2008 vs. 2018: A Tech Odyssey - Louisville's Digital Crossroads

2008 vs. 2018:
A Tech Odyssey
David Berkowitz
Principal, Serial Marketer
david@serialmarketer.net
@dberkowitz
Join the community: serialmarketers.net

This is an annotated version of my talk at Louisville Digital Association’s Digital Crossroads in October
2018. Please reach out if you want more information on anything here, or even the PowerPoint version
of these slides.

Hi, Louisville. It’s time to shift perspective.

MEDIA AGENCY TECH
Some of my affiliations. Most are companies where I worked; with Ad Age and MediaPost, I’ve
contributed a combined 500 columns.

I publish a weekly newsletter – see bit.ly/seriallysignup. I also run the Serial Marketers slack group –
see serialmarketers.net. My day job is consulting, applying my marketing and strategy background to
working on projects around communications, content, innovation strategy, and related fields.

I loved these Information Architects maps via IA.net.

2008 was still a feature phone world.

Internet video was nothing in 2008.

17
Copyright 2007 360i, LLC.
2008 was still the waning era of MySpace.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w6wTJpBCuE8mZN_
6tykQHr304WlsBtlQF9P1-qhAmp0/edit#gid=0
And now there’s Instagram. This character in a Dustinland comic was based on me. Wow.

Desktop apps were huge 10 years ago, and they’re now making a comeback.

23
Me using Mailchimp on my Desktop.

25
“Anyone remember
me?... Those were
fun times. There was
no YouTube. It was
UsTube, baby!
America watched
what we put on the
air or lived with the
consequences."
– Jerry Seinfeld, NBC Upfronts, May 2007

Remember when crowdsourcing was supposed to obviate the need for agencies for Super Bowl ads?

Remember Bud.TV? (Me neither)
“The launch of Bud.tv is doubtless a milestone and a
laudable innovation, the first time a mass marketer that
spends hundreds of millions of dollars with other media
channels every year has decided to make its own… It’s got
a viable entertainment soapbox on the internet.”
-Ad Age, February 2007

This is what Bud.TV is now.

Video Search Horizons (2008)
Facial recognition:
Identifying key characters in
video clips by their faces.
Audio recognition:
Transcribing audio into
searchable text.
Visual mapping: Looking at
screen contrast to determine
the location of scenes.
Frame tagging: Marking
individual frames in a video
with descriptions of what's
happening in that scene.

“Visual search… will
enable millions of
consumers in Japan
alone to do online
searches by taking
pictures of everyday
objects with their
camera phone.”
- KDDI press release, April 2008

Scan a product, get info or deals

Pinterest is the most interesting company to me in the visual search space.

Target licensed Pinterest’s tech. Expect this to be a bigger focus for companies like Pinterest, expanding
use beyond their own apps.

B2B applications for visual search
Creative
optimization
Media
planning
Influencer
marketing
Rights
management
Crisis
management
Partnership
ideation
Competitive
intelligence
Customer
service
R&D

Podcast Ad Spend Steadily Growing
• Actual (IAB): $314 million in 2017
• 2020 projection: $659 million

Top Podcasts in iTunes were via
Mainstream Media

This Chumby I had 10 years ago, a touchable smart-screen, wasn’t voice activated but resembles the
Echo Show quite a bit.

And then there’s the Nabaztag voice-activated bunny. So weird and clunky, but I loved this thing.

Morton Heilig Debuts
VR… in 1957
55

In 1993, Angela Lansbury starred in a VR-themed episode of “Murder She Wrote.”

Second Life’s
Second Coming
"Second Life is not
simply a 'closed'
phenomenon. It is a
real living environment
that every day extends
its frontiers and
increases the number
of residents. We cannot
close our eyes to it."
Father Antonio Spadaro
July 2007

Brands in Second Life, mapped.

H&R Block in Second Life (2008)

Coke’s Virtual Thirst on MySpace

360-degree tour ads from Expedia – this stuff has been around awhile.

66
VR today… or recently enough

67
McDonald’s shows off new restaurants using 360-degree video.

It might not be the best
AR device but it certainly
has the most buzz. In
2008, the iPhone was
highly sought after
by game developers...
The App Store, which
amassed 10,000 apps in
half a year, offers an
instant distribution model
for AR games.
– Games Alfresco

This was a real AR campaign – circa 2010.

Yelp’s Monocle let you see restaurants all around you – but it was always harder to use than a 2D list.

And now we have Apple, Facebook, and others pushing AR. With this example from Apple, is anyone
actually doing this? It’s still a work in progress.

