Ironic Partnership

For decades, videogames and fitness have been each others nemesis. Thankfully, this war of attrition has come to an end as these once enemies have joined forces in a somewhat ironic partnership. The following is both an example of the evolution of videogames and proof that peace does have a chance.

The Game Developers Conference took place in San Francisco, CA last week, and there, Nintendo announced several upcoming product and service introductions, including the much-talked about Wii Fit gaming title. Wii Fit is meant to promote fitness as much as fun game play, showing that the console really is meant for an entirely different gaming market than the “traditional” gaming consoles. Scheduled to officially launch in mid-May, it will come with a Balance Board that can sense one’s weight and motion. Gamers will also be able to log onto a Wii Fit Channel where they can monitor fitness progress through both weight loss and BMI (body mass index). Games that make use of the Wii Fit Balance Board are already in development.

In addition to Wii Fit, Nintendo also plans to launch a downloadable game service called WiiWare on May 12. Here, customers will be able to access games, while developers can gain gaming ideas. Some of the first available games will include Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles; My Life as a King; and LostWids. Both the competing Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 permit downloading games through online portals.

For more information, visit www.wii.com.

Book Report

There is a relationship between the brands we consume and how we define ourselves. Robert Walker has just released a book titled "Buying In" which explores how consumers buy into brands in order to tell a story about themselves. The following is a good summary (plus the results of a cheeky experiment around the positioning of an energy drink). Of course only for those who don't have time to sit down and read the entire thing.

Last Friday morning, I stopped by Likemind to see Piers, Noah and others, as well as to pick up an advanced copy of the book “Buying In” by Rob Walker. His publisher, Random House, offered Likemind attendees in North America free copies and kindly paid our coffee bill too. Walker is a journalist who covers marketing and consumerism for the New York Times. The book attempts to explain why we prefer certain brands, for seemingly irrational reasons. His theory is that we have a deep relationship and dialogue with the products we consume. More importantly, we use these products to create our own self-perceived identity and they give meaning back to us. Changes in marketing strategies have made the relationship even more complex, as the traditional modes of advertising such as mass television and print ads give way to the untraditional methods of “viral” or “guerrilla” marketing. The shift blurs the differentiation between marketers and consumers. Many of the cases he covers will be familiar– Pabst Blue Ribbon, Red Bull, Timberland, American Apparel, and of course Apple’s iPod– especially if you read Walker’s column “Consumed” in the New York Times Magazine.

The idea works like this: we buy into brands and their products mainly in order to a tell a story about ourselves to ourselves, not just to other people. Many successful brands are a blank slate, onto which people can project various stories. These multiple meanings allow certain brands to grow beyond their initial niche. Messages from marketers as well as peers shape our perception of what a brand means. Things get interesting when Walker explains how, although we believe that we can see through marketing and branding, exposure to external messages (that is, marketing) can affect not only our perception of quality but the *actual* quality of a product. He cites an extremely interesting study by Dan Ariely, Baba Shiv, and Ziv Carmon, which gave a group of students an energy drink, its true full price, and told them a scientific study showed that the drink helped mental performance. These students did better than students who were given only the test. Surprisingly, other students who given various combinations of getting the drink, being told it was cheaper (and therefore less valuable,) and that the drink “might” improve performance all did measurably *worse* than the control group.

The relationship between our identity and our brands become apparent when we look at two human drivers that Walker mentions, wanting to be an individual and wanting to belong to a community. The two seemingly opposing internal motivations work out in fascinating ways. We buy products that conform to what we perceive to be our individual taste. However, our unconscious minds process and react to much more than our conscious minds detects. My point is not to argue that we are victims of subliminal “buy popcorn” images in movies. Rather, people are complex beings, full of, emotions, gut instincts, competitiveness and irrational thoughts. If we were truly rational beings economists could more easily explain our behavior, and everybody would be saving more, eating healthy, and exercising a few times a week. Further, the “truth” that we bestow onto our brands is relative. The actual “truth” about the brand is secondary to our perceived brand identity. As Walker notes, anti-marketing hipsters can drink a “working class” beer like FBR, when in fact, it is increasingly drunk by hipsters and less by mid-Western working class beer drinkers.

