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Domenic Venuto
It’s paradoxical that just as our personal and professional lives race toward the end of the year at speeds unknown before October, we will stop and reflect on our past 12 months' accomplishments. This year, the pace is no different from previous years, with perhaps the exception that it’s the end of a decade. It’s hard to remember what was going on at the beginning of the year, let alone the beginning of the decade. So this year, I find myself taking a longer pause in order to remind myself how far the media industry has come and what we can count as accomplishments before we turn our attention to the goals we need to establish for 2011 and beyond.
When I joined Razorfish in April 2000, the Internet was expanding faster than the universe and Razorfish was white hot -- the Internet darling that seemingly every company wanted to hire. As the “new media” industry took stock of its losses, reduced in size and importance, the three years that followed the bubble burst were a struggle. We weren’t short of ideas of how our clients could use the web to grow their businesses, reduce costs or reach new audiences. Our mantra at the time was “Everything that can be digital, will be.” But I remember our ambitions were greater than our clients' capacity to absorb or spend, let alone put them into operation.
The reality was that before we got to the sexy digital stuff, we needed to get our clients to baseline. We needed to educate them, better understand their operational structures and upgrade their back-end technologies. This all took time. Clients weren’t yet ready to build mobile applications that controlled soda vending machines (we had a prototype in our lobby). Nor were they ready to spend thousands of dollars on musical mnemonics to accompany corporate websites (we built a music design lab and hired musicians). While we did some really cool stuff and pushed boundaries in a number of industries -- particularly in finance with clients like Charles Schwab -- the majority of our work back then was online corporate brochure-ware. We produced beautiful, on-brand, corporate vanity pieces that marketing teams took back to their bosses to prove the company “got” digital, especially since it was designed and built by Razorfish.
Things started picking up toward the end of 2003. The Dow was regaining its strength and money was flowing back into the media business. The Internet was maturing. Our clients’ requests and their project appetites were more sophisticated than we had previously seen. The Web was an official channel for reaching consumers. We weren’t simply using the web to supply information. We were now embracing it as a means to present seamless consumer experiences that had real business benefit either by increasing sales, reducing operational costs and/or tying spaghetti-like legacy systems together. Clients like GE were asking us to design and build transaction systems with slick, streamlined user interfaces. By 2006 we were well beyond online brochure-ware.
It was a wild ride from 2006 onwards. The media business exploded. Web 2.0 was the catch-cry and traditional publishers started accelerating their web strategies in search of online advertising dollars to replace the money lost in traditional assets. In NYC, Razorfish couldn’t hire fast enough. In fact we took advantage of an Australian Visa program to (legally) import a number of Australians! We were helping such publishers as The New York Times and Condé Nast enhance their existing properties, conceive new products and build scale in the search of search traffic. We built a nice business marrying our online media buying expertise with web development skills.
2008 and 2009 clearly belonged to the social media craze. After recognizing it as a phenomenon we have spent the past few years trying to understand the attraction and attempting to harness and measure its power. It has also been the main reason the industry created the categories of “Paid,” “Owned” and “Earned” media. With more and more channels to reach consumers we needed a taxonomy to group our marketing strategies and understand the effectiveness of our media spend. To that end, the last few years have seen data collection, attribution and, of course, privacy concerns steadily building in prominence. In a business that is fast getting commoditized, data is evidence (and competitive advantage) that our strategies for reaching consumers and influencers work.
While 2010 continued to be dominated by social media marketing, the iPad (and mobile applications) successfully stole some of the limelight. It has been an incredible year of transition and restructure but one that’s led to so much experimentation and innovation.
So what’s in ahead over the next three years? The fervor around social media will peak as we continue figuring out effective and repeatable marketing applications. There will definitely be more innovation in the tablet space, both in terms of hardware and applications that will create new business models. Online programming will rise in prominence aided by new devices and consumer demand to reduce cable providers’ strong-hold. As these events transpire we will also do a much better job of connecting the data streams together in each of our categories (Paid, Owned and Earned). We might even be able to go one step further and correlate all media spend to sales - the holy grail of marketing. If we are lucky we may just get there by the end of 2013. Just think where we started 10 years ago!
Domenic Venuto is global managing director, media solutions for VivaKi VivaKi is part of Publicis Groupe, the world’s third largest communications group. He can be reached at domenic.venuto@vivaki.com
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