Friday I had the pleasure of attending an MSN seminar featuring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. In the Q&A-session I asked him elaborate on one of his statements in his presentation: that all – “ALL” – advertising will be online in ten years from now.
IP-based and interactive
The seminar was quite small, 40-50 persons gathered in the conference room in Falkoner Centret, mostly advertisers and media company VIPs. I was sitting on the 3rd row, and Ballmer, quite an impressive man, was standing like 3-4 meters from me, when he answered:
– At Microsoft we belive all media are going to be online – that is IP-based. And when the media goes online, so does the advertising. Online and interactive, Balmer said and explained the issue at some depth.
Todays online advertising shows the way
This means that the traditional advertising business will have to learn from the experience gained in the online industry for the past 10 year in order to succeed. At least this is what I asked Steve Balmer in my follow-up question.
– Basically yes, he answered. You’ll need to have experience of the interactive nature of online advertising in order to succeed in the future. In reality, though, it’s not quite that simple. You can’t just add a cookie to a movie-ad.
All media online
When claiming that all media will be online in 2017, Balmer referred to all media – TV as well as newspapers. Actually Balmer claimed that “all reading and writing will be online in ten years” and pointed to the new electronic paper being develloped right now as the tecnological gig to let this prophecy come true.
While I sincerely do not doubt that IP-TV totally will take over broadcast-TV (digital or not), and also profoundly believe that advertisement will change dramatically towards context- and behaviourally targetted ads, I’m really not very confindent in the prospects of e-paper. What I’ve seen this far simply doesn’t work. It definitively still needs a lot of improvement, and when the products good enough, first content-providers will need to catch up and finally we’ll have to wait for end-users (you and me) to adopt as well. To me this looks like more than years – and by that time our lives will have been turned upside down a dozen times allready by things yet to be discovered.