Consumerism and media have always overlapped. In the traditional media of the 20th century, one could think about magazines as real estate for advertising in the same sense as billboards, with articles scattered about just to give consumers a reason to stop by. In the same way, television programs or radio shows are really an excuse for commercials, and the extremity of infomercials are television at its purest.
In the new media of the 21st century, although too soon to make sweeping statements, the distinction between e-commerce and entertainment is similarly a matter of degree. Banners and the such, scattered all over news and other seemingly content-driven pages, are an obvious example. But there are less obvious sources of advertising, such as music videos that are uploaded as widgets onto social networking sites, or bloggers linking pages to articles for increased exposure.
As the Internet has expanded its global footprint and as its participants have become more active and sophisticated in the ways in which they participate, so too the consumer market has become larger and more fragmented – vertically as well as horizontally – and the competitive positioning of commercial interests has become a more complex task. Consumer choices are now more numerous and more accessible than ever, regardless of the product, which is good news for marketers seeking to expose merchandise, but worse news in the sense that competitors can easily do the same. Moreover, the reselling of products and the disruption of the vendor-to-consumer link with a variety of intermediaries, while opening up new business possibilities, have also cut into the profit opportunity all around. In such an environment, the margin for error in marketing is that much narrower and the importance of efficient advertising that much greater.
At its most fundamental level, web advertising comprises variations – some more direct than others – of “search.” The most commonly used sense of the word implies an active consumer who is seeking something, and marketers have become savvy at search optimization in order to be found, while Google has risen from nothing to web dominance on this basis. At the other end of the marketing spectrum, the process is reversed, with businesses seeking out their customers. In this realm, search optimization is replaced by targeting, lead generation, behavioral analysis, and the like; all of which are implemented in more sophisticated (which is to say, inconspicuous) ways. Social networking, as it matures and establishes itself as a permanent mass, is ultimately about consumers being “sought” and advertisers applying their toolkit of techniques within a captive universe of targets that reveal personal tastes, and even intentions, in “real-time”.
Bringing this overview to a tidy conclusion, we can look at new media and its new commercial aspects as an evolution of search-based processes, in which consumers seek products and products seek consumers through a variety of “push” or “pull” systems, depending on perspective. And if, from the commercial perspective, the ultimate “pull” platform is Google – with its 65% market share of consumer searches – then increasingly the “push” universe, where advertisers can have a feast scouring behavioral data and target their wares in all sorts of clever ways, is embodied by Facebook.
An interesting statistic was published recently, illustrating Facebook’s growing web presence as a matter of page views, and as it turns out this social networking site is now more popular than Google. In other related news, there was a thought provoking presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit, in which Sean Parker makes a pretty convincing case that social networking will overtake search (in the Google sense) as the dominant and most valuable Internet platform. Perhaps so, but perhaps the reality will be a blend of opposites, because both push and pull techniques are likely to have their place in e-commerce.
The question that is forcefully making its way to the forefront of industry developments, is… where does Twitter fit in? At the intersection of Google and Facebook, a social network on one hand, and a search engine on the other, will Twitter be the ideal platform that combines both scopes and marketing values, or will it, as neither fish nor fowl, and not really market-leading in either case, underachieve and miss out on the evolution altogether?