Walker also describes how the lines between marketer and consumer are blurring, as I previously mentioned. As with most business books these days, he coins a new term for this observed phenomenon, in this case “murketing.” He goes on to describe how new marketing companies hire “agents” to push products onto friends, family, local store owners, and strangers. The key insight here, is that the agents often do this for free, because they like the feeling of empowerment from sharing their ahead of the curve knowledge about upcoming products to people. What is also interesting is that many of the agents aren’t the hipster influencers in the Lower East Side that Malcolm Gladwell describes in “The Tipping Point” or as Walker names as “Magic People.” Instead, they are regular people with regular jobs, living pretty much anywhere. This idea of weak links and how influence spread through them deserves a post of its own.

Often, people make the claim that people are in control over their decisions, and are further aided today by having overwhelming access to consumer product and service information. This is true, but the issue is more complicated than that. In the past, my general reaction was that this idea, while true, is only part of the equation. We need to insure that our society supports media literacy for people to have the tools to properly deconstruct all the marketing we increasingly exposed to seeing and hearing. Now, Walker’s research suggests that media literacy is not enough.

“Buying In” is mostly descriptive, rather than normative. Walker doesn’t go out and definitely argue that murketing is itself bad, and acknowledges that he too is influenced by these forces at play. He cites his personal questioning of his allegiance to Converse sneakers as an authentic anti-establishment choice after it was purchased by Nike. He does starts this exploration some of the ethics behind our brand-based identities in his coverage of Etsy and craft culture. The founder of Etsy, Robert Kalin, states that his mission is to create authentic “connections” with the things we own. I saw him speak at the recent PFSK conference and was interested to hear him talk about wanting to move towards away from big box shopping and towards a more authentic bazaar-like experience. Walker reports that Kalin has the goal of having his entire wardrobe be hand made products from his site. While this is a noble goal, it does not attempt to unbundle our identities from our brands, be it an artisan on Etsy or the Gap. I would have liked to see Walker take his ideas further in a more normative direction, and explore the possibilities of walking away from our brand attachments. What would happen if we unplugged from our brands? How would we and those around us react to separating ourselves from our possessions? Is that even possible? Even better, what stories would we construct about ourselves? Who would we be?

Source - Weather Pattern

Heads Up - The Green Bandwagon

The "Green" trend has forced companies to (desperately) find ways to jump onto the bandwagon. Not withstanding the importance of being "green", marketers need to be wary of the message they align with their brands. Even with legitimate intentions to be "green", brands could face negative repercussions if the whole company isn't on the same page. The following reveals shortcomings some brands have run into. Be sure to explore the links.

As every Friday, here’s what I’ve noticed recently in backlashes, dissent, and critiques:

1. I haven’t spent a ton of time there, but I’m interested in this site: The EnviroMedia GreenWashing Index. Submit and/or rate marketing messages touting green-ness. Interesting idea; keeping an eye on it.

2. This got linked a lot (it was even in the murketing linkpile earlier this week) but Nerve.com put together a list of its Top 25 ad parodies. Fun.

3. Speaking of hating on Dove’s “real beauty” campaign, a New Yorker profile of photo retoucher Pascal Dangin included this: “I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual ‘real women’ in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. ‘Do you know how much retouching was on that?’ he asked. ‘But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.’”

Someone at Ogilvy subsequently told Ad Age: “There was no retouching of the women.” Still, some details are unclear, and Ad Age says the story is “potentially devastating” and recaps some of the backlashing against Dove to date. UnBeige chimed in to express “deliriously wonderful schadenfreude” about the possible undoing of the “deceptive” campaign: “So now, or soon to come, everyone will be up in arms about being blindly suckered into loving the campaign for its truth and honesty.” We’ll see.

4. Anti-Advertising Agency offers up a few testimonials from current and former ad pros in response to its previously mentioned efforts to get ad pros to quit their jobs. “Advertising is inherently evil … I am glad I am not doing that anymore. It is better to starve righteously.” Etc.

5. Wake Up Wal Mart Blog has posted a video ad arguing that tax rebate checks are being used to by cheap imports from China, at Wal Mart.

6. Brainiac points to this list of 8 Classic Toys Parents Hated. Top spot: Slime.

Source - Murketing

Are Your Ears Burning?

