Adnerds

Our last FollowFridays session was all about the future of advertising. We started by having a look at some industries who are clearly changing their beliefs and actions. The music industry teamed up with YouTube to stream a full U2 concert on the YouTube website reaching a stunning 10 million live viewers and an additional 10 million afterwards! A big contrast with the 100,000 live viewers in the Rose Bowl. But also paramedics are becoming more online and connected as we speak. They have tools and equipment that directly connects their hospital patients’ monitoring systems with their smartphones, some heart patients can be even transfer wireless their current heart rate details by means of a pacemaker with a built-in antenna. Car manufacturers are creating amazing new functionalities to be rolled out in the future where connectivity is key. Volkswagen’s autonomous valet parking is only the beginning. Cars will be connected with their driver, but also cars will have a direction connection with other cars, cars with pedestrians, cars with traffic lights etc. An unmanned Audi TTS will even participate in Pike’s Peak 156-turn ascent.

The Future is Online and Connected

If you didn’t catch our drift yet: we believe the future – also the future of advertising – is online and connected. Five existing technologies, the one already somewhat more wide-spread than the other, add up to the future of advertising. We discussed where the social web (I don’t think we need to introduce Facebook.com?), the pervasive web (or the Internet of Things – Nike Plus connects even your shoes to the internet!), the semantic web (Wolfram Alpha is doing amazing things with today’s web data), digital enhanced life (advanced augmented reality if you like that more like Microvision’s wearable displays) and affective computing (yes, we will even know how you feel if Smartex can pull it off) will lead us in a few years from now.

We concluded our last session with some key figures from both Charlene Li’s EngagementDB report (July 2009) and last week’s released Synovate’s global survey about digital dependency and some possible next steps for your company.