Tell Us a Story

One day in the not-too-distant future, Web 2.0 will be about telling stories in the service of marketing to consumers, said Michael Davis, senior vice president and director of emerging media at Draft FCB/Chicago.

“It is the right idea — the story — that has always motivated the customer to act,” Davis said last month at DMA06. But, he warned, focusing too much on the device conveying that message can blind marketers to all the possibilities for customer communication that will soon be available.

Showing a clip of Steve Jobs introducing the first Apple Macintosh in the early '80s, Davis made the point that emerging media is about passion. “It might have measurable results, and it might have accountability, and I might talk about that to clients every single day,” he said. “But it's about passion, and you can see the passion in Jobs' face.”

Davis ran through a list of macrotrends that marketers will have to come to grips with before the end of the decade. Video on demand, for example, will liberate content from the network programming schedule, thanks to more than 60 million U.S. homes with video on demand by the end of the decade and 30 million with digital video recorders. That video is also moving to the Internet; some 65,000 videos are uploaded daily to YouTube alone. And in turn, that trend is fostering a “me revolution” of social networking, in which individual consumers can author Web channels all about themselves — and give marketers insights about how to sell to them.

The trend that holds the most potential, Davis said, is the migration of content to mobile devices. While full-motion video — essentially, TV on a handset — is only available today with workarounds such as Slingbox technology, within a few years viewers will be able to get what they say they want most from their mobile phones: movies, sports and news.

Inside the retail store, which Davis termed the “fourth screen,” radio-frequency identification tags will help marketers understand consumer behavior better by tracking their movements through the aisles.

All these technologies will work together, enabling DMers to tell consumers the stories that should motivate them to act, according to Davis.

“Content still seems to be king, and contact is there to make sure the content gets to you,” he said. “Whether you're online or in the store, it becomes about how shoppers have control, and what they're doing with that content. Changing behavior becomes the centerpiece of all the consumption models.”