2016: The alarm sounds as at 6:07. Your alarm clock has been monitoring your REM sleep patterns and is attempting to wake you at a time that is better suited to putting you in a rested vs. groggy state. Your alarm clock has also been checking your schedule, the weather, traffic and transit conditions to determine if there are any variables that could effect your travel time to your first appointments today and adjusting its time appropriately based on what it already knows of your morning habits.

The various systems in your house have been talking back and fourth learning your habits over the past few months and have determined that the correct time to wake you up was exactly at 6:07 to music the system knows you like. The alarm clock is really much more than an alarm clock, though. It’s a small seeing, hearing, monitoring static robot called an intelepal - part of a very sophisticated network of information appliances. And although it has no arms, legs or way of moving around it can see, hear and talk with you and when by connecting to the other intelligent appliances in your home and office. Together they all work together to create your own personal benevolent big brother.

The brains of your intelepal come from sophisticated software running on you home computing network. Your home has a few of these bots scattered around always within earshot. Sophisticated software runs across your network using all the CPUs in your house to run amazingly sophisticated applications that can understand your input using such different measures such as as realtime facial, gesture, speech, manner and emotional recognition.

The intelepal is really the most interesting technology you now have in your home, but its real brains come from special applications that you downloaded from the internet. People all around the world collaborate on building programs for the pals. How your pal behaves is a function of the freeware “Thinks” you download into its ability matrix. The alarm clock was just an application. It can do many things such as monitor the children, keep an eye on your home, interact with your personal banking to pay the bills, read your mail, make internet calls. Because your intelepal is really software tied to hardware that sees, hears and talks there is a version that lives on your mobile phone, in your car and wherever else you need it. It lives on your network all it needs is a connection.

Around 2012, marketers starting building applications for consumers which they could download to learn about products or get customer service. The Intelepals evolved to protect consumers from being bombarded with to much information. The initial intelepals will simply agent applications that let you do simple things. In 2010, a company launched the Intelepal brainkit that allowed everyone to craft what were called “Thinks”. These “Thinks” were user built expert systems that could enable the intelepal do new things. By downloading new Thinks people could extend their pals in a limitless fashion. The ability matrix was simply the collection of all the Thinks the Intelpals were capable of. One of the most popular applications for early intelepals was as a fashion advisor. The “looking great” Think was very popular in helping people pick the perfect tie for that power meeting. The available thinks for intelepals rapidly expanded from life coaching to assisting parents to entertaining. Intelepals and their activity matrixes quickly became as diverse as their owners.

In 2014 because of additional massive leaps in home computing power and massive storage and bandwidth capabilities the core thinking power of the intelepals started to also evolve. The ability to map and profile their owners allowed the Intelepals for the first time to take on the role of personal proxy; allowing them to learn and anticipate your behavior and understand your likes and dislikes. Intelepals quickly evolved into being highly trusted personal advisors.

It was also at this time that the ability to truly filter all information through choice started the shift away from mass media to massive media. The traditional media companies were no match for the 400 million consumers who were actively using intelepals to filter and seek content to fit the desires of their masters. The Intelepals started the end of broadcast media. The intelepals also started the massive shift towards consumer AI as a practical tool. The intelepals started a revolution that was as profound as the industrial age the age of intelligent personal robots had begun.

Epilogue:

Why am I writing fiction on a corporate blog? Simply to give you a different perspective. Thinking about interactive advertising is really about thinking way beyond what we consider innovative today. The only way to predict the future is to invent it… and that is by far my favourite part of this job.

This is a week of traveling, some cool new experiences and a ton on interesting meet and greets. The week started on Friday in Joliet, Illinois just outside of Chicago for my first Nascar experience with our client at Wrigley. Right now I’m writing from not-so-sunny Seattle where we have been going back and forth between Casual Connect and Redmond. Lots of stuff is happening these days which is giving me tons of fodder for future blog posts, but today is all about Nascar.

To be honest, I’m not really in your typical Nascar demographic, but I’ve got to tell you that the inner geek in me is hooked. There is so much tech at a Nascar race it kind of makes an Apollo capsule look like the Santa Maria. Nascar is a mix of technology, competitiveness, strategy, personalities, raw energy, exceptional noise and fan momentum that is unlike anything I’ve seen. A Nascar race in the flesh is less about the race than about people. It’s about moveable cities of RVs, flagpoles, beer, corn-dogs and the general feeling of awe.

So sure we have watched the event on TV but nothing compares to the decibel level or the pressure wave headed your way along with the Doppler shift of sound as a car goes flying by you at 170MPH. It’s impressive. You don’t just watch a Nascar race - you feel it.

Nascar is entertainment pure and simple it’s a powerful example of immersion marketing. It’s got brands, advertising, promotions, people watching, cheering and a totally captive audience. When you experience it first hand, it’s hard not to become part of Nascar - which I have discovered is more entity than event. The entity thing is the big the difference between the event and the media experience. When we watch it on television we watch. When we go there, we participate.

