Epilogue

One of the disadvantages of a book like this is that technology changes without regard to publication schedules, the timing of semesters, or the ability to get information about change disseminated rapidly.

I’ve written, rewritten, and unwritten many segments of this book, trying to keep up with the merging and converging of traditional media and the constant invention of new ideas.

The newspaper industry did a smart thing while I was preparing Selling Electronic Media. They combined 130 or so major newspaper Web sites into a consortium designed to be a “national rep” of sorts. Instantly, newspapers appeared to be keeping up with electronic media. They were able to use their marketplace clout coupled with a cutting edge perception.

It was called News Works and was billed as “the very first network on the Web grown from the local affiliate level.” There was monthly traffic of more than 200 million page views. The top 50 DMAs were covered (and lots more, too). Big newspapers were involved and all their editorial content was available online at one location. An early profile of the site’s users showed very salable demographics.

If you’ve read this book carefully and completely, you’re probably thinking that you don’t recall reading a word about News-Works until now. You’re right. Not quite a year after News Works launched, the project was shut down. So I deleted the copy.

Apparently, the nine companies who put the project together couldn’t agree on anything except that they had a good idea. One source said they probably wasted as much as $30 million arguing about structure.

That’s how quickly things changed in the electronic media environment in the year that I wrote this book. Some of those changes I could catch, some I couldn’t. While we all want to predict the future well enough to avoid being caught by changes that occur after the type is set in a book or after the final edit of a video, we must realize that it’s just not possible.

All my life, I’ve heard predictions about the future. Some came true, and some I’m still waiting on. The “interactive future” was predicted, but I can’t say that it looks like any of the predictions I heard about it in the 1950s and 1960s.

I tried to construct this book without predictions because the one I wanted to make was troublesome: at what point will digital creation and delivery be so ubiquitous that the television and the PC are forever merged? I realized that like the News Works story, the answer may happen before I finished. I’m also realist enough to know that it may happen without our noticing entirely. The merger of AT&T and TCI might bring it closer to reality but only when TCI has full digital capability system-wide. When the merger was announced in 1998, TCI was behind the digital curve. With technology, it’s easy to catch up.

It’s fun to make predictions, because there’s a chance that I’ll be correct and you’ll call me a genius. But it’s just as easy to be wrong. Then what do you say about me? Peter Drucker warned us about the danger of predictions in an interview in Wired:

It’s not given to mortals to see the future. All one can do is analyze the present, especially those parts that do not fit what everybody knows and takes for granted. Then one can apply to this analysis the lessons of history and come out with a few possible scenarios. Then one comes out with a few possibilities.

That statement reflects something from Drucker’s 1964 book Managing for Results: “The best we can hope to do is to anticipate future effects of events which have already irrevocably happened.”

The World Future Society uses the phrase “successful anticipations” instead of “predictions.” It urges its members to “suggest things that might happen in the future.” I like to use the term “projections” rather than “predictions”; so, here are some projections—anticipations based on what we know now. These projections will help you see a positive future in selling electronic media. Retail sales continue to rise in these projections. And population statistics indicate more money being spent in the future on advertised products.

By projecting birth rates and potential movement across demographic groups (see Table E-1), we see future baby booms and baby busts that affect every industry. From that, we can make some assumptions: the 75-year-old of the year 2020 will still listen to the Rolling Stones just as he or she did in the 1970s. Think of what that means for entertainment, for housing, and for retirement homes.

TABLE E-1 U.S. Population Projections (Expressed in millions)

Source: U.S. Department of the Census figures “Middle Series” projections made in 1996 from the 1990 Census base.

Diagonal Thinking

A chart like the one in Table E-1 is distracting. Your eye wants to follow each straight line, watching the numbers grow or decline. But population groups don’t move in straight lines across the page. Rather, they move diagonally downward and to the right. Today’s 0-to 4-year-olds are the 5- to 13-year-olds of the year 2005. The printed page doesn’t give me the chance to show that clearly.

