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Top 13 Digital ‘Events’ of the noughties
| March 10, 2010 | Posted by Ross under Baker's Dozens |
We’re now well into 2010, and the gloves are off with the new decade (do we call this the ‘tens’ if last decade was the noughties?) but while we get excited about what’s to come it is also a good time to look back at what has been.
When you look at digital technology in 2000 and think about how we started the decade by closing our eyes as midnight struck on the last day of 1999 because the millenium bug was going to make us all ill, through to leaving the decade with imprints around our eyes from Avatar’s 3D glasses as we tweet about how amazing or disappointing it was on our iPhones (except me, see below)….you become aware that there’s been a big shift in how we use the technology now from then, in just one decade.
So, let’s have a look at my top 13 digital ‘events’ of the last 10 years. Some of them, as Steve Jobs might say, were ‘game-changers’ and some of them were small but kinda cool, and some of then shook and vibrated in their own little corner of the world or culture, but all of them touched me in some way.
I’ll keep this as brief as I can and this post demands comments and feedback with your own suggestions for what should/shouldn’t be on the list. As usual, these are in no order of importance:-
- THAT 24 campaign - Until Tom Sharp of Stone Soup explained it to me some years ago, I didn’t realise that ‘Whole of The Moon’ by The Waterboys was about tiny purple pop star Prince (or ‘the artist formerly know as Prince..who..erm…seems to not mind being called Prince again’). Quite simply, they were in awe of his talent and realised how much they had to learn and how much better he was (“we saw the crescent, you saw the whole the moon”…or ” we spoke about wings, you just flew” etc). I was heading up a digital department at a large agency in Leeds when I got invited to sign up for a website that looked a bit FBI spoofy. 20 minutes later, after realistic spy phonecalls, text messages, website chases and general Spooks-like behaviour I flopped into my chair, exhausted, as the online advert for the new season of 24 finally revealed itself to me. I was hooked, and blown away by what I had just witnessed – I was the Waterboys and I had just heard Prince for the very first time. The link to the promo showreel of this campaign takes a few minutes to download, but it’s worth it. I don’t think this will ever be bettered.
- Really? I can buy my car tax online? – I know, it’s such a small thing, but this was the red-tape behemoth we unlovingly know as the government showing us that their posturing about digital Britain actually had a little bit of substance as along with online tax returns this was another symbol that the internet was being embraced by Westminster. Buy your car tax online they said…so I did, and it worked a treat, and worked quickly…and the disc arrived 4 days later. Why would you now do it any other way? I know it only saves around an hour or two each 6 or 12 months, but oh the joy of not having to go to a post office on the last Saturday of that month and queue with all the other plebs who left it to last minute.
- Christmas No. 1, 2009 – Social Media stood up and decided to be counted in the last few weeks of the decade, like a clarion call to the power it will wield through the next 10 years. Forget Wispas coming back, the name of Jon Morter will be remembered by history more than Joe Whatshisname who won X-Factor last year….Jon was the guy who started this little facebook group and reclaimed music for real people for just a few weeks. Ok, just a few weeks, but Jon showed us what could be done if the idea is sound and we all stick together. Because of this type of social two-finger waving, ’Killing In The Name’ will forever be counted as Christmas #1 in the UK for 2009…eat that Cowell.
- Mr President – America has already given us some insight into what power social media and networking already has though; it played a gigantic part in getting Mr Obama elected to the Whitehouse (millions of people donating small amounts of dollars added up to a HUGE campaign fund) and without digital technology we would have had to endure quite a few years of yet another crumbly old white man messing up the world for sure. If facebook et al had been around a few years earlier then we might have been breathing cleaner air in a more peaceful world after years of President Gore, but it wasn’t and the best man lost. Bet your last dollar that the next US election will be 80/90% fought in cyberspace and let’s see what bearing social media has on the general election in the UK later this year.
- U R Fired – This was big news, remember in 2003 how The Accident Group sacked over 2,400 staff by text message? This was a massive digital event because it showed that technology was not just making it easier for us to stay in touch with friends & family, it was also making it easier for us to be touched and making it very easy for corporations to sledgehammer a work force all at once. This was when we sat up and got reminded that digital can hurt as well as help when in the hands of total gits.
- Radiohead ‘In Rainbows’ - October 2007 saw the release of Radiohead’s latest album and they cut through the piracy debate by strolling confidently up to the UK market and saying ’download and pay what you will for it’ (or buy the physical box set fir £40 in-store). Bold as brass, and I hope it worked out for them. I know people who paid nothing for it and I know people who paid upwards of £17 . This was the day that the music industry was told to start finding a way to co-exist properly with digital formats or disappear into artist/fan controlled anarchy.
- Twitter becoming essential – Where did that come from? My team at the time used Twitter for a big project for a major sports brand in January 2008 and it was kinda cool, and great for managing live football score content onto a website with the API but it was just a text message service wasn’t it? Nope, while my back was turned it became the hottest online service at the end of the noughties, making surely-done-for and finished celebs such as Stephen Fry overnight digital gurus and spokespersons for the digital movement, all because he told us (a lot) by Twitter when he was getting seduced by splendid cream cakes in the baker’s window! But it’s big news…we come out of the noughties with a proper band at number 1 and mobiles in hand all mass tweeting a blizzard of information…everyone can broadcast now, and when you see the power it had in Iran during anti-election protests as a recorder of truth and reality then you know it is a powerful beast we keep in our pockets.