A picture is worth a thousand words and the same is true for brands (despite marketing efforts!). The following is a fascinating widget that invites people to attribute a word or phrase to a given logo. Go see what the online community thinks of your brand in the "browse" section. If your brand isn't there be sure to add it to the list. Neato!

http://www.brandtags.net/

Aspirational Lifestyle Seeks Aspirational Product

Videogames and advertising are a match made in heaven yet few marketers have unlocked the true power of this relationship. Both mediums connect their audience with an aspirational lifestyle however the videogame medium is able to do it from the opposite direction offering products to your already aspirational online persona. How do you sell a Sony Camcorder to Nico from GTA IV?

There are a few common reasons why advertisers want to use videogames to reach consumers.

One is the belief that videogames are a place to recover the waning audiences of television advertising. The highly desirable, seemingly elusive 18-34 male demographic is often, unfairly, assumed to correspond directly to videogame players. What better way to retrieve these "lost" consumers than to inject billboard and video advertising into their sci-fi shooters and fantasy role-playing games?

Would an orc order pizza? Does a dystopian planet from the future need a pacer drink? In most videogames, advertisements become parodies of themselves. An alternate version of this principle swaps young men for middle-aged women, and console games for casual puzzle games, where branded objects replace abstract tokens.

Another motivation is advertisers ongoing interest in targeting children. People assume videogames are for kids (as well as young adult males). Everyone, from greedy candymakers to hopeful science educators to earnest charitable organisations, wants to reach kids early with messages to buy, to learn, or to become aware. What better way to speak to the kiddies than via Mario platformer lookalikes or custom virtual worlds that extend a favorite franchise?

Unfortunately, kids advergames and educational titles underestimate the sophistication that children exhibit at play. Titles like Pokemon, Animal Crossing, or Zoo Tycoon require patience, deep knowledge and sophisticated reasoning.

Yet another reason revolves around visibility. No matter the intended audience, games get attention. These days, every musician, politician, and non-profit cause has a MySpace page, a Facebook profile and a YouTube channel. Videogames offer a sure-fire way to attract new attention in a noisy world. Major press outlets will cover a game without ever playing it, so quality matters less than curiosity. In fact, an entire genre of computer-enabled games played partly in real-world environemnts, known as Alternate Reality Games (or ARGs), have been funded almost exclusively by advertisers as a way to garner the kind of front-page news stories money can't buy directly.

But the features of videogames that make them powerful communication tools cannot be found in their demography, or their puerility, or their peculiarity. Rather, they are located in the very way they make meaning. In games, players take on roles constrained by rules. In play, we become other people, in a different situation, and try out life in their shoes. This is a powerful idea that has the potential for both commercial and social benefit.

For a long time now, advertisers have sold desires rather than competing for needs. They have lured us into buying products that represent the lives we aspire to but don't actually lead. They do this by plastering our world with images of these fantasy lives in the hope that we will buy untold products and services in a vain attempt to bridge the endless chasm between lives of mundane, suburban debt and lives of lithe, hypersexed outdoorsmanship.

But videogames don't just project images; they simulate experiences. For the first time since the quaint sponsor spots of the golden age of television, we have in the videogame a medium that can actually make claims about the features, functions, benefits and drawbacks of products and services. Or of public policies and causes, for that matter.

This untapped potential of games upsets the very foundation of advertising as we know it. Instead of surrounding us with images that reflect lives unlived, games can allow us to try out hypothetical lives with new products, people and ideas. To realise this potential, advertisers of both goods and viewpoints must stop blindly inserting their billboards into games or creating feeble copies of the cornerstones of videogame pop culture. Instead, they must start simulating the products, public policy positions, charitable interventions and other worldly ideas in new games – games worthy of our attention.

In a videogame marketplace overflowing with sports, fantasy and war, one need only look to The Sims, which recetly sold its 100 millionth unit, to see the untapped potential of games to be about real lives instead of fantasy ones.

Source - The Guardian

Media Wars: Magazines Fighting To Stay Relevant

Given the mass proliferation of new media there's a war out there to gain rightful share of eyeballs. And with all the talk about the "death" of TV does the lowly magazine even stand a chance? Take a gander at some media tactics (or should we say tricks) magazines are adopting to stay relevant.

Readers of the latest issue of People magazine may have been startled to open to a bulky page in the middle and hear Natasha Bedingfield’s latest pop song start playing out loud. It was courtesy of a large ad for Verizon Wireless’s music download service — and a tiny battery and speaker wedged within the pages of the magazine.
Or perhaps readers have gotten used to such sensory affronts from their reading material. With blinking lights, pop-up ads, kiss-on lipstick samples, scratch-off scents, melt-in-your-mouth taste strips and even pocket squares, advertisers are stuffing magazines full of just about anything to make their advertisements stand out.

