More on the maturing web- and the decline of banner ads
Uno as Future Studies, Ideas, Products, Web2.0
Jun|30|2008
Friday drinks are great, drinks in general are great, but drinks with great minds are especially great. Last Friday we moze’d on down to Firemans Arms in Green Point for Beer ‘O Clock with Leezl, Tiaan, Herman and Clint. All people who I love working with.
I wanted to chat about how the web is maturing, how we’re seeing different apps coming from different players, and luckily Clint had already spotted what I was trying to articulate.
The web is maturing, and advertising is changing with that. Read this post by Jackson Fish Market on where they see the web going. The gist of the post is that display advertising is disruptive - placing an ad next to content is the print way of thinking about monetization, branding and advertising. Not only that, but it’s also disruptive. Users are on the site because they want to view the content, not the ad, and you are disrupting them with your popup, overlay, onionskin ad.
Enter the webapp. Web apps are places that people want to be, I want to be on tumblr, I love Slideshare and Last.Fm gets more eyeball time from me than books do. Not only those, but I was devastated when Mymilemarker.com shut down, how else will I track my ridiculous consumption patterns? (I just checked and it’s back up again).
So what that means is that people spending time on web apps want to be there, even if it is a branded environment. You have higher engagement levels, people want to be there, in fact, they even come back! What that means for an agency is that they need to rethink they way that they do branding online. Banner ads are actually really boring. Agency’s need to build web apps that are engaging, that fit with their brand, and offer productivity and utility to the user.
We’ve seen a few webapps already, but mostly not really thinking about “web apps” but still riding the “Social Networking is the be-all-and-end-all” mantra. It’s not about social networks, it’s about utility. Locally, the YoungBlood5 network was an example in a way (it had touches of being an app), but we haven’t seen anything that’s a solid application.
The future of agencies will probably see them building webapps and engaging environments, more so than creating banners, trafficking and managing e-mail campaigns.
It’s also why I get irritated by people wanting to “build social networks for everything”. It’s not about social networks, it’s about social applications. All applications need to be social in some way, but they need to be applications and offer utility.
Some examples of branded web applications (some/most border on Social Networks):
Specialised riders club (built on Rails apparently)
Nike Plus
Youngblood5
MTV Think:
StandardBank ATM locator
Why doesn’t Sasol bring out a MyMileMarker type app? Or VirginActive a health app (they already have the LifeZone stuff, but they can do more)? Rama doesn’t need a food social network, they need a web app that people can use to find recipes.
And finally, just because I know most people won’t read the article, here are Jackson Fish Market’s predictions:
- even the biggest brand advertisers will realize that creating and maintaining high quality web apps is not a simple proposition
- they will turn to their ad agencies and their interactive retinue to build these experiences
- more often than not, these folks will build sites oriented around expensive content, video, and the like
- brand advertisers will realize that they need the traditional creatives combined with deeper software expertise to make great online experiences
- some advertisers will bring this in house and in effect become software companies themselves
- some advertisers will work with companies (like ours) to deliver online experiences that have depth, quality, and utility (some of the agencies over time will build deeper expertise in this area — it’s harder than it looks)
- and whichever tactical choice a marketer makes, the bulk of online consumer software will be funded directly by brand advertisers
Signs of a maturing web?
Uno as Online, Products, Web2.0
Jun|20|2008
I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been getting that the days of garage web-startups are over.
My sense of the web is that we’ve reached some level of maturity where most of the apps we’re seeing coming out now are from established houses. Pownce came from the Digg stable, Twitter wasn’t an idea cooked up in a dormroom, it came from Biz Stone (read his history) and Evan Williams, established people in the web industry. Ning has had backing from Marc Andreessen from day 1. Sure that’s only 3 companys, but KickApps isn’t a small basement outfit either. Last.fm started out as being small app, but they’ve grown in stature and are now owned by CBS. If you wanted to compete with Last.fm, you needed to do that 2 years ago, but you need to be a bigger player to do that now.
Whether I’m right or wrong, I get the feeling that there is a myth that shit hot new startups come from a bunch of guys tinkering away at a project in a garage. The reason I’m saying it’s a myth is because I believe the real big web apps will come from large established companies, or at least established minds. I think we’ve matured to a certain level now, where you can just smack out a quick web-app, your app needs to have some level of maturity. I obviously still believe that we’ll see lot’s of smaller apps coming from garage startups, but the ones that will be more successful will come from larger groups, with funding already baked in. I don’t think that we’re in the Wild West days anymore. Maybe in emerging markets there is more scope, but then again websites are international…
This also of course means that if you want to invest in “building the next big thing” you need to start off with a pretty sizable group of people, more than 2 or 3 for example.
I’d love to bounce some ideas around on this, so please comment below.