Brenda Atkinson
MIXED MEDIA
At a conference on new media in New York last week, I realised that the advent of the Internet is probably the single most forceful contribution to consumer empowerment the past century has seen.
The gurus of online research brought home the message: in a digitised media environment where apertures proliferate and shift at the speed of broadband, advertising must more than ever look to maximise consumers’ experience of brands and products. And in an increasingly wireless world, that consumer is going to be on the move.
In the “noughties”, as someone I know refers to the first decade of this century, consumer mobility – enabled by technologies which seem to be becoming prosthetic extensions of our bodies – marks a radical shift from conventional theories of advertising and marketing.
As one research company put it: “Interactivity is a key driver of recall and comprehension,” something most of us would claim to know, but which few of us know how to exploit in driving consumers to purchase at dot.coms.
What’s becoming clear is that the online game is a race in which customisation of message to consumer targets wins. The online retail environment is costly to set up and on average slow to show returns, which means that digital media agencies are under pressure to prove the effectiveness of online media in delivering the bottom line.
Increasingly, though, media is not so much simply bought as created in space and time. In the United States, where the telecoms infrastructure is established and competitive, the leading digital media companies are punting broadband in conjunction with rich media ads that will target consumers in their homes, through wireless applications that will ultimately connect users’ PCs, TVs, PDAs and fridges. Not to mention the fact that video-on- demand via interactive TV will open up new and different apertures through which to reach and engage consumers in media that increase recall, and so increase the likelihood of their moving to a sale.
Also in the virtual pipeline is technology which tracks user profiles and serves them ads online that are customised to gender, marital status and geographical region: online car retailers can serve an ad to a mother of three in California (a station wagon), or a single male in Los Angeles (something more racy).
There’s more, a fact which should make traditional media purveyors realise that they ignore digital at their peril: the Web and the technologies it has generated allow data mining and analysis to a degree of accuracy unprecedented in advertising history. What this means is that those of us who build brands online can fulfil a dual function – by delivering bottom-line accountability to clients through campaign tracking, and by enabling those clients to pursue their customers in an increasingly specific, context-bound way.
Of course, all of this might seem more credible in New York, where commerce has built technological infrastructures only dreamed of in Africa. Mid-winter Manhattan is an appropriate setting for musings on the digital future – its capitalist cathedrals cradle an often daunting and apparently boundless consumerism, fed by an economy in which anything seems possible.
South Africa, however, is poised as the gateway to an entire continent in which wireless technologies promise to democratise access – to information, education and, of course, products and brands.
The launch in Johannesburg last year of Worldspace – the single largest digital broadcast system and the first direct from- satellite- to-broadcast medium, now allows direct multimedia broadcasts to emerging markets worldwide. And the pending deregulation of the telecoms industry promises aggressive competition from which consumers will undoubtedly benefit, including “new” consumers of enabling technologies.
South Africa itself is a country obsessed with new technologies, and driven in large part by a frontier mentality in which, economically speaking, there is an enormous amount up for grabs. More South Africans use cellphones than do landlines and the Internet market reached critical mass last year. According to research conducted by Media Africa, business-to- business electronic is expected to reach almost R4-billion this year.
With the alleviation of bandwidth constraints and the appearance in South Africa of next generation technologies such as WAP (within six months), broadband, and interactive television (within two to five years), an entirely new media spectrum will grow new consumer markets.
And different consumers. The challenge to advertisers and marketers will be to adjust to those consumers’ demands and desires, to meet them, in effect, at the interface of their technologies in ways that build breathing, interactive brands.