Commentary

Fast Forward: The Future Is Back Again

The future is looking bright again on Madison Avenue. No, not the temporal plane, which continues to hold a great deal of uncertainty for the advertising and media businesses. The bright spot is futurism itself. It's fueling new businesses like Publicis' Denuo and Interpublic's Futures Marketing Group, and it's leading to a fundamental rethinking of the role of advertising agencies.

When I first began covering this business in the 1980s, the future was a pretty hot subject, and any agency that wanted to be taken seriously had a media futurist on staff. There were so many new and potentially industry-altering technologies coming on stream that agencies had gurus devoted to tracking and understanding their impact. Some of those technologies - like teletext, videotext, the CD-ROM and interactive kiosks - have faded into distant memories. As have some of the pundits who promised they would usher in a new world of communications.

To be fair, some of those technologies were building blocks for new platforms that would truly transform the way we use media, like the VCR, the DVR, downloadable computer software, and, of course, the Internet. But so many false promises of media revolutions were doled out during the '80s and '90s that the subject of media futurism began to lose credibility on Madison Avenue, and the role of the media futurist became code for navel-gazing and a lame-duck career path.

And for good reason: Many of the most ambitious new-media predictions, and much of the R&D, proved to be busts. And there were some pretty big ones, ranging from Time Warner's Full-Service Network to a variety of telco-based schemes that were supposed to usher in an era of highly addressable interactive TV and e-commerce. Even the Internet had its false start, which sent many of Madison Avenue's bravest visionaries diving for cover, or in search of new jobs.

Well, the future never went away. It took a back seat to more pressing issues like the accountability, effectiveness, and ROI of the half-trillion dollars or so that advertisers and agencies were spending on the past and present.

There were many reasons for suppressing it. Failed start-ups and test-beds had taken their toll on the minds of managers and shareholders alike, sucking up resources and time that yielded little in the way of material results. Big ideas like addressability and interactive TV remained stuck in the quagmire of cable and telco regionalism, turf wars, and platform protectionism that prevented some of the most innovative opportunities from ever gaining any scale.

That's not to say there weren't some bright minds toiling with one foot planted firmly in the future. I had an opportunity to observe one of these noble efforts firsthand: D-Map, a collaboration of the Advertising Research Foundation, MIT's Media Lab, and some of the world's biggest media and technology companies. D-Map, which stood for Digital Map, was the brainchild of former ARF research chief Gabe Samuels and media academician Russ Neuman. The goal was to literally map out how potential changes in technology, public policy, and consumer media adoption might alter the advertising marketplace. The core data was 25 years of stats, including Veronis Suhler Stevenson's formidable Communications Industry Forecast. The result was a program that would allow D-Map users to put their own variables on technology, policy, and society to see what scenarios were likely to come out of it.

It was a good idea, and had the backing of Time Warner, Microsoft, HP, CBS, and even two ad agencies: MediaCom and Universal McCann. But ultimately, the future proved too distant and D-Map went dormant just as some of the biggest digital media developments were poised to pop: broadband, peer-to-peer, online video, search, social media, and all of the Web 2.0 iterations that have followed.

The future is looking bright again on Madison Avenue. Let's not let it grow dim once more.

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