Online Oxygen

May 12, 2005

by Stan Stutter

Hands down, the most eye-popping thing I saw at the American Association of Advertising Agencies/Institute of Communications and Advertising annual management conference in Bermuda earlier this month had to be a presentation by Reinier Evers, director of an organization out of Amsterdam called Trendwatching.com. He was actually speaking exclusively to the 30 or so Canadians at the conference, having been brought in by ICA for its day's worth of unique member programming added on to the three days of speeches and seminars put together by its larger American counterpart.

Evers, a 34-year-old former agency and dotcom executive who co-founded Trendwatching.com in 2002, describes it as being "somewhere between an agency and a consultancy." It boasts more than 4,000 spotters in 70 countries who identify, describe and usually photograph emerging consumer and retail activity. The website makes all the information available for free; Trendwatching.com makes money by charging serious coin for presentations or specific project consultations.

The "Trends Download"

Evers walked us through was in essence a huge brain dump. Where to even start? The mega-trends he outlined were labelled: "online oxygen," "mass class," massclusivity," "Generation C" (as in "creative"), and "Masters of the YOUniverse."

You can delve deeper into the definitions of each, with a plethora of supporting real-world examples, at the Trendwatching.com site. But for me the vast aquifer underlying almost all the trends is the near total dominance of the Internet. The Net has become the atmosphere in which we do almost everything else, or what Evers referred to as "online oxygen."

"The online revolution has only just begun, and already we're completely addicted," he said, citing an experiment last year that asked a group of New Yorkers to go without the Internet for two weeks. The subject group universally became moody and withdrawn. I believe it. Evers noted another recent study which found more people would rather give up food than web access. Ask yourself how many times a day you Google something? Could you live without it?

More than a billion people worldwide are now online. Ninety-six per cent of all U.S. children have been online in the past year. Evers says those penetration numbers are in the range of TV-as in virtually complete. (A separate panel on the state of the Internet underscored that advertisers are starting to get this. Wenda Harris Millard, chief sales officer for Yahoo! in the U.S., pointed out that this year, total revenue for Google and Yahoo! in her country is expected to exceed the combined prime time ad revenues of ABC, CBS and NBC).

And the Net is completely shifting the balance of power in the business world to consumers. Again, we all know this. But do we really get what it means? Blogs with harsh reviews and price comparisons are last year's story. People are posting pictures and video, taken with camera phones, online. Evers showed several images of mouldy bathrooms and soiled carpets posted by disgruntled hotel guests. The whole world is watching indeed.

Evers made the case that entire ecosystems are popping up online. Online dating was only a start, now there's finitely parsed dating niches (singlerepublican.com anyone?) and even websites to improve your odds-lookbetteronline.com, for instance, allows you to improve your photo for postings.

The consumer control and empowerment that the Web has unleashed and amplified can be seen in thousands of ways. One small example Evers showed was a commercial that used footage of the spectacular Tiger Woods chip shot at the Masters golf tournament last month. As anyone who watched the sportscast knows, the ball rolled up to the hole and teetered for what seemed like several seconds with the Nike swoosh exposed before tipping into the hole. It took Nike and its agency almost two weeks to clear the rights and produce a TV spot for airing. Meanwhile, a Nike fan had created his own celebratory spot with the exact same concept and had begun circulating it online (jaffejuice.com) within hours.

The implications of the whole customer-made/remix culture came up several times during other parts of the conference. During a panel discussion on the ad industry's biggest challenges, Rosemarie Ryan, president of JWT New York, said it is coming to terms with how to connect with consumers through technology. The "persuasion model" is out of date, she said. Instead advertisers need to find ways to encourage "consumer participation."

Likewise, the most interesting British creative work that Mother founding partner and joint creative director Mark Waites showed during his presentation were online and viral-both sanctioned, as in some great funny films for mobile phone Orange, and not, as in the famous Ford Ka and Volkswagen Polo "fake" spots. Mpegs that get forwarded online, Waites suggested, are "as close as you can get to word of mouth" in advertising. The real punch line for the Polo fake ad, of course, is that the duo that created it has now landed full-time jobs at a major London agency.

Indeed, after the Trendwatching session, a couple of the Canadian delegates suggested they were considering launching an agency with no creative employees, that would farm out all work to consumers.

I'm not so sure they were kidding.

 

 

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