When I sat down to write this article it occurred to me that one day digital marketing as I know it now will be obsolete. My current skills no longer needed, my product no longer required. As I reflect on the future, I hope I will have more warning than the 170,000 Kodak employees that didn’t see the digital camera coming.It was only eighteen years ago that Kodak sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. They were bankrupt a few years later.
In 1995 there was no Wordpress themes or drag and drop website creators, all websites had to be built by hand writing each line of code. Google was only set to become a thesis project. There was next-to-no SEO. Amazon had just started selling a handful of computer books online. Credit card payments over the Internet were not trusted yet.The written article is fading, copywriters are adapting as people are becoming too impatient and time poor to read a whole article, (unless it’s about them) skimming headlines and missing the message.
Scrolling to find the end before you’ve even started is giving rise to infographics, video and Rich Media content. Websites are simplifying to accommodate smartphones, yet becoming more complex in their speed and design, they have to be faster, more beautiful, more dynamic, responsive, better optimised.Everything needs to be compatible with the phone. We can conduct an entire day of errands on our phones without leaving the house. Pay all our bills, collect our mail, do all our shopping, schooling, working, networking and socialising. We can visit the doctor, take music lessons, do some photography, play a game, watch TV and read the paper.
It is predicted that traditional industry will give way to software and digital industries over the next ten years. Airbnb is the biggest hotel company in the world; a global dominator in the hotel industry that owns not a single property. Uber is the biggest taxi company in the world and owns not a single car.Are computers already more intelligent than humans? Probably. Facebook has pattern recognition software that is better at recognising faces than humans. Google remembers everything for us now. Why make something by hand when you can 3D print it?We’re not worried about the future; we’re excited. Think about how much work we’re going to be able to do in our self-driving cars using our Li-fi Internet on the commute to the office. Whatever that work may be.
