The Future of Now

Back then...

It's 1995. The internet is populated by less than 20,000 websites. Each one takes a couple of minutes to access through a crackling, wheezing dial up connection. This, ladies and gentlemen is what we are trumpeting as the "information superhighway". Netscape is pre-IPO. There is no Google.

We've just launched Marks & Spencer's first ever website. Tomi Davies, Bryan Wright, Mark Henderson and I are now playing buzzword bingo at a conference on the future of the internet. I have the high score, of course. Here's the list of things the visionaries are assuring us will be a commonplace in the future:

The market of one
Mass marketing will be a thing of the past. Mass customisation and one to one marketing will be the thing. One day, technology will know all of your preferences and deliver relevent offers to you, wherever you are. Your newspaper will be digital, delivering news stories on subjects you like.

E-commerce
You'll be able to order through online shops which have your shopping lists stored and can make recommendations to you based on your likes and dislikes. Your goods will delivered to your doorstep and you'll sign for them on a digital hand-held devise. We've seen Peapod and it's the future.

Video on Demand
Time Warner are ploughing millions into trying to deliver video online when and where you ask for it. We don't think it'll ever happen.

Virtual reality
You will conduct your life in a digital counter-existence. The internet will become a three dimensional multi-media experience

Push technologies
The internet will connect with you and not only allow you to call up information, but push things to your desktop based on your preferences.

Convergence
Digital technologies will be accessed by a multitude of devices including mobile phones, TV and even your fridge!

Disintermediation
The internet will radically disrupt business by cutting out middlemen, connecting customers directly with the provider of goods and services.

Now.

Fast forward to today. Our marketing campaigns have tracked the product you browsed on our website and are delivering banners to you with more information as you surf onwards.

At home, we've downloaded the Iphone app from Tesco and are busy barcode scanning the contents of our fridge up to our shopping list, making the most of our digital coupons and loyalty points. I can watch any program, any film, listen to any piece of music and read any book I can possibly think of through my TV, on a games consul, through a digital slate or on my phone.

The games industry is now bigger than the movies. Millions of us spend our time in three dimensional gaming worlds living out our fantasies.

It's been a terrible time for intermediary businesses like publishing and travel, but a great time for the content and service originators. Brands are exploiting and pushing these opportunities at a rapatious rate. They no longer need to pay the publishing gatekeepers of audience segments. They can target individual customers through the network based on behaviour and preference.

Brands are generating their own content and nurturing their own audiences. They are becoming media companies in their own right , disintermediating the publishers from their audiences. Agencies are trying to figure out where they can add value in this landscape.

Ladies and gentlemen, the future just happened!

What next?

The future is quantum. It's the new new thing.

Nobel prize winning Physicist Gerard 't Hooft has a theory which he calls the Holographic Principle. In short, today's quantum mechanics think that our every day reality is just a hologram, generated by binary data stored on the event horizons of black holes. There is no reality - it's just an illusion. So there's virtual reality - the one we used our computers to imagine up and, well, another virtual reality really, the one we were born into.

That's why the Cern Project is such a big deal. It's a very expensive, hugely ambitious way of proving or disproving Gerard's theory. They're looking for one particle in particular - matter. The God particle. Every other particle they've found, labelled and understood. But not this one. The one that proves that our every day existance is real, not virtual. If they don't find it. Well, then maybe Gerard is right.

In other parts of the world, the scientists who are exploring quantum computing are the latest nudists on the late shift. They're putting together the first, faltering, shaky quantum computers. They think that by using revolving particles rather than silicon and transistors, our computing power will accelerate incredibly.

To give you an idea of how dramatic this may be, they predict a time when a quantum computer will give us an amount of computing crunch that we would need a silicon based computer the size of the universe to achieve today.

So. Are we looking at a future where we can use quantum computers to alter the quantum building blocks of our every day reality? How many other realities will we be able to create? Which realities will we choose to live our lives in?

I don't know. None of us knows. What I do know is that sometimes you have to be careful for what you wish for. Sometimes it comes true.

Pen Portraits of the UK Middle Classes

"The Middle Class Handbook" is a lovely blog originally started by London based agency Not Actual Size.

"The idea behind the blog was that as Britain's middle classes were expanding, they were evolving into sub-tribes that defined themselves by collective tastes rather than income."

It presents the index to these tribes in the format of a periodic table. As entertaining as it is useful.

http://www.middleclasshandbook.co.uk/the-periodic-table-of-the-midd/

Rise of the Silver Surfer

We've recently been doing some digital planning and strategy for a financial services company with a silver surfing audience base. I thought I'd share some found data from the process with you. Comments welcome with links if you have any data yourself. Especially interested if you have overlays of socio-demographic info.

Research Highlights:

CARAT CCS

• 55-75 year olds make up 28% of the total UK population, which translates to 12,868,000 people
• Of those, three quarters of 55-64 year olds and 55% of 65-75 year olds use the internet at least occasionally (5,306 million and 3,158 million users respectively)
• Although over half of the 55-75 age group are light users (under 15 hours per week,) a quarter can be considered to be ‘heavy users’ (30+ hours a week) and 45% medium users (15-30 hours per week).
• 83% of 55-64s and 61% of 65-75s access the internet at least once a week on their home PC or laptop.

"They aim to make life easier for themselves, with personal banking and emails being one of the most frequent activities, undertaken at least once a week, while 38% look for the best products by using online reviews, and the same amount look to get them as cheaply as possible with price comparison sites."

WAVE 5

"40% of frequent internet users over the age of 55 manage a social network."

"As a demographic, the over 55s are now more likely than their 16-54 year-old peers to bookmark pages, sign-up to email bulletins and register with websites - clearly wanting to stay connected with news, brands and no doubt a whole range of other information."

NIELSON

"Internet surfers over 50 accounted for 53 per cent of the overall increase in UK users."

"Men over 50 were responsible for 38 per cent of this growth numbering 722,000 while women over 50 accounted for 284,000, or 15 per cent, of the increase."

Links to good recent articles with reviews of surveys/studies:

Generation 62.0: Digital planning for an aging population (CARAT)
Silver surfers get social (WAVE 5)
Silver surfers increase by one million over the last year (NIELSON)

UK Office for National Statistics data: