In the jungle of multi-media productions, marketing channels, creative and production talent plus myriad of CEO and marketing-boys who declare to have the ultimate formula it is very hard to come back to some simple and basic rules.
I believe that in multimedia marketing we have mostly forgotten what the end-user wants, we are again techno-pushing and hyping a digital wave that is not grounded in a real need of the average citizen.
Make a clear distinction between the I know,
so I am and the I see, so I am (I feel, I connect), and
the I act, so I am (I buy, I use, I meet) user-segments.
Don't try to sell products that are made by one personality type to another group,
don't assume that what works for some will work for all.
These groups
roughly compare to head, body and heart-types. These types are very
fundamental and are related to the basic `drives' in our lives but
this can be translated into very practical things like fonts, color
preferences, information density and the relationship between form
and content. We have to judge products and services in this respect,
how does it serve the basic need/drive of a person.
The head person, the nerd was the ideal type for the encyclopedic
CD-ROM and first wave (textual information only) Internet-markets,
but will we succeed in selling the same type of service to people
that are only interested in the looks and feeling of a product, in
what impression one makes with it, if it is in'or not.
The second
wave of Internet-activities, with all the multimedia hype, the graphics
etc. looks great and hip, but doesn't cope with the need for immediacy
in the see/feel people.
Observe the network marketing (multi-level) characteristic of the Internet with at first a clear feeling of superiority for those who are `in'.
Some success will come from the herding quality, the network-marketing/piramid like pitch and the fact that your own Internet-adress (home-page/ISDN number/videophone etc.) gives you more perceived `rank' in the cyber-hierarchy. As this market is pushed by the techno-fascist elite, claiming to be better, smarter, more happy than the next one, many believed the Internet-prophets who benefit most from the hype have had their success stories, newspapers, magazines, TV and even this conference is full of them.
However, I don't feel that the Internet (or any medium
that tries to sell data as information, abundance as happiness and
speed as enlightenment) is going to succeed in the mass-markets, because
it simply doesn't deliver these goodies.
The average citizen Joe Sixpack doesn't need the world at his fingertips,
he needs to cater for his basic needs, either knowing, seeing or acting,
but no product that is an amalgam of these three (a CR-ROM can be
full of data, is shining and has attractive pictures -that don't easily
show up on the screen- but what can you do with it apart from feeding
your computer) will succeed in the long run. Maybe a separation in
visual (like CD-video), interactive (CD-I and CD-ROM in their best
reincarnations) and pure facts (Internet WWW) will help here.
Nearly ten years of CD-ROM has only led to price-erosion, copyright-problems and reduced value-perception, while the timeliness and accessability of the Internet has attacked CD-ROM as a medium for dynamic and encyclopedic data. Making money in CD-ROM's for a large end-user audience becomes harder and harder.
I learned from my own fairly large-scale CD-ROM productions and marketing
efforts. Ten of Thousand of CD's are made nearly monthly now to act
as a premium for magazines and we joined that trend. Prices went down,
our efforts to produce the best CD-ROM's with our own `content' and
copyrighted material proved relatively ineffective against a competition
that just assembled series of CD's with shitware and freeware. Our
standard of integrity became laughable, as magazine buyers only wanted
the shiny discs and probably hardly ever used them.
A result of 34
responses for a month Internet-account out of 14.000 discs wasn't
encouraging.We discovered, the hard way, that in-house development
of interfaces and data-structures is a risky path, as newer software
offers better functionality and better integration and the old structures
are discarded.
But there are lessons, and one of them is that using one data/encoding standrad in the company for all media-activities is a logical step, not only because it facilitates the production of added value, but it steamlines the internal processes. We have found html to be a good
HTML as an access-structure for CD-ROM's is a risk-free
development path with seamless integration of CD-ROM as a data-carrier
and the Internet as a publication-medium.
First hand experience has taught me that:
Internet-cafe's as a stand-alone commercial enterprise are risky
ISDN is only better as an Internet-medium because you get a less congested access to your provider (technically ISDN and Internet are not good friends)
sex is a driving factor on the NET, still amounts to 60 tot 70% of the traffic on my site, even after I took the erotic content off (6 months ago)
Internet-business is driven by
A: Post hippy and Post-Hacker do-gooders with fat subsidies in the
backs and looking for more
B: the media and media people that stand to benefit personally from
the success
C: eager business-men with little real connection with the market
D: big conglomerates that are relatively blind to reality
I therefore see a serious problem the Internet and especially the
WWW as a general public mass-medium. For business-to-business and intra-business
communications tool is has more future and general e-mail will thrive
too, but for mass-marketing the NET is DEAD