I won’t even talk about the technology of the cars - it’s to vast a subject, except to say that the computers, wireless technology and data mining make sport a meld between man and machine. A car is driven by a driverm but it’s raced by a team. But what is
even cooler to me is that you can get a little bit into that information loop, and much closer to the experience, with some crafty tech available on site.

The Nextel A/V/ Data Scanner is cool bit of kit that comes with a headset and a handheld device that lets you shift between camera views from the car, the stats and the communication between the drivers, spotters and crew bosses. The scanner is a digital passport into the action. The scanners take you deeper into the race, intensify the emotional connection and make you feel much closer to the teams. It’s the most interesting example of companioning I’ve ever seen. It creates a layer of digital participation. It was an eye opener for me because normally technology is used in sporting events to give us an external perspective, but in this case, the scanner was designed to give an internal perspective. I must admit the race was more interesting to experience this way.

I can only think that there’s a lesson here for sporting events and broadcasters. The idea of creating companioning services for all sports fans can make the sense of participation much deeper. When we watch a sporting event on television we experience it through a mass media perspective, but technology can put us closer to the action so that we become part of the event. It opens us up a new way of thinking about broadcast one which couples mass and niche media together into one offering at the same time.

I guess the Nascar experience really showed me a possibility where we could use the internet to make mass broadcast media all that more interesting.

I wish I could take you closer to the experience but the closest I can do is give a small sample of what it sounds like. So here is an MP3 Clip for you - it was recorded as the cars will pulling out of pit lane to at the beginning of the race. It’s the internal combustion engine equivalent of the audio build in a symphony - very cool.

For a long time now, I have been sharing publicly at conferences our recipe for engagement, which we define as Reach x Frequency x Interaction - where interaction was generally measured in time. Truthfully, time is only one vector but it’s the easiest to understand and is most important from a branded entertainment and narrative advergaming perspective.

Well, it looks like the ratings world has finally caught on to the idea as well. Nielsen / NetRatings is now including time spent as a measure from here on in. Nielsen feels time is the most important engagement metric. They are on the way, but in my opinion many media buyers and agencies will misuse the new information to make poor choices. Here is the background…justification for this opinion follows.

The market research firm on Tuesday added both Total Minutes and Total Sessions metrics to NetView, its syndicated Internet audience measurement service. While NetView has always reported average time per person and average number of sessions, the new metrics are designed to better portray total engagement across sites.

“Total Minutes is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of Web 2.0 development, not only because it ensures fair measurement of Web sites using RIA and streaming media, but also of Web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming and Internet applications,” said Scott Ross, director, product marketing for NetView.

– Abstracted from Media Post

It’s good to see Nielsen is taking a proactive stand. It’s important to note that Fuel strongly believes that time is only the one of the measurement tools required to provide useful data for analysis. If time was the perfect measure then there would be nothing wrong with television advertising. To assume that just because people are spending more time with a site that the advertising may be more effective is a dangerous misconception, and unfortunately one that many media planners will immediately leap toward.

The alchemy of building content that influences is much more complex than simply being there. When we look at eye tracking studies of how people view webpages and online content we see things that should be very disturbing to those that sell banners and buttons - people tend to ignore them and it’s not that we skip over them it’s that our brains just filter out the messages. We do online what we do in the real-world when we see thousands of signs on a busy road - we filter at a subconscious level.

Engagement is not defined by time, it’s defined by interaction. Interaction is a function of how deep someone is willing to dig into your narrative - your story, your message…it’s a complex definition. When we’re planning a campaign, we think in terms of creating content with cognitive gates - which are kind of like points down a journey to comprehension. We are more interested in people hitting those gates than we are having them spend hours and hours on a site. Don’t get me wrong - we still tell people we focus on time because the truth is most marketing managers get glassy-eyed when I use the term “Cognitive Gate.” It’s a hard bit for many to grasp because they were never trained to think of marketing and advertising as a progressive message. (Still, the smart ones get it right away.)

From an advertising perspective, the challenge is getting attention, and attention is only partially influenced by time. Even if people spend lots of time on a site, remember this - they are there for the content - not the advertising. If you want to reach them, you need to get closer to the content, otherwise you are just noise in the middle of a quest for something interesting. As Cluetrain co-author Doc Searls said, “There is no market for messages.”

While this sounds like a no brainer, the truth is that until the media function and the creative function get closer together the very act of how media is bought and sold will continue to perpetuate the creation of ineffective advertising. It’s not the measurement that truly needs improvement it is that traditional marketers really have a limited comprehension of getting deeper into the heads of those they are trying to reach. Creative is now longer about fancy pants ads - it’s equal parts psychology, social engineering, nodal marketing, design, and sales funnel architecture. No measurement system in the world will help old school thinkers do any better.

