While we’re often talking about the Enterprise on fastforwardblog.com, I thought it might be interesting to go back to where it all began, namely the Web. I’d like to shift our focus on the changes occurring in advertising and traditional media. A fantastic new report was published by Piper Jaffray on February 22nd called The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem. In this 425-page industry report, the author Safa Rashtchy says:

Advertisers need to adapt to the new consumer demands and match their services closely with consumer needs. The old advertising adage that advertising is about “convincing consumers to buy what they don’t know they need” has to change. Consumers largely know what they need, and they want messages that are targeted at those specific needs. They also want to associate the brand with their lifestyle, and in doing so, they will become evangelizers for that brand. Thus advertisers need to forge closer relationships with consumers - close enough to be part of the content they are consuming, not just a commercial interruption of the content. In the new regime, advertisers must not only follow customer cues, they must also join their networks as active participants with a genuine interest in promoting consumers’ interests.

We at FAST agree that a massive change is occurring in media where traditional advertising is going to be replaced by contextual advertising where brand owners actively engage in connecting consumers to the content they seek or allowing consumers to create lifestyle- (and brand-) relevant content. Rashtchy cautions the traditional media companies to transform themselves into W20 companies, lickety-split and then mentions search as a key driver:

Search itself has become the new portal model, as many users now rely on search to navigate the Web and find answers to their questions. Searching is no longer just used to find information or to buy a product; search is the way people navigate the Internet.

Searchenginewatch also comments on where Piper Jaffray thinks search is going. Get your hands on this report. It’s well worth the read.

The E20 Take

How does this apply to the Enterprise? If you think of Corporate Communications as “advertising” and culture as “lifestyle”, then the employee user needs to be connecting to the content or communities they seek and the employee needs to contribute back to the enterprise discussion. In other words, it’s a bottoms-up world emerging and how the company’s senior management manages and disseminates information is being upturned.