The Future of Business, Marketing and Communications - my presentation at the Future Event in Trinidad, today (Oct 8, 2008)

I had the privilege of doing the keynote speech at a Futurist Event here in Port of Spain, Trinidad, today. The event was organized by Rostant Advertising and also featured Jeff Swystun, Chief Communications Officer of DDB (NY), talking about The Swarm, and Jeroen Matser, Strategy Director at TribalDDB London. Both delivered very powerful speeches that I hope will be available online, soon as well; plus I think there will be video footage of most speeches, too... stay tuned! Blogger and Trini Digerati Mark Lindersay wrote a nice preview of the event here (thanks Mark!), and some more thoughts from my interview with Mark are here.

The topic:  The next 5 years in Business, Media, Society and Culture: trends and opportunities in our immediate future. The details: I talked about the massive disruptions that are a result of the explosive global popularity and ever-faster adoption of the Internet and the resulting cultural, economic and societal changes. When everyone is connected at very high speeds, everywhere, all the time, for almost-free, on 100s of different devices, and the 'people formerly known as consumers' gain even more power with every mouse click, what does that do to traditional business processes and marketing strategies, to established economic value chains; and how will products or services be sold in the future?  What will change, when and how, and where are the next real opportunities? How to (re)invent the future? 

Here's the PDF with most of the slides (3MB, 40+ pages) Future_business_leonhard_trinidad_oct_8_2008.pdf

A quick note to everyone that attended: please check out my 30+ other presentations, as well, both on this blog and on Slideshare.  Photo: the Rostant Advertising team and the 2 other speakers (me taking the pic;)

Comments

[MIles Abraham]

This was a great conference and just what Trinidad needed in terms of turning the Ad industry toward seeing the massive shift in thinking and marketing. Great Ideas come and go but I think the basis of what was said here...is here to stay.

The problem with Trinidad is. It hasn't begun to arrive yet. In Trinidad although net availability and usage has skyrocketed in the last 3 years. The basic services and solutions are not there.

Web 1.0 = Commerce
Web 2.0 = People

The commerece part has not even begun. Our banks are online...That's about it.

Either way a good start and I hope it gets those Account Execs pushing digital a lot more in our area.

Thanks again for this sir.

[Judette Coward-Puglisi]

There is a clear role for futurists to make sense of what’ coming, to ‘predict’ the future. But there is also a clear role for folks like me, the small business owners grappling with the reality of Facebook, You Tube, viral. Twitter. Digg it.

Email is dead. Who knew?

The power of the small business owner lies not in the ability to predict the future but to create it. We have the choice. We can see things happen or we can make them happen. We certainly can’t cling to the old ways of doing things and in fact must experiment and later become advocates to government, big business and even our own employees on how to utilise the new digital tools that will allow us to effectively compete.

In a very real way the future is here, in the present. And it is not good or bad, right or wrong. Indeed it becomes what we make it.

[Gerd Leonhard]

Indeed, Judette, it's all in the MIX that fits for you - win your location, for your users / customers. I would not drop email if I was selling luxury gold resorts right now ;)

[Karel - Caribbean Public Relations]

I was unable to attend, so thanks for the slides.