Interesting sessions on the future of life and the Net

From Jerry Michalski's Sociate blog ... interesting to think about how mass communication is about the approaches we take to it rather than the "segments" of people we are trying to reach.

"I’m at the Stanford Legal Futures Conference, which today adopted a FOO Camp approach that, in truth, isn’t that FOOish. Last night they posted the schedule, which has multiple panels with five or six smart people on each. OK.

But that doesn’t mean the sessions aren’t full of great stuff.

One small snippet: Jay Rosen quoted Raymond Williams saying “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” Then he proceeded to draw a distinction between inferring consumer behavior and following people’s actions, where action is what people do when they exercise their freedom.

It’ll take me a while to digest this, but it gives me a useful way to explain a trend I’m seeing, which is the slow death of traditional market segment analysis and the inference of behaviors in order to run marketing campaigns.

What replaces it? Good listening, fast following, smart adaptation. Segments vanish because their assumptions break all the time. Micro-niches emerge as people from different segments act in similar ways. Some grow really large; most stay small."

Mick's response?

Jerry - nice quote from Raymond Williams. In my experience, the “marketer’s trick” is to use the understanding of behaviors to create manageable segements. The aim is to create some form of critical mass of understanding to take action on.

Micro-niches are interesting but not very useful to act upon. Traditional socio-economic segmentations are virtually useless. Actual behaviors (”you are what you buy”) are more useful.

7 Branding Trends for 2008 You Won't See Anywhere Else

From the Fusion Brand Blog

What are the seven branding trends that will affect you most in 2008?

ProfitBrand Trend #1. Next era of online advertising rises

"Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? … You will."

That was the world's first banner ad (as well as one of the most prophetic), which kicked off the first era of online advertising. The AT&T ad ran on October 25, 1994, on the HotWired site.

This long-lasting era of online advertising has been substantially enhanced through the years to counter the slow glazing of consumer eyes, and now offers a variety of sizes, animation and tracking. Such banner or display ads account for about one-third of online advertising revenues, despite the fact that the click-through rates have declined dramatically from the early years. However, video advertising (which includes video search and mobile TV) is breathing new life into this genre, and will certainly capture many more dollars next year.

While the first era will be with us for a long time, the second era – symbolized by pop-ups and pop-unders -- is hopefully on its last legs. Surely, camera company X10 and the travel site Orbitz deserve places in Advertising's Hall of Shame for their Internet carpet-bombing. (However, beware of "pop-up audio," an emerging format that forces visitors to hear an entire ad without being able to turn it off). Revenue figures are hard to come by, but one estimate claims 20% of the $9.5 billion spent on casino and porn advertising goes to pop-ups and pop-unders.

The third era is sucking the lifeblood from newspapers. Online classified advertising, best symbolized by Craigslist and also-rans like eBay's kijiji , captures at least $50 million annually of high-profit advertising that used to go newspapers. It is also a dagger poised at the heart of MLS, the real estate monopoly for brokers and agents. Classified ads account for about 17% of total online advertising, which various research firms estimate dto total $17-$20 billion in 2007.

The next era is, of course, search advertising, with more than 40% of the Internet advertising pie. The value of search advertising comes both from the ability to target someone interested in an offering and pay for performance. As a result, the average cost of a sale for paid search is $26.75 per order, compared to $71.89 for a banner ad. No wonder US advertisers spent $8.3 billion on online advertising in 2007, up from $7 billion in 2006.

This era will explode if Google, which controls an estimated 70-85% of the paid-search advertising market, completes its acquisition of DoubleClick. Imagine what marketers will do with the offspring of the marriage of the largest search query database with the world's largest online behavioural database.

The latest era, now just out of the blocks, is social advertising, where advertisers will be able to piggyback on the social interactions on online users. Already, movies, books and companies have been putting up profile pages on MySpace, and then accepting "friend requests" for advance or "insider" information. Facebook users can treat brands as their "friends," and each online interaction with the brand can be communicated to their own circle of friends. USAToday achieved an amazing 380% increase in new reader registrations when it added social media services such as discussion forums, story recommendations, reviews and more. A companion trend is social shopping, which involves sharing shopping wish lists, experiences and purchase tracking.

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