10 + 10 TRENDS WHICH WILL SHAPE 2011OR NOT

In the last months I have been sharing in different forums and videoposts my opinions about which could be the trends that will shape 2011 and I have been requested several times to summarize them and put them in perspective. So, finally I have decided to create this list of recommendations, split into those which affect the traveler behavior and those directly related to the Media world. Of course, 10 and 10, to comply with the non-written rule. But dont blame me if I fail, I am just guessing for the sake of it. Traveller behavior 1.- Not to forget the Boomers This year, baby boomers will celebrate their 65th birthdays at the rate of 20,000 people a day in the western countries. These boomers have time, money and energy to spare. They also have a deep thirst for experiences, and that holds true across income levels. Boomers will value the expertise who can help them craft the fantastic experiences they want trips that nourish, rejuvenate and enlighten, learning and volunteer vacations, customized adventures. Theres too much at stake for these travelers to book through the Internet if the pure transactional sites dont evolve. Its not: what is the cost of the airplane? Its: what is the cost of that week in terms of its importance in my life? Women boomers deserve a special remark. Expect to see growing numbers of single women over 50 traveling with their friends, Compared to earlier generations, those women are more highly educated, more empowered, more independent, more powerful in almost every single way. Many have also inherited money from their husbands or parents, and they have a passion for learning. Women Boomers are a market thats ripe for the picking as they are taking up any invitation from friends to go anywhere where they can learn. Theyre saying, Im going to Patagonia. Do you want to come? 2.- The search for meaning The recession and its aftermath are renewing a consumer focus on meaningfulness, making people look inward at things that are really important to them. What matters now are: families and friends; education and self-improvement; health and spirituality; creativity; community involvement; and the environment. Travelers are willing to spend a lot of money on travel experiences, but they need different reasons to spend it. 3.- Sustainability Environmental awareness is influencing consumer choices in a big way. Concern about sustainability and the planet is top of mind for everybody, people seek out companies doing green things that are cool. Use that as a selling tool. People are willing to pay more for things that are really important to them, and green issues are one of those main things. For every strategy, new product or service, you must pay attention to the fact that over 98% of consumers in every market worldwide view themselves as environmentalists. 4.- The influential traveller

Javier Gonzlez-Soria y Moreno de la Santa

10 + 10 TRENDS WHICH WILL SHAPE 2011OR NOT Brands selling direct to the consumer are now complemented by consumers recommending to consumers. In some ways theyre hijacking brand marketing for all products. We like approval from others and people that we know especially, but this collusion of opinion and information is not always the truest form of value. There is always a blend to that fact and it's not about you or me personally, it's about how the numbers are used. And what will be more important this year is how relevant all you see, hear, do, tweet really is. So as a first step, ratings should become deeper than one out-of-five-star rating or was this helpful? if we are going to be able to sift through the hyperbole of quantity. Quality will become the new quantity 5.- A defensive mindset around spending Consumers are hedging their bets against events or circumstances that might blow their budgets, Only with this mindset is understandable a divorce insurance, which covers the cost of divorce logistics; increased sales of frozen foods, because they wont go bad; and wedding day insurance that reimburses couples if it rains on their special day. That will suppose the growth of all-inclusive travel options that make it easier to budget, and the increase of trip insurance, especially if they are creative and go beyond lost luggage. Successful travel marketers will need to appeal to travelers strong sense of value. 6.- Internet ubiquity The Internet will be everyplace. Its converging with TV, with computing, with cell phones. Its the convergence of all this information technology into one kind of appliance. Every consumer purchasing decision is going to be mediated by this convergence. The move to mobile computing, mobile communications, mobile transactions is going to transform consumers - always-connected devices that give me choices. Brands need to learn how to navigate this new territory. its about influencing the influencers, having mind that perception is reality; and monitoring and understanding your reputation is more important than any ad a business can take out. Since 1998 I've been hearing that next year mobile will be big, and each year it never happens. Until now. The Android and Apple platforms are solid, well engineered and ready to change our world. Applications and optics have been the two elements that completed the mobile cake. Gone will be the short-lived and quickly unused "app candy" that has been prevalent in this first era of smartphones. 2010 was a platform building year for mobile, now its time for lift-off...finally. 7.- Stories are trickling up The way that news and cultural influences spread has undergone a profound change. Things that are impacting culture and what were talking about are trickling up. Stories communicate and they spread quickly, so use the power of story in marketing and social media. If you want to create influence, you tell a story. Story is the new flavor for marketing, the enduring flavor. Clearly our next evolution in the digital world is in moving beyond the simple fascination with new apps and devices and the true application of them in our lives through valuable and relevant content. No longer will we have the shallow mash of video banks that produce banal instructional information with no context or emotional connection.