Acknowledging that time is an important metric is a step in the right direction but it’s not the whole story. What’s happening with attention is the real question here…in many ways this is just continuing to move old style thinking forward. Honestly, we would love to share our thinking with Nielsen - perhaps we will.

If you believe that 10 years from now you will read a paperback or a daily paper, best think again. Useful ebook technology is actually on the horizon. There are a number of new players building prototypes looking at cool features and, of course, thinking about the impact connectivity could have on a beautifully crafted digital reading device. The market will rapidly gravitate to these devices when the price is below 100 Euros.

The problem with most ebook technology is that people called them ebooks which always brought forward the ire of many people. The future of the ebook is really a sort of digital view pad.

These viewpads will be wireless, weigh less than a typical paperback, will visible to the world via RFID (and Wifi, Wimax, GSM and its high bandwidth derivatives), will read and display many formats both stored and live, have an extremely long battery life along with wireless charging, have an inspired UI, won’t sacrifice the fact that designers want to be designers, be usable everywhere including airplanes and of course have a brilliant high resolution screen. Based on what we see in development I can tell you it’s closer than most people think.

These viewpads will accept a wide range of content types. We will purchase traditional ebooks texts, we will download web aggregates which are really customized news letters - take a look at google reader coupled with gears if you want a look a that future. These devices will be our partners in the shopping experience. The screens will integrate many new approaches from OLEDs to eInk and the memory will be solid state and these things will be build a part of a network perpetually. They will act as information stores and in many cases thin clients, validating the Google model of putting application on the server and not the device.

The viewpad is really another form of ubiquitous computer and a continuation of a dream that came out of the Xerox park (they invented the mouse and the GUI) . These new computers will be nothing short of massively disruptive. The smart device that auto updates will put an end to the daily newspaper in its traditional form. The smart device which can be whatever we want may also change the retail content business. The viewpad will be the gateway to a million new magazines. The book shop will change to become something entirely new and different. They will not be computers as much as dedicated content devices. It’s an are that is just starting now to evolve.

The truth is that viewpads are going to eventually be a part of all of our lives. The idea that web content will only be consumed on a PC or a laptop is absurd. The iPhone soon will qualify an viewpad. PocketPC, smart phones, UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PCs) will all be evolving to fit the bill. The viewpad will become part of the technology set that starts to define new opportunities from the web.

What will define the viewpad are two distinct types of getting content. The use, surf, and select model which is similar to what we have now and the autofill model which will push our most desired content to the device without our active involvement. Viewpads will evolve to become our window into the world of digital content.

What is really at stake here is a fundamental new way to interact with content. All these new handheld computers will travel around with us, get tossed around like paperbacks will give us instant access to a tremendous range of new content. They will redefine the nature of media and in the process create new and interesting possibilities for evolution of content industries. The question is - will these old-media companies resist the evolution or embrace it, making information more accessible than ever.

Only time will tell…

…but first a history lesson.

I’ve always said that the music industry got what it deserved when they ignored the consumer behavior shift created with by original Napster. We (the people who buy stuff) wanted easier access to content. The record industry ignored this seachange and have been whining about revenues ever since. The only people to blame were those in charge at the time - management blew it . Now the industry takes it out on consumers by using thuggish legal tactics via the RIAA - shame - keep suing grandmothers - we are all paying attention to that - seriously we are. You should be inventing not defending the model is done. Call off the RIAA and get people file sharing again because it’s the only way to find the efficiencies of scale you will need to profit in a long-tail world. Old-schoolers don’t fear you may not grow old alone there appears to be company on the way.

Viacom launched a suit against Google for a billion dollars for copyright infringement. They claim that over 160,000 videos were on display without permission. This is most likely true. The problem is that Viacom is blind to the new reality of consumer driven entertainment. The content in question was online because everyday folks put it there. Your audiences ripped your content and transfered it into a mechanism that would present it as a form of ondemand entertainment. They did this because YOU did not. Consumers are telling you that they wish to consume content in new and innovative ways. Customers have become way more complex in their consumption patterns than the media conglomerates are willing to accept or actually comprehend. Consumers have told you what they desired 160,000 times and you are not listening. Are you so traditional that you can’t see a massive opportunity in front of your eyes. Taking the content away will only compound your problems - you will drive the activity underground or worse you will open the door for a competitor with more vision. Remember business school? Specifically that lesson about “Power in the Channel”. Viacom are you willing to risk the billions required to reinvent a globally distributed consumer activity. If the answer is yes then stay the course and try to starve YouTube of content.

If you’re not sure you can stomach that much risk then we suggest you redirect some of your legal funding into an R&D think tank and come up with ways of monetizing this new reality and fast. The record industry tells us that their losses are in the billions - there is no time to waste, is there? We have some ideas if your interested. I image you will get a pretty good concession out of all this suing stuff and it will feel like a victory but a decade from now you will look back and realized that is was nothing of the sort. Ask the music industry what they might do differently if they could travel back to 1999.