If you read across, begin with the 45–54 line, and note the peak at 2010 and the decline toward 2020. Then follow the 55–64, 65–74, and 75 + lines as they increase from now to 2020. That’s the effect of the baby boom moving through the chart.

You can see an all-new baby boom emerging by 2015. It extends diagonally downward to 2020 (and, of course, beyond). The new century’s boom won’t be as large as the baby boom we’ve chronicled for the past 40 years, but it will be a welcome sight to marketers and employers of 2020.

Educators geared up in the late 1990s for increased enrollment because kids born in the late 1980s and early 1990s were heading to school. Enrollments will flatten again until 2015 or 2020.

Marketers who target 18- to 24-year-olds for a living are stuck with flat numbers. Dominance by the 35 to 44 group ends in 2005. My remarks about elderly Rolling Stones fans is supported by the increases in the 65 to 74 and over 75 populations. They’ll listen to the Stones, to Kenny G, to Aretha Franklin, or to Garth Brooks, just as they did when they were younger. And they’ll eat pizza and wear designer jeans while they do it, just as they did when they were younger.

The elderly population of 2020 will be a most unusual group. They will have seen the wealthiest period of American history. They will have been the most culturally diverse. They’ll be the healthiest group of old folks ever, jogging, running, and hardening their abdominals (and complaining about it more than they did when they were 45). The reason 75 + will be so important in 2020 is that there will be so many of them expecting to continue demographic dominance.

Not shown in these figures will be major changes in the workforce: fewer males, more females; fewer whites, more blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. More than 80% of retirees will be white. A third of new workers will be minorities. Civilian employment is projected at 171 million in 2020.

The workplace itself won’t be a place at all, but a portable electronic terminal used to communicate with co-workers and to download and upload information.

Retail

By 2010, the average household income will have increased by 22%, according to Woods and Poole Economics. During the same period, the number of households will have grown by only 14% and the population by only 13%. Read that projection as a windfall for retailers. With money outpacing people, retail sales are projected to increase 24%. Any increase in retail sales spells an increase in advertising sales in all media, and electronic media will be dominant. (See Table E-2.)

I first used these projections in a series of speeches that celebrated my company’s twentieth anniversary (in 1997). Not liking to dwell on the past, I thought it might be a nice twist to look forward instead of backward at an anniversary. Broadcast managers groups and several state association meetings heard about this very positive future. That resulted in a booklet called 2020 Visions which my company created and distributed to radio stations nationally.

It’s exciting to see projections like these because they say the future is secure for the field of electronic media. With a larger population spending more money in retail, there should be plenty of opportunities for sellers of advertising to capitalize. Of course, there also will be more media fighting for those increased dollars.

TABLE E–2 Retail Sales Projections*

* Income per capita is expressed in 1987 dollars. All other figures are in billions of dollars.

Source: Woods and Poole Economics, quoted in American Demographics.

Some things, however, will not change: the need for talented people, for example, or the need for coherent messages delivered effectively to the audiences the advertiser wants to reach.

The key will still be how we focus on the customer. Instead of managing products in the future, corporations will manage customers. If that sounds manipulative, it’s not. An automobile dealer told direct marketing guru Lester Wunderman that one customer who buys cars from one dealership over a lifetime represents $332,000. That makes that dealer want to work on “share of customer” as well as “share of market.”

In the long term, share of customer will win. If the dealer has a 100% share of customer, the customer relies on the dealer for all auto purchases, not just the next one. Companies that advertise must reach the target in a virtually one-on-one setting, whether using mass media or interactive online services.

One final note, if I might. Throughout this book, I’ve been reasonably successful at avoiding highway metaphors, as in the “Information Superhighway.” The highway analogy raises questions for me: do we live on highways? No. Do we create relationships with highways? No. We use highways to get to our destinations. The destination is much more important than the road. Sure, we want the shortest, most direct route to the audiences we serve. But some information highways are really dirt roads, while others are autobahns. The customer tells you which is which.