Sebastian Kaupert
with
Don Schechter
Sebastian Kaupert, Creative Director at Creative Services, CondeNet, talks about Facebook as a platform for personal and business communication and the importance of cultural influences on the future of mobile and web advertising.
Transcript: Sebastian Kaupert
I think the success of widgets, the jury is still out on that. I think that in the ? we are dealing with, widgets, gadgets, I call them adgets. If I can tell if a widget is linked with a piece of advertising that I have more reservations about that. I think that we have to figure out how to suspend our immediate needs and deliver real value. In recognition of that, consumers will engage and we will have advertising benefits. As long as the widget is just a thinly veiled advertisement linked to an advertisers or marketer s site, why would I care? That s not the functionality I expect from a widget. As long as there are adgets out there, I think we are going to have a hard time engaging the consumer on the level that we really could.
In the company I work for, ComeNet and ComeNast, FB is a platform where we maintain social connections and also professional connections. So you will find a log of my colleagues on my FB and my list of friends and vice versa.
I think the iPhone could be the game changer here, but I think that we are dealing with an area here that is less do to technology and more about culture. When you look at Europe, cell phone use has a completely different dimension culturally, never mind the tech and the carriers. The equipment is managed differently than the US market. What really has to happen is how we integrate mobile devices into our lives. For example, text messaging, nobody thinks twice about in Europe, they have unlimited text messaging plans or else they d all be poor. That just hasn t happened yet. Americans have a different relationship with their mobile devices and until that changes, mobile advertising will have a hard time. The opportunity is the engagement and the response and SMS action is an essential part of that. Without that being integral to our behavior, its struggling.
Second Life has gone from a channel to an application. When you look at it a lot of businesses are using it for conducting meetings, virtual stores where people can buy virtual stores. We have a phenomenon where people are upset that they can t replicate that in the real world. Let s say that they can't go to their Second Life American Apparel Store and then buy a real item in the real American Apparel Store in that channel. The user interest and the user readiness is there, but I think that it's a complex environment that requires learning on everybody's part and it's not there yet.
The most interesting thing to me is that we are still in the infancy, everyone talks about how we figured this all out, but we re far away from really understanding it. This is a space where its really being invented, and an incredible opportunity for innovation. Of course, as long as we approach it recognizing that we all have a lot to learn, its exciting. Recognizing that everyone that participates in the conversation is a potential contributor for ideas and insights, changes our creative process. Also it leaves to richer ideas and better ideas often, because they are more informed and more people feed into the discourse, and that s a very exciting thing.
I m weary of predictions because we ve all been shown that the next great idea, 6 months out it tends to be something nobody expected. A lot of predictions are highly self-promotional and I m very cautious about that. CondeNet is very involved with Facebook, building applications and putting a lot of intelligence into figuring it all out. If we got even _ of what we are going right, its a tremendous opportunity, but like I said before, we all have a lot to learn.
I think that it s hard to know what is going to happen with Facebook a year old. Everyone is getting tired of moving friends lists and profiles to other places. Google is on to something as being an aggregator to be a single point of access. Again, that would still require me to go and learn another environment. Facebook has met a certain sweet spot and has the potential to stay around and not fizzle the way Myspace did. My sense is that they are going to be around, but in light of what Google is after, it s hard to know
