arrive at genuinely innovative places.
- And what does this mean for brands?
- As we all know, economically it’s been a hard slog lately. Normally recessions are shortish, sharp affairs. It’s tough for a bit, house prices fall, consumers are squeezed and we all start again. This has been a bit different though. Mervyn King talks of seven lean years (which we’re right in the middle of now).
- That sometimes feels like forever. It’s certainly felt like that to me. I’ve worked here for nearly four years,and only four months of that has been when the economy hasn’t been in a mess. It sometimes feels that this should be my job title. Before the recession hit, this type of job essentially involved discussing how consumers were going to find the time to spend all their money. It’s changed a bit since.
- With these economically challenging times lasting far longer than normal, marketers are starting to consider just how ingrained new purchase habits are becoming. And with that in mind, the ‘new normal’ might look quite different to the old rules. Brands are responding to that in a number of ways, with stripped-down ranges and more accessible products being two methods of obtaining and retaining consumers.
- A third way in which brands are adapting to the forever recession is by introducing smaller pack sizes. A good example of this would be Heinz introducing a smaller bottle of ketchup in the U.S, retailing at 99 cents, to help combat flagging sales.
- Smaller pack sizes is interesting, as it’s a tactic that is used in the developing world. Brands such as Lux and Sunsilk sell one-rupee (about 1.5 pence) sachets in India, to help fledgling consumers dip their toe into the world of brands at an affordable price point. The example of Heinz illustrates that this also has resonance in the developed world. But rather than helping people into a brand, it’s helping people to stay with a brand in more challenging times.
- What does this mean for brands?
- And this won’t be the first time that a tactic designed with the developing world in mind ends up being popular in the developed world. Although their star has waned of late, Netbooks found a great deal of popularity in developed world markets over recent times. They were made as a low-cost option for lower-income markets, and almost by accident ended up being popular in the developed world due to their small size and cost. It’s a trend I see developing further – things that are produced in the developing world becoming popular in the developed world – sometimes for the same reasons (such as cost), sometimes for very different reasons.
- And that’s something to bear in mind when you think about the developing world. There are two assumptions you should steer clear of. Firstly – they will follow exactly the same path as us.Secondly – we have nothing to learn from them.We talk in our guide about shifting poles in the world – essentially a unipolar world (in which the West rules) being replaced by a multipolar one.
- The implications of that are, of course, enormous. Trendwatching has identified a trend entitled ‘Red Carpet’, which involves the measures that are being taken to accommodate visitors from developing markets (particularly China)The number of foreign trips taken by the Chinese is rising at a phenomenal rate, and they tend to be very heavy spenders. Recent research showed that Chinese tourists spend, on average, 8% of their disposable income on a foreign trip (there tends only to be one). Harrods has led the way in accommodating this, installing Chinese bank terminals and hiring 75 Mandarin-speaking staff. Sales from the new bank terminals showed that Chinese visitors spend on average £3,500 in a store visit. Clearly Harrods is an extreme example, but more and more we are seeing (and will see) the measures that are often taken to accommodate Western shoppers in Asian markets seen in reverse in the UK.
- At a more macro-level, we will start to see brands taking the habits and tastes of consumers in those countries much more into consideration. And whilst a multipolar world will mean multipolar products, we would anticipate a trickle down effect. So expect to see mass-market products more influenced at a macro-level by the sensibilities of consumers outside the West.
- What does this mean for brands?
- So let’s move onto our next section – the more upbeat ‘Cheer Up and Get Involved’
- In terms of the total effect that the repolarisation of the world has on Britain,I think it has the real potential to be positive. The fact is that Britain does not have a great deal to lose, simply because it has not been a superpower for more than half a century now. The American media is full of wailing and gnashing of teeth about jobs going to China and their manufacturing base being destroyed. Luckily for us, we don’t have a manufacturing base to destroy – it’s gone already. What we do have is something that’s harder to replicate – something that can’t be written down in a series of instructions and sent off to the developing world. Our knowledge, our heritage, our creativity and our culture.
- And that’s why I think 2012 actually holds promise for Britain. We can show our worth on the world stage. And this won’t come in the format of pomposity and superiority. It will come in an iteration of modern Britishness. This comes from two sources – two things to genuinely look forward to. The Olympic Games and Diamond Jubilee.The Sun newspaper ran this in their January 3rd newspaper, imploring people to make 2012 great (under the banner of the Olympics)
- The government are also, unsurprisingly, keen to extol the virtues and assets we possess as a nation. This meeting, chaired by David Cameron, was held at the Handball arena in early January, with ‘xxxx is great’ posters in the background. E.G Heritage is great, entrepreneurs are great, culture is great etc etc.
