The 5 Creepiest Advertising Techniques of the (Near) Future | Cracked.com

This is a must read - funny, scary and inspiring at the same time: The 5 Creepiest Advertising Techniques of the (Near) Future | Cracked.com.

Trendwatching.com on the "Free Love" trend: the War for Attention, and how the Net seems to drive pricing for 'content' towards zero

Trendwatching just released a hot new report here. Some excerpts and comments:

According to Trendwatching, the rise of FREE LOVE can be attributed to:

• "An all-out war for consumers' attention (make that saturated consumers), including various handout and sampling techniques. (*Gerd's comment: It's all about Attention now - Distribution is a given. Scarcity is dead. Friction is Fiction - well.... mostly!)
• The online world, with its amazing capacity to create, copy and distribute anything that's digital, with costs that are close to zero, forcing producers to come up with new business models/services, which are often purely ad-driven.(*Gerd's comment: I think a new kind of advertising - advertising 2.0 - will be crucial here, but I do think that's still 18-24 months off)
• The ever-decreasing cost of physical production makes it easier to offer more (nearly) free goods in the offline world too. In fact, many goods have actually become insanely cheap...
• The avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C.
• C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, making transactions cash-neutral.
• An emerging recycling culture.
• And all of the above fueling consumers' expectations to get online and offline stuff for free"

I highly recommend reading Trendwatching's five manifestations of FREE LOVE: 'Any excuse to advertise', 'Courting saturated consumers', 'C2C', 'Swapping, not spending', and 'Less is more', which all incorporate one or more of the above drivers.

Meet me at Ars Electronica 2008: Symposium on the Limits of Intellectual Property

Joichi Ito and the Ars Electronica people have invited me to join them for this conference that is promising to be very unique.  I will be giving a talk on September 5, 2008 - join me if you are somewhere close by (this event is held in Linz, Austria).  This is what Joi says about it: 

"Computers and the Internet has lowered the cost of communication and the creation and distribution of information so much that many fundamental notions of organizations, economics and property have completely changed or require major upgrades. There is a new generation of youth across the globe which lead the charge into this changing world, modifying their basic behaviors to adapt to technology as it develops. Some businesses and artists have been able to keep up with these trends while other struggle and fail. The much slower to adapt legal system is being pushed to its limits with organizations on all sides of the issues trying very hard to adapt outdated laws. Most of the new behaviors and organizations creating value have a completely different notion property. Intellectual property, while key to the post-industrial revolution nature of the firm, is more of an encumbrance than an asset to the sharing oriented mode of creation now central to the Internet. This year, we will bring together the users, artists, businesses, policy makers and academics involved intentionally or beyond their control in this change to understand this new world and to try to adapt to it."

(Joichi Ito)

The Future of Radio (Slideshare presentation by Gerd Leonhard)

This is a presentation I have it late 2007 but it is still very much to-the-point and relevant. Slideshare.net rocks, btw - it's really the Youtube of Slideshows. You can check out all of my slideshows on Slideshare, here (pdf downloads for all of them).

| View | Upload your own

Muxtape: I have uploaded 12 podcasts on various topics

Muxtape is pretty interesting, and perfectly 'legal' for streaming audio podcasts;)
Check out my Future of Media talks  here  (sorry no widgets yet)

Update - just found another way to make audio podcast widgets for single tracks, called Muzicons. Check it out: 

Advertising 2.0: Free Content in Return for Attention (and Ads = Content, too)

Well, this is of course hardly new, as such, just more pronounced. The Future of Advertising will see advertisers (and brands, directly) providing free music, films, TV-shows, games and other premium content in return for targeted and focused attention to what was formerly known as Ads; or rather other types of content - as I sometimes call it, advercontent or contvertising - that promotes products and services - but limited to what we have ASK to see.

