Tags: When people were getting all creative in fourteenth century Italy, they didn’t think of themselves as driving a renaissance. That only became clearer later. I think something similar (on perhaps a less exalted level!) is happening in online advertising today.
Last week I gave a talk at Web 2.0 in San Francisco about this. The theme was why - despite plenty of gloom about the advertising space – we’re actually in a period of great innovation that is going to really drive value over the next couple of years.
I noted a couple of interesting trends, notably the current massive asymmetry in economic value creation between search vs. the rest. I proposed a few explanations for this.
I also shared a perspective on some of the important, emerging themes (or solutions) that are going to help drive longer-term economic value and mentioned some of the companies that are working in these spaces. The key themes covered:
- The increasing importance of people > places.
- The drive to deepen understanding of people’s interests and intent, not just their context or immediate actions.
- The move towards business models that pool audiences (aka people) and thus help to “de-fragment” (I know, that’s not a pretty word :-)) the rapidly growing tail.
- The increased (and very necessary!) focus on ad relevance in the non-search world.
- The advent of more balanced overall usability for users – incorporating (hopefully) a deeper and better symbiosis of content and advertising.
- The drive to enable tens and hundreds of thousands of advertisers to participate in all online advertising formats, not just search and contextual.
Here’s an example slide:
The full deck can be found here. There are undoubtedly other important trends and players. Would love to get your thoughts.