One reason for the phenomenon is the technology that makes it less expensive to put unusual objects in magazines and that helps advertisers create more sophisticated inserts. Improvements, for example, in hiding fragrance samples under peel-off strips have also reduced the backlash from people with allergies.

But there is another dynamic at work: with so much of the publishing industry shifting to the Web, magazine executives are trying to use their print products as a tactical advantage.

Not only are they reminding advertisers that magazines are good places to attach things, but they are also seeking out and conceiving these projects. “For us, it’s be clever or die,” said Peter King Hunsinger, the publisher of GQ, which tucked fabric pocket squares into 19,000 April issues for a Lexus promotion.

And advertisers are looking for concrete returns on these creative ads, many of which use coupons or other incentives to drive consumers to Web sites or stores, where the effectiveness of the ad can be measured.

“The days of just trying to be creative and doing these without a serious commitment to marketing results are gone,” said Mike Maguire, the chief executive of Structural Graphics, a company that produces three-dimensional ads, like pop-up panties for a Fruit of the Loom advertisement.

Advertisers have been trying to stand out from the pack since the perfume strip was invented in 1979, when the scent was so strong that “you could kind of smell it before you even opened the magazine,” recalled Diane Crecca, vice president for sales, marketing and business development at Arcade Marketing, which invented the scent strip.

The technology for shampoos or lotions was not much better. “They would sometimes burst inside the magazine,” said Agnes Landau, senior vice president for global makeup marketing at Clinique. “There was a little bit of a backlash from the customers at that point because they didn’t want the magazine being damaged.”

Advertisers were also unhappy because the samples they sent out were subject to an extra fee from the post office. Arcade Marketing executives studied what the post office’s definition of “sample” was. By 1997, it had devised a thumb-size packet that could withstand pressure without bursting. The packet was small enough to avoid the excess fee.

More technology advances on the chemical side, such as being able to affix face powder to a piece of paper, led to powder, lipstick and even nail-polish samples. Perfume samples now can be contained beneath seals and wrapped in little packages, a relief to allergy sufferers. “We hope to see more of it,” said Angel Waldron, spokeswoman for the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

But how much more can magazines take? “The biggest issue for editors and, of course, publishers, is how many there are,” said John Fennell, associate professor of magazine journalism and holder of the Meredith Chair in service journalism at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

“They break up the editorial in the book — you’re paging through the book and you have big, stiff cardboard things in the middle,” said Professor Fennell. “So as much as they make money, there’s a sense of how many can be put in the book without there being an overload?”

The beauty business has led the charge on free samples in magazines. More than 1,000 fragrances and 800 eye-shadow shades for department stores have been introduced in the last five years, according to the NPD Group, a market-research firm, and their manufacturers are eager to make their ads stand out.

“In addition to giving consumers a chance to use your product, it’s an arresting, cut-through-the-clutter advertisement,” said Katie Devine, product director for Aveeno Facial Care at Johnson & Johnson Beauty Care. Ms. Devine said that Aveeno offers samples in magazines of “essentially any product that’s a big marketing focus for us,” and that coupons with samples have two to three times the redemption rate of those without.

Allure, a women’s magazine that focuses on beauty, has seen a 20 percent increase in sample inserts over the last two years, according to its publisher, Nancy Cardone. “It’s become so dramatically effective in beauty that two years ago we developed an issue that we promote as our sampling issue,” Ms. Cardone said.

But many of the more unusual inserts are coming from outside the beauty industry. Advertisers have been playing with pop-up ads since the 1970s, but design software and laser equipment have allowed much cheaper, more complicated pop-ups, often incorporating light, sound and materials like Mylar.

Scratch ‘n’ sniff has given way to scented ink. Batteries have become small enough that an ad can light up or carry a sound chip. And taste, which had no place in magazines until recently, has been conquered by First Flavor, a company in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., that packages dissolving taste strips. Welch’s Grape Juice ran an ad in People in February with the strips, and Jay Minkoff, the chief executive of First Flavor, said that the company was working on several more food-category advertisements.

