2016

Broadcast media has long been converted at the last mile to direct, personalised content. Immersive psychosocial /sexual experiences are traded with consumers, tailored to their personal foibles, in exchange for the opportunity to sell them personalised product.

Last.Behaviour constantly monitors media interactions and purchasing habits via embedded RFID chips and then uses the aggregated data and a social recommendation algorithm to tailor our experience of content and commerce - e-tailers and offline retail spaces dynamically re-order their wares depending on perceived preference - due to the size of the base being monitored they are rarely wrong.

Agencies, faced by the continual erosion of their commission based business models, merged with media owners, who never fully recovered from the copyright war of 2010 when a significant proportion of the enraged media public, facing innumerable lawsuits for infringement they consider fair use, signed up to The Mymedia Manifesto.

The Mymedia Manifesto adherents stopped purchasing media content and looked only to user generated media, released via creative commons licenses, for their media needs. A global barter economy of content established itself online, protected from the eyes of the coporations by sophisticated public key encryption.

The newly merged conglomerates found ever more subtle ways to incorporate paid for messaging in content experiences delivered to those consumers not under Mymedia. In order to offer consumers something that they could not receive under Mymedia, they plow trillions into neuroscience R&D.

The discovery of electrical, non-invasive interfaces for primary pleasure response enabled advertisers to trigger affective embedding with content experiences. Brand communities develop around certain kinds of affective response, with adherents addicted to the communication offered by specific brands and purchasing product only to get another hit.

Planners became experience engineers, working in tandem with an increasingly diverse array of technology implementation specialists, to craft communication interactions more valuable than any products.

Footnote: Amara's Law - We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

Inspired by John's post here.