- The dot.com crash – It had to happen, simple as that. There were so many average and below average businesses getting ridiculous praise from investors who were in turn hyper-inflating the perceived value of any new company that had .com somewhere in its name. I saw the excesses at a large life assurance company I was working at through the early years of the decade and they were throwing money into a hole (around £250m from what I remember) because there was a culture of having to compete with where financial services was believed to be going, with the launch of brands such as egg.com. The stock market and the traders within, as usual, were behaving like a bunch of toddlers at an all you can eat sherbert party until one day, I presume, someone there actually logged on to lastminute.com and a few other darling sites of 2000 and realised just how crap they were and how paper-thin the strategies behind so many of these companies was. I put it to you…has anyone reading this ever bought anything off lastminute.com…or do you know anyone who has? Please let me know. Anyway, crash, boom….and a couple of years later the corporate web is back with businesses being properly vetted and supported for having a good idea, or for showing some inertia with business growth. Super-brands persisted, such as google, ebay, amazon but aside from them the dot com crash cleared the way for bricks and mortar businesses to get online and claim some space for themselves. I think we’re going to flip the cycle again this next decade with companies such as Zavvi and Woolworths showing us that the death of the physical store can actually be quite liberating for a retailer.
- The iPhone - I haven’t got one, but I feel as though I need one. I am jealous of anyone who has one, and I curse the dates of my upgrade cycle with my mobile phone provider as it’s October before I can upgrade again…but I can’t wait that long. Since 2000, every new year has been heralded as the year of the mobile device with regards to digital and, more specifically, mobile browsing but despite the penetration of mobile ownership rising above 100% and texts being sent in their billions it has never come to pass that we use our mobiles for frequent internet use. That particular part of the digital revolution has been stuck on the starting blocks for nearly 10 years. But then iPhone arrived to finish off the decade making sure that we start this new one as a growing band of mobile browsers (among other things) and has created a truly digital mobile entertainment and communications device (movies, music, apps, calls, web, social media and more are all in there). The mobile revolution has finally begun. They just need to drop the price before October….
- Google launches Adwords – Launched in 2000, it didn’t change the world straight away, but this will be seen as the time that ‘old’ advertising went on the critical list and ‘new’ advertising was born. For a brand owner or retailer it changed the model from ‘We think a few people in your target might read or watch this, so buy an advert’ to ‘These people have specifically said they want to know about your product/brand/industry so we’ll show them your advert and you only pay if they visit you’. This quality of advertising was new, and it was also available to all, not just the big brands. Read a direct marketing book from the 1990s or earlier and then consider what Google Adwords lets a marketeer do today and you’ll see how revolutionary this was and remains.
- Skype – One of those launches that reminds us that technology is supposed to make life easier and cheaper and bring us all together. Skype lets families who are spread around the globe talk to each other over the internet for free (or next to nothing) when for so long the traditional telecomms companies have been fleecing people who want to make international calls for any reasonable length of time. Communication will eventually be owned by the masses as technology develops further and open source collaboration gets more wide-spread and I’m cool with that….BT is, like, soooo last century!
- You Tube – launched in 2006; you don’t need me to explain it to you…massive impact, massive global entertainment and business tool, and finally solved the sticky wicket of how to manage (and host) video files on the web.
- Viral Marketing finds its home – and its home is online and in the ether of the digital age. Away from the precision of Google Adwords, comes the dice-rolling of viral marketing and an area where creatives can be truly creative without their best ideas being sanitized by layers of overly cautious managers and directors. When a viral campaign goes stellar then the results are mind boggling, attracting millions of pairs of eyes onto a brand within a few weeks and creating oodles of great content that feeds the likes of You Tube and other social media platforms. The appetite for viral and the ease of entry and broadcast also means that smaller businesses can have some fun and hope that they punch well above their weight….here’s my favourite and it was done by a friend of mine for some friends of his who ran a skip hire business. For more reading on great virals, have a look at this guy’s top 10 viral campaigns…I’m proud to say that my team and I managed the Threshers voucher campaigns and their online seeding while at Poulters….went very well as it happens
So there you have it…what did I miss out and what did I put in that just wasn’t worthy? Answers on a comment card below please….thanks for reading.
ps…honorable mention to the government as without them pushing for broadband to have been so widely accessible so soon in the decade we would be lagging behind considerably with the rest of Europe and the world.
I’ve bought something from lastminute.com – a short break in Prague and it was brilliant, and many of my friends have as sell. It may have a ‘paper-thin’ strategy but it serves a purpose for people who are too lazy to move off their sofa and go to a travel agent.
Great post though and I agree with you on almost everything!
Kate, thanks for the comment….it’s a fair cop, glad Lastminute.com served you well. I think it’s been overtaken (a while ago) by many other cheap travel sites and services but you have inspired me to have another look at it….watch me end up booking something with them.
If I do I promise to print a copy of this post and swallow it so that I eat my words.
Glad you liked the post