Taste strips and musical ads come with a relatively big price tag, another reason publishers are seeking them so aggressively. For Clinique, the cost of an insert with a sample is three times that of a normal ad, according to Ms. Landau. The cost of a flavor-strip insert, which typically includes First Flavor’s production costs, special printing and an ad-insertion charge, said Mr. Minkoff, “roughly doubles the cost” of a single-page advertisement in a national magazine.

Because of the revenue potential, publishers are going to great lengths to attract elaborate campaigns. The publisher of Cosmopolitan, Donna Kalajian Lagani, bought equipment that could affix product samples directly to a magazine page, rather than to a card insert — a big cost for Cosmopolitan, but a money-saver for advertisers.

“Clients are looking to us to come up with solutions on how to communicate to our readers,” Ms. Lagani said. “We’ve really changed the way we go to market.”

Despite the expense, advertisers seem to be trying to outdo one another in the complexity of their inserts. Take the MasterCard “Priceless Search” campaign, which is running in several Condé Nast magazines for April. The ads, conceived by MasterCard and McCann Erickson Worldwide, part of the McCann Worldgroup division of the Interpublic Group of Companies, feature a sealed envelope with an instant-win game piece inside, on heavy paper. MasterCard ran 12 million of the advertisements. “We’ve done inserts before, but never to this level of sophistication and complexity,” said Chris Jogis, vice president of United States brand marketing for MasterCard.

It took MasterCard two years to pull off the project. The assembly process required the ad to be printed, the envelopes to be printed and the envelope inserts to be printed, then the whole piece assembled, before the ads were sent for binding. The instant-win program, too, required several security measures, including a team of overseers at the binding plant to make sure the three winning pieces were distributed randomly.

All the printing had to be done in accordance with Condé Nast’s equipment. “It was down to the minutiae of the glue that was used and where the envelope was inserted,” said Patty Ryan, director of operations for Project Support Team, the promotion-administration agency that MasterCard used. All the work was meant to drive traffic to a “Priceless” Web site, where MasterCard could offer more information to visitors. Mr. Jogis said the company was seeing good results.

And the media director at Lexus, Andrea Lim, said she was happy to see that the pocket square promotion in GQ had driven traffic to the Lexus Web site. Lexus made an extra 2,000 pocket squares available online, which were claimed in 30 hours after the ads appeared. (The fabric was organic material, which was meant to connote the environmental benefits claimed by the Lexus hybrid.)

“We liked this idea so much,” Ms. Lim said, “that in the first meeting, after we decided it’s going to be the pocket square, that then next year it’s going to be X. We just keep trying to raise the bar.”

Source - New York Times

Big Brother Is Interacting

We all know marketing tactics which speak at consumers are no longer the successful strategy they once were. Moving forward, marketers are exploring ways to encourage interaction with brands by engaging consumers. The following is an enticing example from Australia. Think someone is stalking you? You're right!

To promote popular reality show Big Brother 2008 on Channel TEN in Australia, advertising agency Marketforce in Perth came up with a unique bluetooth SMS campaign that really caught people by surprise. The ads embodied the “Big Brother is watching” slogan, which is the essence of the show.

The campaign installed Blue-tooth transmitters in over 20 high-traffic bus shelters around town. The transmitters automatically sent two anonymous messages to any bluetooth enabled phones in the area.

The first message was tailored specifically for the local location, with something along the lines of “Im watching u. Ur at the (customized current location)”. The second message is received 30-40 seconds later with the big reveal, saying “Big Brother is back. 7 PM weeknights on TEN”.

I like the unusual dynamics of this campaign which can intrigue people who receive a message from a “stalker” to end up being a promotion for a TV show.

Good work by creatives Ryan Albuino, Andrew Chu at the Marketforce agency.

Source - Trendhunter

Generation V

We're all to familiar with Generations X, Y and incoming Z. Labeling generations is a way to understand new generations that appear not to have connections to the cultural icons of previous ones. But how do you label a generations in a Web 2.0 world? Enter Gen V.

With 1.2 billion people expected to be online by 2011, the Internet has already become the catalyst for immersing interaction and e-commerce and the conduit for vast amounts of information.

In 10 years, the largest influence on all purchases will be the virtual experiences associated with them, and, therefore, more money will be spent marketing and selling to multiple online personae than marketing and selling offline. This transition in customer interaction is being driven by Generation Virtual, also known as "Generation V."

