This week I am putting the finishing touches on my annual Printing and Creative 2009 Forecast for WhatTheyThink.com, and the report will touch on the major trends that printers, creatives, and the universe of companies that surrounds them, will need to content with in 2009—and beyond.
Without giving away the store, what are some of the trends that marketers and advertisers will need to contend with in the new year?
As I used to do with the TrendWatch and Industry Measure forecast reports, I identified those items which are
hot, warm, and cold—and, this time, with one [dis]honorable mention.
Hot Items
Mobile Media—2009 could be the year that mobile pops for marketers an advertisers, driven by the Apple iPhone and the new Google Android. Doing something with cellphones has been the holy grail for many marketers since the cellphone hit the market. The growing reliance on these devices makes them desirable target for marketing messages—especially now that they can handle and coordinate a larger and larger variety of media and platforms. And their increasing incorporation of GPS opens other new possibilities. (Speaking of GPS, New York City will be experimenting in 2009 with GPS-enabled digital signage affixed to city buses, that can change its message depending on what neighborhood the bus enters. Is there, say, a Starbucks around the block? Well, now you can look at the side of a bus and find out!)
“Green” Issues—Print buyers are becoming increasingly green-savvy and are paying closer and closer attention to issues such as recycled paper, chains of certification, and other green issues, largely to put on a green face for their own clients. This will likely only get stronger in 2009. There is also the sense that more and more industries will be going green and more and more green technologies, and investments in green technologies, hitting the market. We should try to be careful that we don’t end up creating yet another unsustainable asset bubble.
Web 2.0—As ever, second-generation Web technologies that foster community, interactivity with other users, and ways that consumers play some role in the content creation process. That is, blogs that allow for not only user comments (in theory) but viral transmission and cross-posting; podcasts; YouTube and viral video; and social networking, which is not just “greasy kid stuff,” but is becoming increasingly important for business networking and even marketing.
1:1 Printing—When we see, as we did in a survey that the WhatTheyThink Economics and Research Center conducted in September, that creatives are starting to see more and more interest in 1:1 printing, we are prepared to at least entertain the idea that perhaps its day has come. However, the weak link in the chain may very well be the database. A good database is hard to find. So while the printing may ultimately be the easiest part of the 1:1 process, marketers need to ensure that database quality remains up to snuff. (And as print publications—especially business-to-business magazines—fold or move solely online, where much reading is done anonymously, good databases may become even scarcer.) Otherwise, the effectiveness of 1:1 will suffer, and we will all be back at square one.
“Wikinomics” or “Open Source-onomics”—The poster child for this is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), which is derided almost as often as it is consulted. (Despite its reputation, independent studies have found that, generally speaking, Wikipedia is no better or worse than the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica.) The point is that online communities of thousands or millions of disparate individuals are more and more involved in the creation of a wide variety of products and services, from computer software (usually referred to under the rubric of “Open Source”), to mutual funds, to prosthetic limbs, to airplanes—and, of course, to encyclopedias.
Warm Items
E-Books—In the December 2008 issue of Writer’s Digest magazine, publishing guru Bob Sacks sees the either/or p- or e-book argument a moot point:
The reading of a book is the distribution of stored information, passed from one person to another. Could it be a book printed on dead trees? Yes. Could it be the same book delivered in electronic format? Yes. The point is that all the world’s information is now available for immediate distribution in any format the reader requires.
(Bob Sacks, “It’s a Digital World Now,” Writer’s Digest, December 2008, p. 34. In an example of how BoSacks’ theory holds true, while this writer subscribes—happily—to the print edition of Writer’s Digest, the tendency for the publication to not put its magazine content online for reference, blogging, and viral dissemination is highly frustrating. We also get the sense they are shooting themselves in the foot by failing to make their content available in as wide a variety of formats as possible.)
Anyway, this is not a new conversation in publishing; the idea that content should be optimized for deliverability in whatever manner the consumer chooses (sometimes called “media agnosticism”) is as old as...well, e-books. Publishers are still wrestling with economic models for this. Part of the Amazon Kindle’s killer app-ness is that it can also be used to download content from the Internet, such as blog feeds and other electronic content. (Reviews have griped more about the DRM and fees involved than the technology or usability.) Once a single device can be used for as many purposes and as many media as possible, it will be a must-have device. Something like...the iPhone, a single pocket-sized device that can be used to make calls, check e-mail, surf the Web (in exactly the same way as on a computer), watch YouTube video, play iTunes, and more. The point of the e-book discussion is to not be concerned with any particular device, but to use the existence of those devices to understand the need for content to be available however and whenever the user wants it. Sometimes that will be print. Sometimes it will not.
Multichannel Marketing—Most people in graphic communications today recognize that content needs to be free to be piped to whatever delivery mechanism the consumer of that content wants. In print? Check. On the Web? Check. Via PDF? Sure, why not. Via a mobile device? Go for it. As video delivered via ubiquitous electronic displays? We’re getting there. Marketing (and publishing) today is not just about crafting a compelling message, it’s also about crafting a compelling media strategy that gets that message to where the eyeballs are. The consumer is now in the position to define how s/he wants—and, increasingly, expects—content delivered. Ignoring those wants and expectations is a recipe for failure.
Viral Campaigns/Unconventional Marketing—2007 was the year that unconventional marketing—some might call it guerrilla marketing—reached its pinnacle. Success was increasingly to be found in unconventional approaches to branding and marketing. It’s not even a case of thinking “outside the box.” The idea was to deny that the box even existed at all. In 2008, rather than seeing this taken to the next level, there seems to have been a pullback, primarily as the industry moves on to other things, or looks back into applying traditional marketing and advertising strategies to new and newer media. So the talk this year has been about trying to leverage mobile media, how to advertise in online video, and new applications for signs and billboards. Then, too, there is the economy. As the Wall Street Journal wrote recently, “In recent years, marketers have set aside a portion of their ad budgets to experiment with digital technologies such as Web video, mobile phones, gaming and virtual worlds. But with broader economic turmoil reaching Madison Avenue, these ‘experimental’ budgets are among the first to hit the cutting-room floor.”
[Dis]honorable Mention
The Economy—The next 12 months will likely not be pretty, and there is always the tendency to cut back on marketing and advertising when the economy gets rough. This is the wrong thing to do; curling into a ball and hoping that things get better soon is not exactly a strategy for success. Even the printing industry has defied macroeconomic trends in the past. Smart companies and smart businesspeople know how to be proactive in bad times and still find ways to prosper. Over the years, we’ve been encouraged to live in a constant state of fear of...pretty much everything, foreign and domestic. Well, I think it’s time to start bucking that trend.
Economic recessions are not things to fear; they are challenges to be conquered by action, not waited out like a bad storm. They present opportunities to think long and hard about one’s business, retool where necessary, and make an all-out assault on the market to escape the vicious death spiral that affects so many in tough times.
