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Brian ChigerDigital StrategistAgencyNet |
With all due respect to the producers of ABC's My Generation, I could have told you the show wasn't going to work. I graduated with that class—the class of 2000—and it was pretty obvious, even then, that we were not going to be America's greatest generation. And why should we be? We were first. And first is bound to make a few mistakes along the way. But really guys, you didn't need to rub it in with an assault of punchy, yet demoralizing, billboards. That was gratuitous.
Digital Consumers Aren't Just Regular Consumers with Keyboards
The Class of 2000 was not just the first class of the new millennium, but also the first generation of digital consumers. Many of us began using computers at age five, right around the time we began to read.
Books and screens coexisted happily in those days, but even then it was clear that digital wasn't just another screen in our already media-saturated homes. It was (and is) a cultural phenomenon that changed our expectations about everything: music, art, culture, connection, friendship . . . . About the way we buy things. About what things are (and aren't) worth.
For example, this year is my 10-year high school reunion. Should I go? The standard reasons are out the window. I already know what my classmates look like. I know what jobs they have, where they live, who got married, and who has kids. I know who got fat and who's going bald (hint: this guy). I can catch up and organize drinks with anyone at anytime. Essentially, Facebook has made the high school reunion obsolete—tough break if you're in the business of helping people lose a decade of Hot Pocket dinners and Budweiser babies in time for a rendezvous with old frenemies.
Digital is about understanding and facilitating a new, more connected way of living. It's about catering to the expectations of a progressive and demanding multiscreen consumer.
So Where Are Consumers Heading Next?
If 2010 was the year of the integrated Web, when platforms like Facebook Connect and Twitter allowed Web applications to break out of their domains by passing data and identities between them, then 2011 will be the year of the integrated world: the year when technologies like mobile, QR, geo-location, RFID, tablets, and Internet-enabled appliances allow everything to talk to everything.
The beginning is already here. GoogleTV and Samsung are bringing Internet apps to television. Location-based start-ups like Shopkick and Pushkart are changing the retail experience. Meanwhile, Macy's just launched a dressing room experience that lets shoppers find clothing on an iPad and then try it on virtually, using an augmented-reality mirror, before soliciting real-time feedback from their friends using SMS, e-mail, and their social networks. The culture of oversharing meets real-time shopping.
The fact is, technology drives culture. It's the digital marketer's job to stay abreast of that culture and produce the tools that facilitate it.
And you know what? I think I will go to my reunion— that obnoxiously retro, hipster thing is in this year.
Back to the 2011 Digital Marketing Outlook home page.
About Brian Chiger Building upon his psychology degree from the University of Rochester, Brian Chiger began his career in advertising at Saatchi & Saatchi. As AgencyNet's Digital Strategist and Editor-in-Chief of ANidea.com, Brian applies his passion for consumer insights, ethnographic research, and sociology to the digital ecosystem.
