What a Difference Fifteen Years Make!
In 1993, a group of us in Colorado were trying to figure out what this Internet thing was going to become. Wired magazine had just published their first issue. The very first web browser that could display both images and text in the same window, Mosaic, had just released to the world. The Aspen Institute hosted its first symposium on the subject of the internet and society. They were heady times. An honorable email address ended in .edu or .org. If your email address ended in .gov or .mil, you were treated with suspicion, and a .com address marked you as someone who might run roughshod over our new playground and ruin it for the rest of us.
We were all relatively naive, and eagerly chomping at our bits for this anti-Orwellian future where people had the power of the press, where public policy could be reviewed and responded to by the people, and where education reform meant everyone could attend the very best classes and learn from the greatest minds without tuition or relocation. When a high level manager from the marketing department at Comcast announced at the Aspen Institute that their carefully executed studies revealed that men wanted to use the internet to bet on sports and women wanted to shop, shop, shop, she was booed by the crowd. It wasn’t what we wanted to hear. We were the thought leaders, or so we thought. Money didn’t matter, or so we thought.
Time remains the greatest teacher of all. While Utopia didn’t arrive with our broadband connections, some of what we mused about at the Aspen Institute has come true. Our digital world is abound with great resources like the TED talks, podcasts from Harvard, Dartmouth, and Stanford, and well over 100 million blogs on every imaginable subject. The information age is truly upon us.
But our vision was too narrow. It didn’t say “and-also”. The internet expanded in every direction and with a particular bias toward commerce. What we have today far exceeds the imagination of anyone who attended that early winter symposium. The internet has become an economic engine and a .com address is nothing out of the ordinary. We have arrived at a point where the internet is the catalyst of influence, not yet under anyone’s control, but not entirely a free-for-all.
And the woman from Comcast was also right, though too narrow in her view as well. Men shop online. In fact, men out-spend women on the internet, say they are more comfortable shopping online, and are less apt to hold back on purchases during a down economy. It’s our shopping habits that have changed the most. For some, we view it as a way to save time. For others, it’s a way to make more informed purchases. And many of us are simply looking for the best deal. Whatever the reason, one out of every two American adults has made a purchase online.
Perhaps a greater shock to those pioneers of the mid-1990’s is the amount of detailed information available about internet users. The internet is a marketer’s panacea. For the first time we can watch an individual from their first exposure to a campaign, all the way through to the purchase of a product, even tracking the path they take through the store. The data is staggering, and we’re just starting to understand how we can use it. Marketing intelligence and its application to campaign execution is the new frontier of advertising and marketing.
The date for Orwell’s future has come and gone, but perhaps he too, was just too narrow in his view. You can see a little bit of Orwell in today’s internet, but you can also see empowerment. Consumers today are more informed, more price aware, have more choices, and ultimately, more influence over brands. Time will tell, but we may be at the beginning of a consumer revolution where it is the ultimate purchaser who shapes the product and the brand identity.
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