Year 2009: The Coming of Age of Digital

I know it isn't the time of predictions anymore, but a few announcements and reports this past week made me realize that 2009 will be remembered not only as the year of the first real global economic and financial crisis, but also as the year of the Coming of Age of Digital. Meaning when Digital Media REALLY are becoming mainstream AND finally -hopefully- monetizable…

A few rolling milestones can explain why we are (to my mind) reaching this tipping point:

- spread out, commoditized, soaring consumption of TV (see Accenture's report) and particularly long form online video, see the article from video business with 23% more time spent watching online video YoY in February 2009.

Hulu in the US and the iPlayer in the UK have generalized catch-up TV on the internet. People are not only watching stupid videos on YouTube any more or music videos on MySpace, they're actually are more and more to watch long form shows on the internet (see The Office, Lost, House on Hulu - iTunes – announced recently, long-form videos on YouTube as well, etc) full screen

- Declining marketing budgets across the board mean CMOs need to show higher ROI and hence spend more on digital. Hence relatively speaking, digital ad spend is growing double digits, and in absolute flat or growing a little. Think about 2010, when, crossing fingers, the economy comes back up, digital advertising will be at a whole new level in terms of the digital spend

- social networks have taken over internet time. Just announced this week by Nielsen Online, that time spent on social networks have surpassed time spent on online e-mail systems. Why is that? Because people now use Facebook to send e-mails, twitter to send text messages. Now that FB is a country of 200MM people and that Oprah Winfrey is on Twitter, we are really talking about mainstream media. As the article above mentioned says ‘and this is driven not by the young, but by the middle-aged’.

- the birth of the apps. As Apple announced this week their one-billionth apps downloads, mobile content has gone mainstream too. This progress was previously hampered by the variety of devices, sizes, and exploitation systems. Apple was genius enough to create one device, with one size, one system, a business model common to all content providers, and to make it a success. And as we all know, blackberry, Nokia and Samsung are coming with their own version of the App Store, which will make mobile consumption of content, mainstream, commoditized, and advertiser friendly, as well.

All these growing global digital indicators: media consumption, social networks, advertising spend, mean that both eyeballs and engagement are shifting platforms (from traditional television, newspapers, magazines, to the internet and convergent media) and that once the economy recovers, and the business models and analytics standards get clarified, we will see major holes in the traditional media spend model. And digital & convergent media will start driving some revenues, after having only gathered eyeballs… At least this is what the company who will spend an outrageous amount of money buying Twitter thinks.

Exciting times ahead…

More DIGITAL BREAKTHROUGH THINKING AND NEWS SUMMARY @ Flypaper.TV