A recent example for the Dallas Mavericks via the agency Groove Jones using a Facebook filter – it’s
still hard to imagine people taking the time to activate the filter and use it.

The aggregator FriendFeed has been replaced in a way by services like Franz that bring all your
communications tools together.

3 Types of Widgets
I have no clue what the types of widgets even are.

Google’s old social strategy

82
Facebook was once respected as a leader for its privacy controls.

The Brave browser, which has a blockchain connection not worth describing here, epitomizes the anti-
ad, anti-corporate approach people now have as some seek to gain control over their data.

Mobile barcodes on verge of going mainstream
LOL.

The most scanned QR code ever? Calvin Klein bought a billboard with just this image in New York.

Lookin’ for barcodes in all the smelliest
places
This ad with a barcode really ran on NYC garbage trucks. No,
really.

Lookin’ for barcodes in all the
smelliest places

Old-school connection of online and offline.

Public bathroom searches holding
steady

p
m
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk efficiently powered workforces-on-demand for easily repeatable tasks.

I really did post this task somtime around 2008.

Actual response as well (but not an actual email I sent my boss).

While Mechanical Turk wasn’t AI-driven, it did make some wonder about what would happen with
large-scale workforce disruption, especially given how cheap it was to get most projects done. Now,
people could be circumvented entirely by AI.

Via NPR, you can find out if your job will likely be automated.

Bloomberg Businessweek ran covers designed by AI. Pretty good, right?

No, I wasn’t talking about blockchain in 2008. Bitcoin was created in 2009, and I wasn’t talking about it
then either (sadly, I wasn’t buying it then either).

This is one of my favorite bitcoin marketing stunts. Fitting for a talk given in Kentucky too.

While Uber, Airbnb and the like gained traction not long after the period covered here, few anticipated
such disruptive mobile-first business models.

Shown here are Saatva Mattresses and Allbirds, two of my favorite direct-to-consumer brands driven
by scalable online channels driven heavily through social ads. In 2008, agencies typically told clients to
avoid using social media for direct-response purposes.

We broke up some functional areas, but fortunately thus far there’s been no silo-ing of tech into
mobile, social, and local – the dreaded MoSoLo or whatever version kept coming up awhile ago. Even
in 2008, these three areas were infused into everything and not stand-alone entities.

While privacy was a concern in 2008, the Digital Detox idea of a backlash to our screens and addictive
tech services (email, social, etc) hadn’t yet crystallized.

Takeaways for the
next 10+ years

Expect a continued focus on direct-to-consumer brands that can get around the middleman, especially
when that middleman is Amazon. How well will these continue to scale? Will the ad economics continue
to hold up? In the near-term, this is a high-growth area.
6

Established brands matter too… see Kaepernick & Nike. Call it a stunt. Call it political. You can hate the
guy and hate the shows and still acknowledge that this brand plays an outsized role in our culture.

Very little goes away entirely. Technologies and trends take a long time to mature and become
ingrained as a habit.

Bet on what shifts the power to consumers and giving people control over what, when, and with whom
we interact.

Newton’s 3rd Law constantly applies: for every action, there’s an equal & opposite reaction. Conflicting
trends happen simultaneously. We consume more long and short form content. We’re more concerned
about privacy but more people also want to share publicly and earn influencer status. We buy from
individual brands but spend more on Amazon. Bet on opposite trends coinciding.

Most laughably dumb ideas now were laughably bad then. You can prevent these. Ask what are your
goals, what problem are you trying to solve, and does this fit in with any way an actual human being
behaves? There are Garbage Truck QR Code ideas all the time that we can prevent from happening.

Learn by doing. Try. Share with others. Use a platform you’d never thing matters. Spend a night in an
Airbnb if you haven’t. Make yourself uncomfortable. Buy $1 worth of bitcoin just to see how it’s done.
Try a stupid-looking brand filter on Instagram even if you don’t like taking pictures (delete it after!).

It’s been a lot of fun shifting perspectives with you.

THANK YOU!
David Berkowitz
Keep in touch: david@serialmarketer.net
Read & subscribe: serialmarketer.net
Join the community: serialmarketers.net
Thanks for reading this. If you want the PPT version or further decks on topics like VR & AR, AI, and
Blockchain, let me know. It’d also be great to have you joining the Slack group or reading the
newsletter if you’re so inclined. And thanks to the Louisville Digital Association for having me at Digital
Crossroads.

2008 vs. 2018: A Tech Odyssey - Louisville's Digital Crossroads

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2008 vs. 2018: A Tech Odyssey - Louisville's Digital Crossroads