We hate to say “I told you so.” Wait. No, we really don’t. Analysts at Piper Jaffray & Co. took a good, hard at look at things and decided we are in the midst of a media – well, everything – revolution and it’s all the Internet’s fault. E-Life as you know it is about to change.
Boy, wish we’d have noticed that before Piper Jaffray put out this 425-page report (PDF). Oh yeah, we kind of did, notice it a lot, but we’ll get to back-patting later. The report, entitled The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and The Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium, coins the latest buzzword “communitainment” after exploring the upheaval currently in progress.
Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of SEO-PR, took one for the team and weeded through the report before penning a succinct summary over at Search Engine Watch. “After several years of moving at a healthy pace along well-traveled pathways, the search engine industry seems to be sailing off in surprising new directions,” he writes.
The comprehensive report is the result of a year’s worth of research led by Piper Jaffray’s Safa Rashtchy, managing director and senior Internet analyst, and Aaron Kessler, VP and senior Internet analyst, and is the firm’s outline of how they believe advertising and media models will change over the next couple of decades.
Jarboe quotes an email from them:
“Consider this report as a warning of a storm that has already formed, a storm that will destroy many models and create new ones. Luckily, the full cycle of the storm will still take a few more years to complete, and there is still time to react.”
The short and skinny: The user revolution has gone mainstream and is causing increased media fragmentation, putting search, as a portal, at the forefront of branding, and video ads will be funding it all.
It’s good to see this spark of recognition from outside the online marketing world. For the longest time, SEM was considered, from both sides of the fence, quite separate from traditional media and traditional marketing/advertising/branding. Search marketers, at times still, scoffed at branding concepts that didn’t produce direct, measurable results, even if this is the way the advertising world has worked for decades. Ask Coca-Cola.
But traditional Madison Avenue types have also been slow to accept the power of search marketing, and, more recently, the power of user-generated media. Both sides, though, are starting to get it: it’s all going to be one big media orgy one day anyway, might as well start smooching.
We could go into specifics about how this orgiastic revolution will take place, but we’d just be repeating ourselves. Instead, consider this an abridged index of sheer, conceited prescience:
Don’t Expect the FCC to Stay Out of It
Madison Ave. Doesn’t Get Web Video
Google and In-game Advertising
Quantum Physics and Viral Marketing
Search Engines and Time Reality (just for fun)
Google Media, Inc., 20 years later…
Advertisers Late To the Big Dance
Portals, Google’s One Of Them
Google Should Come Out of Portal Closet
Mainstream Media Afraid Of Blogs
Branding In The Age of Wikipedia
Branding In the Red Light District
Podcasting, Blogging, Monetization
That’s all of the horn-tooting for today.
