How technology marketing has evolved in the past 10 years
Ten years ago this month we were all living in fear of disaster. Not disaster in the form of a meteor hitting the earth or raging wildfires. No, this was a disaster created by a lack of foresight.
Programmers at some point in the past had failed to account for the changing of the thousands digit in the clocks inside computers. Nobody was quite sure what would happen when these clocks tried to tick from 11:59:59 on December 31, 1999 to 12:00:00 on January 1, 2000.
(My wife and I were in the process of adopting two children from Russia and had to frantically expedite all our paperwork to get over there in December because the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was planning to shut down for the month of January due to concerns that “Y2K” problems would paralyze the country.)
Of course, the year 2000 came in with more of a whimper than a bang. There were very few computer problems created by the transition to the year 2000.
But the bang came soon after in the form of the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The NASDAQ peaked at 5048 in March 2000. It lost nine percent of its value in the next six days and continued to trend downward, finally finding a bottom in the fourth quarter of 2002.
In retrospect, the bursting of the bubble seems easy to predict. Even when we were in the middle of it, something didn’t feel quite right about twenty somethings coming to meetings in shorts and flip-flops to discuss their plans for bringing in millions in venture capital, or AOL buying Time Warner, or an online pet store flooding the airwaves with its sock puppet spokesperson.
But even here in the Midwest it was hard not to get caught up in the excitement, and excitement always trumps common sense. So when the goal shifted from selling products and helping clients build a sustainable business to beating the other start-ups to the end of the rainbow where supposedly savvy investors sat on a pot of gold, we were right there.
To borrow Dickens’ line, it was the best of times and the worst of times for technology marketing.
The dot-com bust was a hard fall for many, but a necessary adjustment. It took technology marketing until about 2006 to really recover and even with that, budgets have never returned to what we saw at the beginning of the decade. But the difference is that the budgets now are being spent marketing real products that generate real revenue - many of them being installed in the data centers that are the engines driving the Internet-based businesses of today.
Something that often gets lost in discussions of the dot com bubble is that the idea that inflated the bubble - the Internet would change everything - turned out to be largely true. It just didn’t happen as quickly as some people (unrealistically) expected.
But it is happening. Email has become an essential thread that connects us to the rest of the world - so important we no longer even leave our desks without it. Broadband in the home is commonplace, making YouTube and Hulu possible. Record stores have virtually disappeared as more and more music is purchased online. Newspapers struggle for survival in the face of Craigslist and a tsunami of online content. Wikipedia has displaced encyclopedias. E-commerce sales rise every year. Everybody - including your mom - is on Facebook.
And all those technology-driven developments are now changing the way we market technology. This past year, in particular, has been one of adapting our strategies and tactics to capitalize on these changes to make the connections that influence behavior, sometimes anticipating the change and sometimes racing to catch up with it.
It’s hard to imagine this next decade could be as tumultuous and eventful as the previous one. Will social media follow the same pattern as the dot-com businesses, growing quickly and then contracting before stabilizing? What new developments do we have to look forward to - or fear? Whatever happens, it’s bound to be interesting.