- What does this mean for brands?
- If 2011 was the year of apathy and fractiousness, 2012 will be the year of engagement. It will feel, for the first time in a long time, like we’re genuinely all in it together (and not just what career politicians espouse on Radio 4 and Question Time). There’ll be a spirit of ‘join in’ and ‘get involved’. There’ll be an even greater drive for consumers to get involved in brands.
- We all know about consumers creating with brands, but I promised myself neither that or gamification would be mentioned in this presentation.They’re both valid and interesting, but I think we’ve probably heard enough about both of those in trend presentations for the moment.
- 2012 will also a bigger opportunity for brands to get involved in society, which we’ve outlined in our trend entitled ‘A Helping Brand – where PR meets ER. This builds on a academic paper written by a Harvard academic, in which he introduces the concept of creating Shared Value.By this, he means not just a piecemeal CSR initiative, rather a long-lasting, mutually beneficial investment in a particular community. This becomes even more pertinent at a time when services are being cut across the board, allowing brands to attach their names to popular and high-profile activities, building brand profile at the grassroots and on top of that actually doing some real good. Kellogg’s Give a Child a Breakfast is a good example of a ‘helping brand’ – stepping in to save breakfast clubs when government cuts threatened their future. This is both additive to the community and to Kellogg’s on a long-term basis, as they will be provided with young adults that have spent their formative years eating their cereal.
- What does this mean for brands?
- Also, what I think we’ll see more (which we’ve not seen much in the past) is brands asking consumers to get involved in decision making (a trend we’ve entitled Micro Democracy) giving their opinion on which decision a brand should make. This will happen in a good way (Waitrose’s Community Matters scheme is a nice example). It could, however, also manifest in a less positive way. An opportunity to get consumers to make unpalatable choices.It’s also treating consumers like grown-ups. In my opinion,that’s a revelation that business has woken up to over recent years. It’s oftennot what you do, it’s the way that you do it.
- What does this mean for brands?
- So more is expected of brands, but also more is demanded of brands and business.And a consumer demand that is only going to gather paceis for greater transparency and openness. This is a long-term trend that I see accelerating over in 2012.But at the same time as we demand more transparency and openness from business, we are also fighting to present the best version of ourselves online.
- Personal online brand management is getting ever more crucial, and also ever more complex.And it’s not just the branding of the present us that we’re concerned with. It’s also the brand management of the past us.
- Never before in human history has the balance of information been so skewed in favour of recent history. We’re all familiar with the stats about how much data is being produced every year, and how that’s set to increase exponentially. But think about it in a different way. There’s probably more recorded information online about the last day (and by information I mean news stories, images, videos, tweets, status updates) than there is about the entire year of 1988 (I picked 1988 at random, but basically any year before the start of the technology revolution). Obviously society didn’t start in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room, and the majority of people alive today have lived more of their lives in an offline world than in the online world. With lots of history to fill, there will be increased opportunity to backfill our own personal narrative.
- The Timeline feature could be the first of many back-story services that we see online. With most people over the age of 30 having lived more of their lives offline than on, there’s a whole load of past to be told. And with this will come the temptation to selectively fill your back story. Take my timeline, for example. Lots of stuff happened in this period. Good and bad. I’m unlikely to put any of the bad stuff in. I’ve already seen examples of people adding to their timelines with holidays they went on and things they did in the distant past. I’ve not seen them add failed exams or relationships. Facebook in its normal guise at least shows the warts and all truth (to a certain degree) – “xxxx is no longer in a relationship’, for example.
- And obviously LinkedIn allows you to fill in your back story in an often creative manner, which according to esteemed Head of Planning Jon Tipple does take place.
- I mentioned how crucial online brand management is. It’s also very complex too. And it’s getting more complex as we move into what we’ve termed to be a one-faced world, primarily caused by the continued rise of Twitter.
- Facebook is the home of curated identities for a small selection of our nearest and dearest.It allows you to choose the people who see/don’t see what you get up to (here in Barcelona looking decidedly worse for wear –eyes barely open).
- Twitter is a completely different kettle of fish. Your boss can follow you, as can ex-girlfriends, your parents and other undesirables. They can all see what you have to say about a variety of subjects. Yes, they may not be able to see photos of you wasted on a night out, but they can find out something much more telling (and one might say, damning) – what you think. For example, potential employers might forgive images of you looking blotto after a Jagerbomb or three, but if your politics is dodgy or your tweets are littered with spelling mistakes, you might not get a call-back.