This means I will be trading some of my personal user data, my click-streams and digital breadcrumbs in return for getting free content. Think ad-supported music (yes... soon!) and films. This will feel like free to the users and will offer huge value to the advertisers (provided of course that the match is 99%!)
Read more here: www.mediafuturist.com/advertising/index.html   If you like my images check out my other stuff on Flickr.

Update: Just ran across this very much related cartoon on Flickr

Web 2.0 and all that Noise (new video)

Web 1.0 was about GETTING Noise. Web 2.0 is (was) about MAKING Noise. Web 3.0 is about FILTERING Noise. Web 4.0 (ouch) is about SMART NOISE (or... going deaf?).... watch this and tell me what you think

Download all GerdTube videos via this iTunes Link

Economic Egoism and the Quest for Control

Is it ALL about maximizing your profit and retaining control over the market? Is the short-tern view towards immediate profit sustainable in the long-term? In this networked and hyper-connected word, if you can have and maintain complete control is it still okay and 'natural' to do so and do exploit the advantage to the fullest?  Here is a quote from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev: "economic egoism'' has led to what may be the worst economic contraction since the depression of the 1930s"
Maybe this video, below, can illustrate the point a bit?

Steve Ballmer on The Future of Media and Advertising

Here is his bottom line from the Washington Post Interviews
" There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form..." 

The Device that was the Phone (via Always on)

Via AlwaysOn Trend #2: The device that used to be a phone. Your mobile phone will turn into a mainstream computer. Beyond just e-mail and web access, the phones of the future will have such features as built-in projection screens. High-speed data will make your phone a virtual credit card and ID (even a passport!). Access will open phones up, transforming them into payment systems, personal information filing systems, and much, much more.

Attention Surplus moving from TV to the Web (Clay Shirky remix)

2015 Predictions: Social Shopping

I found this very interesting chart on Shopping Innovations on KenRadio.com (I think). Imagine shopping via / on your favorite social network, people i.e. users collaborating to produce new products... and holographic sales assistants.

Speaking of holography, yes... it's real.Check out this video, below (Cisco):

The Future of Copyright: Copyright 2.0 (new video)

After I held a presentation on this subject, a few days ago, I decided I may as well make a short video out of the slides, so here it is. I am using Screenflow for this - a fantastic way of integrating video into a slideshow while you are clicking through, and record the whole thing.

In this video I talk about the Future of Copyright and these juicy subjects:

• An actual distinction between ‘Copy’ vs ‘Performance’ of digital content no longer exists
  
• Even if it did: the sole ‘Selling of Copies’ is no longer a growing business, or a sustainable model
  
• The exclusive right to ‘make copies’ is becoming impossible to enforce
  
• Criminalization of Sharing and Policing of Web-Access is not the kind of ‘Justice’ our society can afford
• New Permissions & ‘Usage-Rights’ for Digital Music can and will solve this problem

Update: here is an iPod-ready file for downloading: Download copyright_2.0 by Gerd Leonhard Futurist short.m4v

Update: just found an interesting podcast show on Copyright2.0 here

You can, btw, subscribe to my Gerdtube video blog posts via my Blip.tv channel here (includes itunes feed etc - Blip rocks!).

Project Make McCain Exciting: Gray Ambition

Via Twitter and Buzzfeed comes this nice remix:  "As part of Stephen Colbert’s “Make McCain Exciting” contest, one YouTube user has masterfully mashed-up sound bytes and close-ups of McCain with Madonna’s “Vogue,” making the presidential nominee not only exciting but...."

The Intend to Share is already a Criminal Act

Says the MPAA

"...the MPAA,...told Judge Davis that peer-to-peer users automatically should be liable for infringement. The only purpose for placing copyrighted works in the shared folder is, of course, to 'share,' by making those works available to countless other P2P networks," the MPAA wrote."

And more from the Wired blog: "You don't have to prove actual distribution. You need to prove there's works in the share folder, and that is distribution," said Joseph Geisman, MPAA's chief intellectual property attorney, as he described the so-called "making available" concept"

War is peace and peace is war. Right?