• by Joan Voight , January 2, 2009

Seismic shifts are coming - Joan Voight wonders who'll be minding the store.

Things have been the same for a long time. Quiet and peaceful would be the wrong words, but with a few concessions to technology, the way we advertise and are advertised to has remained basically unchanged. When Ed Cotton, director of strategy at Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, looks ahead, it's not six months or a year out - but way out into the abyss.

Intense in a random, disheveled sort of way, Cotton runs his California agency's brand strategy arm, Influx Consulting, and is known for his cerebral late-night marathon emailing and blogging. Most of his colleagues would say his head is in the future the majority of the time anyway, so his visions of tomorrow tend to be uncannily prescient.

In 2018 we will look back with bemusement at the industry before 2010, when most advertising meant ads - brief, static bits of promotional info on TV video, Web sites, radio, paper or big flat outdoor posters. These repetitive ad messages were everywhere you went, and people quietly tolerated them and went about their day. Before 2010, most ads offered little opportunity to complain, ask questions, collect more information, meet the people involved, or play a game. How ridiculously boring, really.

In contrast, advertising in what Cotton has already christened the Platinum Age, 2015-2018, will enjoy the liberation that comes from most everyone who used to run the marketing industry before retiring or going on to other endeavors (or the Great Beyond). These will be heady days, with affable advertising conversationalists taking over the reins from revered ad creatives and insistent, data-spouting technocrats. Metrics experts will have their day in the sun around 2010 as they rise to senior levels and implement advertising programs based on the abundance of consumer, retail and marketplace data at their fingertips. But by 2018 this metrics crowd will have lost its glamour, and folded into the business-as-usual structure of all consumer-oriented organizations.

Lisa Seward, who founded media consultancy Mod Communications, once asked her bosses at her former agency how to tell a TV network client that its business model would be obliterated in a few years. "Don't tell them," came the reply. "It's not going to happen next year." A decade from now, data's contribution to advertising will be simple, Seward says. With data-mining systems, "any company will know the value of me as a customer. With that information, it can then model the value of me over a lifetime and figure out how much it should be willing to invest in advertising to me," she says.

Experts speculate that brands will reach consumers in 2018 in a huge range of ways, including sponsoring, hosting or producing all kinds of digital entertainment, information and games. People will access this content on their interactive screens of choice, ranging from cinema-size panels at home or in public, to watch-size personal mobile screens. Branded events will be common, also along a wide spectrum, from huge, public, real-and-virtual experiences, to tiny, private affairs.

CMOs will have disappeared, and marketing leadership will come from the CEO, whose roots will be not in the operations, finance or sales side of the company, but from the increasingly influential customer service and customer experience side. Intuitive executives who know how to blog, visit, inspire and schmooze with employees, partners and customers will be the top dogs.

And it goes way beyond that.

The Friendly Buys

As customers increasingly become peers to marketers, the earth is going to shift under the marketplace itself. All that data about our interests, buying habits, media consumption, relationships, skills, family history and personal style - we will own that data. We will also be armed with up-to-date, comparative information about companies and products. As consumers, we will turn into sellers - of our data, time, attention, opinions and repeat business. As Tom Ordahl, partner at strategic consultancy Group 1066, puts it, "In the next 10 years, marketers will learn what it is like to be on the buying side of the equation. They'll find it is a heck of a lot different bidding for a person's business than it is thanking them for their purchase."

This imminent shift in power makes Ordahl, who handles Microsoft, MasterCard and other blue-chip clients, very excited. "Want to market a product or service to me? Fine. I'll set the price for what messages I permit to be sent to my media devices, when I receive them and what format they take," he says. "Want to conduct market research with someone like me? Sure, I'm happy to give you information. But I want something in return." Consumers will be paid in money, cash-back programs, coupons, discounts, services and good manners. If a communication from a brand feels too pushy or otherwise inappropriate, you will break the access to your information or attention.

A McKinsey Quarterly report confirms that open innovation between a brand and its customers will transfigure businesses. Called "distributed cocreation," it means that companies will link customers into development projects for new marketing and product ideas. How would a combined service-innovation-advertising approach work for an old-school company like General Motors?

Strategist Peter Dixon, senior partner at brand consultancy Prophet, paints the scenario thus: In 2018, GM no longer makes cars, but instead presides over a national chain of franchised retail, repair and hydrogen-refueling auto centers converted from old Buick, Pontiac and GMAC dealerships. The centers sell Toyota-owned Chevrolet and Cadillac as well as other Japanese- and European-made autos - all of which are either hybrids or hydrogen-powered.

Big Mac Attack

The centers bring in only 20 percent of GM's revenue. Their main purpose is to supply prospects for the primary source of its income: the subscription-based, ad-supported OnStar in-vehicle security and travel assistance service. Ad sales supply half of GM's revenue from the service, subscriptions the other half, predicts Dixon.

OnStar subscribers will be able to pay $50 a month for the service without any brand messages, or they can pay $20 a month by registering for the brand-supported version of the system. For the discounted version, they provide personal data as well as information about their and their passengers' habits, interests and lifestyles.

That information is blended with patterns the system learns from the stops and destinations of the driver and is used to make advertising suggestions and send alerts to people in the car. For instance, McDonald's pays GM to provide alerts to drivers who like fast food, telling them at lunchtime, dinnertime and after-hours where the nearest McDonald's outlet is along their route. The Big Mac alerts become more urgent if the driver has been driving for a while, and include a free beverage if a beef or garden burger is bought within the hour.

In Dixon's vision, the vast majority of car buyers sign up for the OnStar service, and three-quarters of those sign up for the cheaper branded version - providing a huge market for GM's OnStar advertising division.

David Hallerman, research analyst at eMarketer, insists that trying to look 10 years ahead is downright "foolhardy." But then, he would say that, wouldn't he? From his vantage point, he's right, of course. Data and quantitative research are powerful for tactical planning and measuring performance, but they don't, and can't, do what imagination and vision can. Just ask Steve Jobs - or Toyota.

Strategists agree that tomorrow's brands will have to understand the culture of their consumers, whether that culture belongs to health-conscious foodies or convenience-motivated families on a car camping trip. Futurist Faith Popcorn says that as the world gets more complicated, "culture is our refuge. It's where we live." Advertisers will want to cohabit, rather than dominate, that space - adding value, rather than interruption.

To connect with customers, brands can hire liaisons - marketing advisers who serve as sherpas - to tell the brand where these groups are, how the brand should behave with them, and what communications would be acceptable. Promising not to advertise is also much cheaper than advertising.

Will it be worth it? We will have mountains of information about ourselves that we need to manage, but fewer annoyingly repetitive ads everywhere we go. We'll also have brands trying to counsel, assist, educate and inform us at every turn, with motives we don't always appreciate. No problem, says digital guru and investor Esther Dyson: "Categorizing 'friends,' managing news feeds, handling intersecting communities of contacts feels natural to the young Facebook users of today."

Marketers can expect to spend less on advertising, but keeping up with their customer-partners will require them to break down internal silos at a record pace. Seward, formerly of Fallon, says it will be worth it. In fact, the tech-saturated future will ironically be a lot like the tech-innocent past. "We consumers will be essentially asking brands to operate like a 1950s mom-and-pop shop," she says. The stores didn't have all these divisions - product development, sales, marketing, advertising, customer service, strategic branding. "The owners just got to know their customers, listened to them and took care of them."