The last truly useful technological advancement was the solar calculator, a wonderfully convenient, money-saving invention. OK, yes, also the internet and throw in the cellular (not “smart”) phone. Otherwise, Silicon Valley has given us a bunch of ultimately useless “shiny” things.
Within about 80 years, half of us will replaced by robots, and the other half will be either working for robots with microchips in our heads, or we’ll be dead from climate change/climate wars/disease/revolution/etc. Silicon Valley is not going save us with a tech version of the fountain of youth. We’ll get a few more years to suffer, if we’re lucky. That’s because the tech enclaves care about their tech enclaves, not you and not the rest of the country. They care about their next “unicorn” and how long they can keep it alive, deceiving and milking investors. Then they’ll just “pivot” to the next one.
Meanwhile, you (not me) will spend five? ten? years of your entire wonderful high-tech life on social media, most of that time staring at your phone screen everywhere all the time, even at the urinal, even as you die. In the upcoming NATO-Russia-China war, will our millennial pilots take selfies as they’re blasted out of the sky? (It won’t matter because Russia will have already hacked all of our weapons systems.) Go ahead, keep snickering, and take another selfie. Just know that your precious phone now allows everybody to track you everywhere: advertisers, the authorities, hackers, hitmen, etc.
You hate Facebook, yet you keep obsessively checking your “feed” every 15 minutes to see if your “friends” are doing better (shit) or worse (yay!) than you. Yet none of you talk to each other, either via your phones (my God, no) or in person. Your idea of “intimacy” is an animated “hi” on a “smartwatch.”
Ad position: web_incontent_pos1
You (not me) can order pizza with sneakers and beer by yelling at a small black tower, meaning you don’t have to run or even walk in those sneakers or get up off your ever-flabbier asses to get fat and drunk. Is Alexa your best friend yet? Be truthful. No matter, it soon will be because it will be able to detect your mood, your emotions — that’s better than your current also-always-plugged-in significant other — and respond perfectly, in that soothing voice. … It’ll order supplies for you, drugs for you, tell you how best to painlessly commit suicide.
Unsurprisingly, tech is also destroying advertising. Ads are becoming ever creepily invasive and yet still don’t work, though flying drone billboards have some promise because they’re really just traditional advertising with a tech trick. Even if you manage to avoid reading old school billboards, more and more these billboards are starting to read you. Because tech ruins everything.
Then, there’s “native” ads. They don’t work, don’t sell, and nobody remembers the advertiser. That’s quite a sticky wicket of a Catch-22, ain’t it? Still, “martech” and “ad tech” are currently at each others throats over whose ads don’t work the least. Ad tech is the worst thing to ever happen to advertising.
Ad position: web_incontent_pos2
Bots, software, AI and other tech are slowly but steadily shrinking payrolls by eliminating creative jobs in all fields. Copywriters, art directors, graphic designers need to think about changing their titles to something like “socio-digital anthropologist” or “ad whisperer” or “creative conceptualizer.”
Now if you’ll please excuse me, I’m taking my Renault Zoe “on the road” to write a Jack Kerouac-ish novel for me.
More in Marketing
In the marketing world, anime is following in the footsteps of gaming
As marketers look to take advantage of anime’s entry into the zeitgeist, they might be wise to observe the parallels between the evolution of anime as a marketing channel and the ways brands have learned to better leverage gaming in recent years.
With the introduction of video ads and e-commerce, Roblox looks to attain platform status
Roblox is expanding into more areas than just ads in 2024. Much like platforms such as Amazon and Facebook have transcended their origins to evolve from their origins as online marketplaces and social media channels, Roblox is in the midst of a transformation into a platform for all elements of users’ virtual lives.
PepsiCo wants to remain a ‘driver of culture’ as it turns to influencers and activations amid rebrand
The soda-maker says it can translate cultural relevance into sales volume.
Ad position: web_bfu