• by Kendall Allen , August 3, 2009

In a marketplace characterized by mergers and acquisitions, forces of imagination and invention -- displacement is the dynamic we tend to acknowledge most. Markets are made, adjust and evolve. What is ultimately important prevails, and the obsolete falls away.

Last week, coincidentally on the day that the Microsoft Yahoo deal was announced and we all pondered its awesome 10-year term, I happened to be eyeballing a number of industry timelines and grids, considering how many mini-markets there are within "the" market. It occurred to me that given our media convergence aspirations, there are some markets that we really need to make it. We are counting on them to deliver on our visions.

First, Digital Itself

You can go back pretty far on precursors to what we today consider digital. But as soon as "www" became a recognizable cultural phenomenon, there was no turning back.

Yes, as soon as we saw it coming, we knew it had to succeed, but for most of us in on the ground floor, there was never any doubt it would. It would just continue to advance, displace and evolve. Think of these loosely defined milestones:

- Content and community forging a more public relationship, coming out to reveal dazzling opportunities to digest content geared to your interests and convene and communicate with your peers.

- Online publishers launching paid content models (a seemingly never-ending experiment).

- The monetization of Web sites, making advertising and custom sponsorship possible.

- The establishment of third-party campaign management and tracking systems.

- The creation of Internet advertising standards for media planning and buying; creative units; measurement and accounting.

- The digitalization of customer relationship management.

- The movement by search engines to offer "paid" or sponsored advertising.

- The creation of comparable quality and accountability standards for search engine marketing -- the creation of an industry unto itself.

Against the master timeline and its constellation of market events for the past 15 to 20 years, among other corporate and marketplace jostles, we have had the browser wars; the battle for email provider market share; scintillating pursuits of ad-server world domination; the transformation of the music industry; the upending of old-school journalism; the search wars; and of course the perpetually forthcoming "year of mobile." There are a few markets in all of this hoopla worth a spotlight when we talk about displacement.

What We Now Call Social Media

Most of us feel the need to caveat current discussions on social media with a nod to its fairly old roots. Once the Web became, well, the Web, it was social from the get-go. Communication and peer connecting were at the foundation. We built on this. It's not a new galaxy, just a richer one, star by star.

Listservs, message boards, chat rooms cropped up in the early days and the space drove onward through the '90s with the launch of Classmates; the debut of Craigslist; early tech-enabled social planning dabblings by eVite; and then the sequence of Plaxo, Friendster and Linkedin. And, so on. These were all seeds of the rich social media environment we now populate. Doubtless  this entire sphere will continue to thrive as it builds, molts and advances our use of digital for communal marketing and personal needs. We need digitized social to persist, and there is no question that it shall.

Behavioral Monsters in the Dark

Musing on this marketplace has been going on as long as I can remember. In the shadier earlier days, we or our clients questioned the validity and safety of things like imputed profiles and targeted ad serving across networks. We won't name any names. But as the science of targeting has advanced and behavioral has become one of several legitimate targeting disciplines, the debate has elevated, with telco, ISP, legal and government interests all implicated in conversations on privacy.

When traditional media journalists report on the state of behavioral targeting and the perceived conflicts of interest, they tend to leave out basic truths about behavioral data and personally identifiable information. It's all too easy to quote Orwell or imply moral and ethical issues. But, in our quest for customized content, marketing and consuming environments, some form of behavioral targeting must persist. And, it must improve. We need it to survive and to become the best possible version of itself, in my opinion. No one said we are there yet. We are not. Let's keep on keeping on.

Mobile Maturity As Glue

We do not need to dedicate a year to mobile. But, mobile making it really does help tie a bow around a more converged digital marketplace. Mobile coming of age helps us capitalize on other advances: more robust video distribution infrastructure and production quality; prevalence of cross-channel entertainment programming; rich-media capacity for marketing utility; mobile commerce capability; and, of course, more of an open-source mentality in general.

Mobile getting to the next level means figuring out things like large-scale, dexterous ad serving; creative standardization; and the OS landscape. When you glance around the globe, it's easy to think that mobile has stayed stuck. But if you really look more deeply at some of the system advancements in the marketplace, the movement is clear. It's my hope that this will really open up in the next three to five years. I don't care which year.

It would not be the industry we know and admire, if the ground did not continually shimmy and shift beneath our feet. We count on displacement for useful market movement. Sometimes subtle and sometimes radical, it's a constant. While it's not exactly a natural order, but one that we directly, collectively impact -- I'd like to think that the market ultimately continues to shake down as it should.