What Cloud Means to Marketing Forecast - Advertising Age - Digital

This link has been bookmarked by 9 people . It was first bookmarked on 17 Mar 2008, by Gary Edwards.

23 Mar 08

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22 Mar 08

Thomas Vander Wal
Nicholas Carr writes about the impact of cloud computing on the marketing and broad communication market

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20 Mar 08

Carl Anderson
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19 Mar 08

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Will Richardson
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- Sometime in the past few years, most of us began to change the way we use our personal computers. We stopped going out and buying new software programs and installing them on our hard drives. Instead, we started using the internet as our computer, tapping into the vast quantities of software and data flowing through the network. Our powerful desktop and laptop PCs have been turned inside out. Most of their value comes not from what's inside them but from the network they're hooked up to. They've become, essentially, terminals.
- Cheap, plentiful electricity changed society and culture, spurring the rise of mass media, mass consumerism and modern advertising. We can expect that cheap, plentiful computing will have similarly far-reaching consequences, once again overturning many of our assumptions about how we work and live.
- The success of a software program is coming to be judged not by unit sales but by the ability of the provider to attract an audience, hold that audience's attention with interesting data and tools, and deliver relevant ads to it.
- In other words, those huge server farms are not only transforming the software industry. They pose big and growing competitive threats to many traditional publishing, broadcasting and advertising firms. The media business has already gone through wrenching changes thanks to the web, but the upheaval is just in its early stages.
- It's also transforming the way companies operate and employees collaborate. Rather than e-mail a version of a document and get multiple copies back, all with different edits, the cloud enables all the employees to work collaboratively off the same document, which lives, of course, in the cloud.
  - This is a huge shift for edcation as well.
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18 Mar 08

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- Cheap, plentiful electricity changed society and culture, spurring the rise of mass media, mass consumerism and modern advertising.
17 Mar 08

Gary Edwards

There are dark sides to the blurring of media and software. As companies become more adept at tracking the activities and preferences of people, the temptation to monitor and even manipulate personal behavior will grow ever stronger.

Continued fragmentation
We are also likely to see a continuing fragmentation of media and audiences, as sophisticated software algorithms are used to create custom bundles of content geared to individual preferences. Google has said it wants to store "100% of a user's data" inside its data centers, enabling it to achieve what it calls "transparent personalization." At that point, the company would be able to automatically choose which information to show you, and which to withhold, without having to wait for you to ask.

Of course, the value of advertising would grow substantially in this scenario. But what would happen to the common culture that provides the glue for society? The mass media that emerged from the electric grid a century ago had plenty of flaws, but it did help to bring people together. Our new computing grid promises to reprogram not only advertising and marketing but also culture with the cold logic of software code. Everything will become more efficient, but we may find that we've sacrificed a little bit of our humanity in the process.

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- The gorilla in this nascent market is Google. It has been spending billions of dollars to build huge data centers, or "server farms," around the world, enabling it to run all sorts of consumer software and store enormous quantities of personal data. Combine that processing muscle with the company's dominance of web searching and advertising, and you have a juggernaut capable of redefining the software business on the media model.