Javier Gonzlez-Soria y Moreno de la Santa

10 + 10 TRENDS WHICH WILL SHAPE 2011OR NOT 8.- Better web experience HTML 5 will start invading a lot of work. Some of it super creative work and some banal and purely functional. Again, this wasn't purely because it was better than everyone else, it's a device-driven change. In the end HTML 5 will take a sizable share of the development work for new media and to what end only our collective imagination can tell us and travelers will not accept less 9.- Discount shopping formula Groupon is probably the first to come to mind. And the principle in itself will be the next phenomenon of online retail madness. What it has and probably will become is a natural progression in social media and online shopping. And with Facebook joining the game with its virtual currency, sky is the limit 10.- Location, location, location We all know Foursquare has made an impact on social media and those who consume it. Facebook will simply turn up the volume dial and will have quintupled the subscribers of Foursquare. But this isnt just about people checking in anymore. Now businesses can instantly register all their locations and youll have a networked location experience, which could be a good thing or a disaster. Like many features that come and go, this one wont go away and Facebook, Google and others will play hard to win. And clearly Mobile technology is changing traveler behavior, providing more access to local and location-aware advertising and information. Media world 1.- Agency Consolidation There are too many agencies and digital services for clients to manage. People like to say that social agencies are winning over traditional digital agencies (traditional digital...really?) but that's too much of a red herring to ignore. All digital agencies, some specializing in one area or another, are competing. What will hurt them all is too much specialization. There are too many devices and platforms shifting and changing to make pop-up agencies rationalize their value. Many times this past year and in the future months, the mobile and social although inextricably linked will be competing for client budget. Its not a competition when eventually you are competing with yourself. So what all agencies need to do is acquire, build, mentor and refine capable technologies and people that are all working harmoniously and are measured in an egalitarian form. It will be the next agency model. 2.- Paying for the content The last stage of adolescence for publishing is upon us. The big publishing brands have been our virtual parents" of content for long enough. This will be the inevitable jumping off point for the poignant and the popular in publishing. The NYT is now a paid subscription and many others will follow. What will separate the wheat from the chaff of online magazines and news is how valuable they are to the reader. The paying for professional online content will be the true end of the