Labeling generations is a way to understand new generations that appear not to have connections to the cultural icons of previous ones. And marketers use the categories of baby boomers, Generation X and Generation Y to segment the population for targeting products and services with a focus on age.

However, Generation V recognizes that general behavior, attitudes and interests start to blend in an online environment. As more baby boomers (who are living longer) and young people go online and participate in a flat virtual environment, the generational distinctions break down. Customers will hop across segments at various times for various reasons and are likely to act like several generations at any given time.

Unlike previous generations, Generation V is not defined by age, gender, social demographic or geography, but is based on demonstrated achievement, accomplishments (merit) and an increasing preference toward the use of digital media channels to discover information, build knowledge and share insights. Generation V members create multiple, often anonymous, personae to control relevant information flow into the community and businesses.

Web 2.0 signaled a "V-day" shift of control from company to customer, where increasingly powerful virtual environments and social networking communities proliferate. While traditional wisdom has focused on customer identification for one-to-one targeted marketing campaigns, cross-selling and so on, the reality of Generation V members using multiple personae (e.g., Amazon reviewer, eBay seller, Second Life avatar "World of Warcraft" blood elf, digger, blogger, YouTuber), and the sheer power of their growing influence, means that customers will have a host of online personae driving your business relationship.

Discovering customers' true identities becomes irrelevant. Multibillion-dollar third-party customer data providers, business intelligence and analytics markets will shift from collecting demographic information to psychographic information to better understand these various personae and their behaviors. Companies will create multiple interactive, virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases. By doing so, they will benefit from a deeper understanding of how and what people are exploring or buying, who strays from the normal path and why.

Generation V's emergence is a direct consequence of the consumerization of information technology. Such consumerization extends far beyond the availability of affordable hardware and Internet-delivered, consumer-oriented services. It has become clear that it is the attitude of users toward the purchase and use of these capabilities--and their desire to involve themselves in a highly participative interaction--that is the fundamental and most influential aspect of this established trend.

Generation V is, therefore, defined around three key behavioral attributes.

First: to use technology as a day-to-day tool to facilitate communication that is not bounded by the previous limits of geography. Note that this characteristic is shared with the so-called "digital natives." Still, it is becoming common for digital natives to teach their grandparents (typically baby boomers), who find themselves--with the time in retirement and a better level of health than they expected--able to take advantage of the available technology.

Note as well that familiarity and willingness does not automatically equate to complete understanding or even the desire to understand the technology they use. To digital natives and Generation V, this is not technology--merely the stuff they use on a day-to-day basis.

Second, building on their communications capabilities, Generation V members demonstrate an overwhelming desire to participate through involvement in global communities. This participation is enabled through self-created online personae. Technology has delivered the means to produce content in a rich variety of media formats, and the Internet enables its global distribution at little cost, eliminating the stranglehold previously held on information dissemination by the broadcast media, the authorities and those with power or money.

This capability, at an ever-accelerating pace, undermines the power of the broadcast distribution channels, leading to declining readership and viewing figures and threatening to break the advertising model that has funded this sector for decades. Key in this desire to participate is the absolute belief in the necessity and value of a two-way participation--an active involvement in the community rather than a passive consumption. Generation V expects a conversation rather than a communication.

Finally, the value set of Generation V differs subtly from that of its predecessors. Its members have an overwhelming belief in a meritocratic environment: the value of collaboration, that "we" is more powerful and valuable than "me" and that sharing increases the value of something rather than diminishes or erodes it. This can be traced back to the growth of the open-source development model, which conventional enterprises have viewed suspiciously because it does not compute with their traditional "work–for-reward" model.

Further examples can be seen in pop music (the rise of remixes and sampling, as well as reusing existing and copyrighted materials to create new creative works) and in the software mash-ups of Web 2.0, where powerful and vibrant new "applications" are built through the collective, and iterative, activities of many disconnected individuals.

Although the inevitable rise of Generation V threatens established business models and power structures, it is not driven by a desire for destruction. Instead, it represents a desire for creativity, belonging, self-actualization and self-determination. It is entirely in keeping with existing economic theory, which maintains that in the latter stages of a technological revolution, it is not new technologies that drive growth, but new ways of deploying and combining established technologies to deliver new value.

The changes brought by Generation V will lead to huge opportunities for those who can accept the signs and react to the new forces shaping the technological landscape.

Source - Forbes