- So we’re taking more time to curate our own identities online. However, that doesn’t mean brands can get away with doing the same.
- Transparency and openness are the most basic of hygiene factors now.
- This has already been taken to levels that one couldn’t imagine just a few years ago. A decade ago, the idea of a retailer putting up all reviews of its products (good and bad) would have been unthinkable – after all, a one star rating for a product is active discouragement to buying it , which somewhat runs counter to the reason why stores exist. What smart retailers have realised, however, is that consumers will find out what they want to know. So giving them that information on your site isn’t going to greatly affect purchase habits.
- Retailers are not actively going out of their way to give you feedback they’ve received on their brands, however. We are starting to see this change, however. In the U.S last July, Domino’s rented out billboard space in Times Square, in which they posted up all consumer comments (good and bad). This tacticespecially works for businesses that are considered to have a bad reputation. If people generally think bad things about you, a few more negative comments won’t affect you too much. What baring all can do is give your consumers a much more balanced view of what people actually say.McDonalds did the same (to great effect) a few years back on the premise that people couldn’t really think any worse of them.
- What it also does is highlight bad reviews that are given by those that, to put it kindly, are not society’s sharpest tools. My main takeout from this review (on the right), for example, is not about Domino’s, but rather about the author. In fact, highlighting badly written and nonsensical one-star reviews is quite popular online.
- The You Can’t Please Everyone blog on Get Cynical is a good case in point – it shows 1 star reviews of classic films and books. Here are a couple of my favourites.
- An aspect of business being more open with us is that it exponentially increases the amount of data in the public domain.Now, big data is something we’ve been talking about in Pulse for yonks. We are living in a revolution as big and important as the Industrial Revolution, withdata at its heart. We’ve seen two main areas in which data has increased over the last few months in the social networking sphere.
- The first being ‘Frictionless Sharing’ – a term coined by Trendwatching to describe sharing which is passive rather than active. The most obvious example of this is ‘xxxxx listened to xxxxx on Spotify’ or ‘xxxxx read this article on the Guardian”.
- The second is the big increase in Twitter sign-ups. Twitter sign-ups trebled following the launch of iOS5 on the iPhone/iPad, with deep integration into the phone allowing users to tweet directly from photos and videos, rather than having to go into a Twitter app and tweet from there.
- With so much more information, we need better filters.
- Twitter is a good case in point of filter failure.A big increase in Twitter sign-ups means that we’ve now got more and more people tweeting about the same thing. I wouldn’t say that hashtags are impossible to follow now, but for popular topics they are pretty difficult. Twitter has gone some way to addressing this by putting a top tweet at the top of most hashtags. But there’s real room to go further – and a real need. The ability to sort tweets by Klout score or number of retweets a particular tweet has gained would go a long way to improving Twitter’s filtering capabilities (which are currently close to non-existent), hence the ‘Twidiot Filter’ is less of an observational trend, and more of a projected trend based on need.
- What does this mean for brands?
- Alongside the amount of information increasing is the number of options as consumers increasing. We now depend on filters and curators to guide us. What we’ll increasingly let them do is let the filters become decision-makers (and let them revisit those decisions on a regular basis). Certain mobile phone networks already automatically switch you from tariff to tariff based on your usage – and in the near future there could be a space for companies that are set up to make the best decision for a consumer (and review that on a regular basis).We anticipate this in sectors that are both highly complex and low-interest sectors. So think utilities and insurance.
- What does this mean for brands?
- And the sheer amount of information available makes filters important. Without filters we’d have to wade through almost unimaginable amounts of information. The downside to filters, however, is they filter to the person you are when you set them. Unless you continually change them (or they are continually changed for you), they’ll keep returning information and products in the same arena – hence our trend entitled ‘Escaping the You-Loop’In this context, being a brand that can still surprise and delight consumers becomes ever more important.
- The growth of Big Data goes hand in hand with digital technology stretching itself further into our lives in our final section entitled Digital First, Digital Everywhere.
- Let’s deal with Digital First, first
- Last year I referred to children of the television age building the internet and children of the internet age rebuilding our world.
- An interesting comparison with the digital revolution is the invention of the printing press. When the printing press was invented, printers mimicked scribes, with fonts designed to look like handwriting. Printing was promoted as automated scribe writing.Sometimes it needs a new generation to fully see the possibilities. And of course, we increasingly have that. At both the ideation and production phase, who are producing digital first products for the youngest consumers – that new generation who are unencumbered by the past. A new generation that can’t recognise the difference between analogue and digital.