Javier Gonzlez-Soria y Moreno de la Santa

10 + 10 TRENDS WHICH WILL SHAPE 2011OR NOT physical publication and it seems that the public is ready to cut bait. Obviously, the speed of this change will differ from country to country 3.- Media trading and public and private exchanges A year ago, demand-side platforms (DSPs) were a novelty; today they are a power to reckon with. As this segment matures, we can expect to see mounting pressure from buyers to increase transparency and decrease margins. In 2011, we will also see growing support for mobile, video, and rich media over real-time-bidding (RTB) exchanges. Parallel to the growth of public exchanges and DSPs, agencies and publishers have been actively pursuing an alternative solution -- one that would retain the efficiencies of a public exchange, yet provide qualified media opportunities to agencies and help publishers protect inventory grading and avoid channel conflict. For most of 2010, the idea of private exchanges was nothing more than a dream, but it is quickly materializing with both publisher-driven solutions like the one from Weather.com and AdMeld, as well as with agency-driven solutions like Vivaki's private ad slots. 4.- Social unrest The social network is making serious waves, and it's not just at the box office. Facebook's media buying application programming interfaces (APIs) have spawned a foray of search engine marketing providers like Efficient Frontier, Marin Software, Kenshoo, and Adobe SearchCenter into display. What we need to be aware of is that Facebook's strict serving, tracking, and data-sharing policies are disrupting the status quo among marketers, third-party servers, and publishers. 5.- Proprietary data. Data brokers like BlueKai and eXelate might be facing some serious challenges, as both publishers and marketers increase efforts to control and monetize data themselves. Massive efforts by agency groups to aggregate and leverage marketing data are reaching critical mass. Havas Digital's Artemis and WPP's ZAP are agency-created tools that enable optimization without requiring third-party data. More advertisers are starting to connect customer relationship management (CRM) data into integrated marketing platforms where it can be used to analyze performance and retarget consumers across marketing channels. 6.- Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) going mainstream. Kicked off by the Google-Terracent acquisition in late 2009, the consolidation trend continued in 2010 with the MediaMath-Adroit and Yahoo-Dapper acquisitions. However, quickly following the hype was the realization that creative optimization is not an easy execution when done in a silo outside the main campaign workflow. Focus has shifted to execution, service, reliability, and scalability. As DCO makes its way into marketing mainstream, there are still some operational hurdles to overcome. 7.- Remarketing heaven

Javier Gonzlez-Soria y Moreno de la Santa

10 + 10 TRENDS WHICH WILL SHAPE 2011OR NOT Combining media and creative optimization is done with great success by performance optimization companies like Google, Criteo, FetchBack, Dotomi, NextPerformance, and Acerno (Akamai), which use media and creative optimization for retargeting, mostly based on cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-peracquisition (CPA) models. Using quantitative methods, their success confirms the logical assertion that finding the right audience and telling the right story work best when done in concert. 8.- Figuring out attribution Measuring ad effectiveness is all about capturing the value created by marketing activity. The next logical step is to attribute that value to the different activities (channels, buys, etc.) in order to understand what constitutes success. Although attribution has been a hot topic for years, I believe 2011 will be a turning point where many more marketers, including brand-focused agencies, will effectively apply attribution modeling and gain a 360-degree view into consumer behaviors. There will be a major step forward in online advertising measurement, aiming to move digital closer to the TV model, so expect to see new ideas from companies focused on measuring actual consumer actions rather than surveyed attitudes. 9.- Mobile display As always, mobile marketing remains as challenging as it is promising. The wild fragmentation of devices, technologies, vendors, etc., makes any mobile display campaign complicated. However, there are reasons for optimism. With the increasing acceptance of buy-side third-party serving, solutions like those from Admob after its integration with Google, marketers can start thinking about managing and tracking mobile together with other portions of their media plan. 10.- Basic rich media Advanced rich media executions have secured a distinguished place in marketers' minds and wallets. Technological innovation will continue to drive new creative and groundbreaking executions in advanced rich media. But, it's also important to recognize how far basic rich media has evolved as well. The "do-it-yourself" wizardlike tools allow users to create templated ads utilizing basic rich media formats and features, including panel expansion, video, etc. In some cases, ads are constructed automatically using existing web or other assets. Google is setting standards in that direction. The low price point opened up rich media to both marketers and publishers, which traditionally tend to stick with standard banner ads.
Dr. Javier Gonzlez-Soria y Moreno de la Santa, PhD, JD, MBA, MA, SEPc, CIA, CPA
www.youtube.com/travelthink www.lookinside.travel

Madrid, April 29th, 2011

NOTE: The opinion expressed by the author in this article is not necessarily shared by the entities with which he is related

Javier Gonzlez-Soria y Moreno de la Santa

10 + 10 TRENDS WHICH WILL SHAPE 2011OR NOT

Javier Gonzlez-Soria y Moreno de la Santa