There has never been so much change in the way people communicate than there is right now. New generations use tools their parents don’t even understand, and young people consume news as easy as they create and publish it themselves. These shifts in communication will undoubtedly have consequences for the communication industry. Can advertising campaigns still be based on a mix between 30 second tv commercials, print ads in top-down media and below the line activities? Roughly five years after the burst of the Internet bubble, developers and investors are regaining trust in the World Wide Web. But not in the web as we know it. This time it’s about conversation, cooperation, and empowerment of the masses. This time it is bottom-up, instead of top-down. People are taking back the web that companies have been trying to commercialize for the past 10 years, without much success.
If we combine the social aspects of new web applications (which I will explain later on) with technological developments such as the ever dropping price of hardware, the rise of wireless communications and the massification of mobile phones, we can start to see mayor changes in a lot of aspects today’s advertising relies on to be effective. This paper intends to explore these changes.
What’s the effect of an advertising campaign, in a world where every consumer has instant access to all hard data about any given product? How can we even reach these consumers in a media landscape that consists of millions of personal blogs, podcasts and time shifted television? What is the role of marketing when consumers are directly connected to almost anybody within the companies they buy from? In this paper I will attempt to provide some answers (or at least clues), but for now, the best way to be prepared is to simply be aware of the fact that things are changing. Something has been set off, that is impossible to stopped. And it will force advertising to reinvent itself in quite a few ways.