- This is a good example of the youngest in our society being totally oblivious to the fact that analogue and digital are separate – a one year old pinching and swiping a magazine as if it were an iPad. See more http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqF2gryy4Gs
- Until now digital has been a tacked-on afterthought to real world developments. However, we are beginning to see some early examples of a ‘digital first’ approach. And no surprise that it’s the kids market leading the way. Products such as Lego’s ‘Life of George’, the Macy’s ‘Believe-o-magic’ app and Cheatwell’s ‘App-Player’ board game seamlessly fuse real-world and digital aspects, with the digital element being an indispensable part of the experience.See more http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DHZwSOVKBY
- Obviously for the rest of us, the transition to a world in which technology reaches every area is a slightly longer process. We don’t take to it as naturally. We remember a time before all this. We will, however, be more and more willing (or desire) to allow technology to reach the previously analogue parts of our lives, and connectivity to reach the technology that previously stood unlinked to the rest of the world.
- We’ll be buying more things on our mobile phones, as screens get bigger, consumers get more comfortable with the mechanism and greater number of mobile-optimised websites.
- We’ll (possibly) be using our mobile phones as a payment mechanism.There’s a slight element of Field of Dreams to using your mobile phone to pay for things – if you build the infrastructure, people should come. There will be an education and an infrastructure job to do – and I think it will begin in earnest in 2012.
- Internet of things – making the objects we possess as searchable as information online. Examples could be Googling your home to find a lost pair of keys, your fridge tweeting you to tell you it’s run out of butter or your tumble dryer texting you to tell you that your clothes are still damp. A process that won’t be by any means fully formed at the end of 2012, but one you’ll definitely hear more about.
- In the spirit of linking up previously unconnected devices – this looks set to be a breakout year for both Smart TV and Social TV. TV and the internet have developed as discrete entities – whilst there’s been much innovation in the later in terms of functionality, there’s been far less amongst the former. The TV has added picture sharpness, size (of screen) and become lower in cost, but what it does hasn’t fundamentally changed for a long while. That’s all changing, but more importantly it’s about to become mass. Most new television sets are now sold with Smart TV technology. We also see third-party sources (Xbox Kinect etc.) bringing the functionality to our TV sets.
- And of course, Apple’s (rumoured) launch of iTV at the end of the year could be a watershed moment in the new era of televisions.
- So the rise of all things digital continues.Technology is becoming less and less about silos and more and more about ecosystems. That’s not to say, however, that it will be a one way street. We know that not every innovation is adopted by the masses, but even technology pushed by the most powerful companies in the world will sometimes fail to gain any meaningful uptake.
- Take Siri for example – lauded by Apple as the key feature of their iPhone 4S and one that would revolutionise the way we interact with our mobile phones.It’s early days yet so I won’t write it off, but initial signs for Siri (in this version) aren’t particularly positive.
- Only ¼ of 4S owners use it at all, with only 10% doing so on a daily basis. And this was taken from a website with a primarily US audience – our cultural reticence to make much noise in public places would, I suggest, make that number even lower.
- There are also other innovations that I (and many others) have serious doubts about. I’m willing to be proved wrong , but QR codes would be one, although they did see a 50% rise in use according to this statistic (from madeupstats)You do sometimes get the feeling with QR codes that it’s a very small group of people talking to each other.
- And the spread of digital technologies won’t all be one way traffic – not in terms of availability, but in terms of free accessibility. The internet is built around advertising – that’s the route to free content. But just how valuable are people consuming your content going to be to advertisers if they’re based halfway around the world?In a globalised world, paywalls are starting to get more xenophobic. The Independent is planning to erect a paywall for those outside the UK. The Onion limits those outside the U.S. Makes sense – how are you going to convince Sainsbury’s to advertise on your site when a high % of traffic comes from the U.S/Australia?That’s something that the industry (perhaps more at the media planning end) will have to keep tabs on. John Wanamaker (the father of modern advertising) once famously asserted that ‘half of all the money I spend on advertising is wasted – I just don’t know which half’. It’s pretty easy to quantify how much money you’re wasting if you’re advertising to people that can’t buy your products. From a consumer point of view it might mean access to less information than we’ve been used to. We’re familiar with all-encompassing paywalls (The Times), but not ones that are solely based on our place of residence.