The Brickwire: 2010: The Start of the Digital Acceleration Decade - Scott Neslund - MediaBizBloggers

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I recently started commuting between New York and San Francisco and it made me think back to the last time I commuted between two cities on a frequent basis. It was 1999 when I was living in Chicago but working in Toronto each week and new technologies were just breaking on to the scene as a part of daily business and personal life. I started to think about those new technologies, the enormous progress that has been made in 10 short years and the impact on advertising for the next decade.

In 1999, Nokia was the #1 cell phone (and it wasn't smart), Blackberry's debut got attention for simply providing business email, TiVo promised to change the way the world watched TV, and AOL ruled the Internet. Fast forward to 2010 where mobile phone penetration is nearing 100%, Facebook captures over 300 million visitors each month, e-readers are transforming the print industry, Google makes enormous profits from free services, and TV is everywhere and on demand. These advancements have been accepted by consumers and woven into their media behavior, albeit some with greater success than others.

If the last 10 years can be characterized as the "the lost decade" from an economic standpoint, then the opposite is true for describing the rapid development and acceptance of new digital media applications by consumers. It truly was the foundation decade of consumer digital acceptance on many levels: e-commerce, content viewing and sharing, crowd sourcing and information searching.

The next 10 years will be about accelerating the trend of consumers moving into the digital space for almost every aspect of their lives where they need to buy, sell, learn, share or be entertained by something. This acceleration will be compounded by the fact that consumers continue to have more and more choices due the long tail of the digital shelf space and they will exploit those choices through their ability to search for exactly what they want and what they need.

Search marketing will be a critical area for advertisers to master if they want to succeed with consumers in the next decade due to the explosion of choices online. Consumers are still in control and search is one of their main tools of authority over advertisers.

"Serving 23 Billion and Growing": ComScore announced that U.S. consumers conducted 23 billion searches in December, a 22% increase over the same month last year. Worldwide the number tops 130 billion. Media behavior like this can't be ignored and it shows how significant search behavior has become among consumers. Any advertiser wishing to grow their business in the digital world must start with how they can best connect with consumers through their search behavior. This understanding will open up communication opportunities for advertisers that will make them more relevant to consumers versus simply placing ads in front of them hoping they will stick.

Probably one of the most telling statistics indicating the critical role search plays in the new decade is the recent holiday shopping season where online sales increased 5% to over $27 billion while brick and mortar sales saw declines. Search strategies were key drivers of capturing consumers online while they shopped for holiday gifts. Even struggling retailers like Sears have discovered that their best hope for revenue growth is online. The company launched an aggressive plan to save the company by building an e-tailing effort that captures 40 million visitors each month and is driven by strong search marketing.

You also see this trend taking shape in the entertainment industry where consumers can search for whatever video content they want on YouTube, Hulu and all the television network sites. The print industry is in a state of massive transformation as they move their content to digital platforms and now they need to find strategic ways to steer consumers to their content. Simply being online with your content isn't good enough. You have to help consumers find it and value it through search marketing.

Search will also become more important as social networking sites open up their information to search engines and allow consumers to discover a wider world of possibilities that were previously locked.

The power of search marketing gives advertisers a significant opportunity to build their business at a time when the media landscape is changing racially. Advertisers should view this change as an opportunity for growth and not as a wave that needs to be pushed back. Agencies for the future realize this trend and agencies that don't will find themselves managing their business decline for the next decade while the consumer will be in an age of digital acceleration driven by search behavior.

Scott Neslund is CEO of Red Bricks Media. He can be reached at sneslund@redbricksmedia.com.

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