80 / 20 Rule Flip #1: All Media and Advertising Will Be Digital.

This is part 1 of a series of posts called Advertising’s 80 / 20 Rule is Flipping. See introduction.

Cut. Copy. Paste. Our digital world shows its analog roots in metaphors.

But when was the last time anyone pasted up an ad before it went to press? Or actually cut film when doing a rough cut?

It doesn’t happen because we all work in a digital world now. From start to finish, all advertising, with a very few exceptions, is entirely digital.

Even for analog advertising outputs — print, outdoor, out-of-home, point of sale — the workflow is, with the exception of the final output, digital.

And TV? On June 12, 2009, over-the-air analog TV signals can stop in the US. All TV thereafter will be digital TV.

Very soon, event marketing will be the only significant analog marketing that remains.

So what does this mean?

Digital media tends to follow different rules than analog media, rules that are only starting to emerge in advertising.

The most influential rule is expressed in the dry words of Moore’s Law: the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.

Some predictable effects of Moore’s Law on advertising:

• Digital displays — LCD and plasma screens, e-ink, digital paper — will soon compete against analog displays — posters, billboards, magazines and newspapers — and in most cases supercede them.
• Transfer and storage of media (data) will cease to be a consideration. A thousands ads can be ready to run in an instant.
• Equipment-based advantages — having better gear — will cease to be a source of advantage. Better gear will continuously become cheaper and more accessible until it no longer matters.
• The amount of data generated will continue to increase. The biggest problem will be making sense of complexity — finding the signal in the noise.
• Intellectual property frameworks — trademarks, copyrights, usage rights — will continue their uneasy co-existence with perfect digital copying technologies and practices — remixes, mash-ups, derivations.

As Chris Anderson writes:

There’s nothing new about technology’s deflationary force, but what is new is the speed at which industries of all sorts are becoming digital businesses and thus able to exploit those economics. When Google turned advertising into a software application, a classic services business formerly based on human economics (things get more expensive each year) switched to software economics (things get cheaper).

Next: 80 / 20 Rule Flip #2: All media and advertising will be connected to the web.

Tags:
80 / 20 flip, 80 / 20 Rule Flip, Advertising, chris anderson, digital, digital displays, equipment, free, google, software, storage, Wired

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