I was asked to give the opening keynote at The World After Advertising conference in Düsseldorf, Germany, back in November 2010; where I presented a PoV on the future of advertising and the digital landscape – focusing heavily on user experience driven by data & technology.

The keynote covers relations between people and brands, the evolution of the digital consumer, the evolution of technology and how it changed us, an introduction to contextual computing, adaptive experiences, the Internet of Things, and a few predictions for the next 5 years.

The events was recorded, but I have not managed to get the official video — luckily for us, someone at the front row recorded the entire keynote from their phone.

Find below the full video recording, slides, and an amazing infographic an artist made live while listening to my keynote.

YouTube Full Video Recording:

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Classified as RANT!

Prequel: I noticed that some pages were taking too long to load … I heard good things about WP Super Cache and I had tried it before, but it was messing up when toggling between web view and mobile view … randomly providing web users the mobile view, and mobile users the web view … I decided to give it another chance, tested, and it works … speeded up the site drastically.

Chapter 1: A week goes by and I notice a drop in site traffic … I analyze why and it’s mainly organic traffic from Google

More specifically, % Change -42.81% … ok, now I’m pissed… why all the sudden my search ranking dropped so much?!

Chapter 2: I perform a search for some of my main articles, such as Free Social Media Monitoring Tools. Result?

Buy Meridia Pill? Reliable Online Drugstore? WTF?! Where did this come from? I obviously never put that there … So I click through and it’s my regular content … but if I open the cached Google version, this is what I see:

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It’s easy to get caught up in today’s trends or even focus on the next six months. Some of 2009′s biggest trends included an increased emphasis on real-time search and information distribution, while distribution of marketing content in widgets and other pieces of portable content that worked across devices and social spaces also saw its stake rise. Plus, there were great improvements in social-media monitoring and analytics. And most notably, marketers finally acknowledged that social media was more than just a fad, with almost complete adoption by all major marketers.

Here are the top 11 predictions for what social media will look like in 2012 (based on a full presentation which is available on my blog). Some of these items exist today in their early stages, but this list is about what I believe will become the norm in 2012. Ultimately, share of voice, point of view and community influence will be more important than brand ownership — and marketers will need to get over it if they want to stay relevant in 2012.

1. Privacy expectations will (have to) change
There will be a cultural shift, whereby people will begin to find it increasingly more acceptable to expose more and more of their personal details on different forms of social media. Sharing your likes, dislikes, opinions, photos, videos and other forms of personal information will be the norm and people will become more accepting of personalized experiences, both corporate and personal, that are reacting to this dearth of personal information.

2. Complete decentralization of social networks
The concept of a friend network will be a portable experience. You’ll find most digital experiences will be able to leverage the power of your social networks in a way that leverages your readily available personal information and the relationships you’ve established. We’re already seeing the beginnings of this with Facebook Connect and Google’s FriendConnect.
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I’ve been really struggling to keep up with my blogging and professional writing lately. Hopefully I’ll get some more time in December when I take some time off. In the meantime I’ll share a very simple funny email my friend Jill Schoen shared at the office.  I’m assuming these are real, either way they’re absolutely classic.

As the title says… “Some People Should Not Have Facebook”…

ENJOY!

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Bob Garfield wrote a passionate article today about why he thinks Cannes is dead. Although I agree with Bob that many of the ads that have been celebrated at Cannes don’t represent the future of advertising, I don’t believe for one second that Cannes is dead.

The last year has been a rough year in advertising and this coming year is likely to be just as bad or worse, but I don’t feel this has left a gaping void in advertising. It only left a gaping void if you’re staring in the same direction you were last year and the years before that. We’ve all recognized that digital has been a catalyst for a massive change in the way we market, but our industry’s biggest challenge, after dealing with technological and cultural implications of our new wired world, has been learning how to deal with a world in a true global recession. It’s not just our budgets that have been reduced or shifted, but the consumer has fundamentally changed.

Like those that had lived through the great depression, the people that are experiencing this global recession are learning the value of frugality and economic maturity that comes with these experiences. It’s forcing us, as marketers, to evolve our message in conjunction with the way we’re delivering our message.

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