Media of yesterday, today and tomorrow

and it is mind-boggling to think what another 10 years might bring.
Media Week casts its mind back to 1996, provides a snapshot of how far
we have come and does a bit of crystal ball-gazing to see what the next
decade might reveal.

Yesterday: 1996

If a trawl through Media Week back issues tells us one thing, it is that
bold future talk and 10-year theories can make fools of the wisest among
us. In 1996, many things which are now part of the very fabric of daily
lives were still unclear.

"I don't see the need to open [digital terrestrial] channels up 52 weeks
a year, seven days a week," one TV boss told Media Week in April of that
year. "Wembley Stadium, the Albert Hall - they open up when there's an
attraction that is going to draw enough revenue. I see the digital
channels working in that way.

"If you have an attraction, you ring up and book some spectrum, sell
tickets and off you go. Then it closes down again."

As Catchphrase host Roy Walker might have put it back then, "it's a good
guess, Sir Michael Grade, but it's the wrong answer".

We can probably forgive the then Channel 4 chief executive his lack of
vision, speaking as he was at a time when Channel Five was yet to go
live, cable and satellite TV advertising revenues stood at just over 5%
of the total and every new website merited a news story.

The internet was still in its infancy and most media owners were still
blissfully unaware of how massive it would become. The first banner ad
had appeared just two years previously, so online was far from the
commercial proposition it has become today.

"Back then, your creativity was so far ahead of what technology could
do," says Rebecca Conroy, new media director at BBC Magazines, whose job
in 1996 - her first year with the corporation - involved writing the
Formula One news for what was then BBC Online.

"Everyone assumed the internet would be just like television straight
away and we could put all this video on there - not really appreciating
that everyone was on a dial-up modem."

When you consider that, just four years earlier, there had been only 26
servers in operation in the entire world, it is perhaps not so
surprising the internet has taken this long to become so ubiquitous.

But even a decade ago, certain switched-on clients were already
beginning to cut through the Gordian knot of internet rhetoric. A Media
Week story in May 1996 details Procter & Gamble's insistence that online
publishers offer a cost-per-click advertising model, rather than
charging advertisers per thousand page impressions, whether the user
clicked on the ad or not.

Other now-familiar debates were also just getting started: calls were
already coming for a cross-media currency, while the first, tentative
influx of dedicated planners had begun to arrive, bringing with them the
debate over just who should be responsible for online.

Ten years ago, the internet was a very callow thing indeed, but it
already shouldered incredibly high expectations. "The last generation
who will turn pages for pleasure has already been born," said publisher
Felix Dennis that June. "In 20 years, ink on paper will seem a strange
way to distribute media."

A little extreme, perhaps, but Dennis knows how to spot a trend. While
the internet was taking its first steps, other media scarcely knew what
tribulations awaited.

In February 1996, tabloids were contemplating a 5% fall in display
revenue. That month, every tabloid bar the Daily Mail recorded a
readership at least 20% higher than in the corresponding month in
2006.

During the same period, every national broadsheet - there were then five
which held to the largest format, compared to today's two - lost at
least 10% of its readership, with the exception of The Times, which grew
by 8% (source: TGI/BMRB).

Ironically, if it is the range of choice presented by the internet and
multichannel television which has respectively helped to destabilise the
national newspaper industry and the terrestrial TV market, 1996 was also
a key year for just that type of consumer choice.

It was the year Sky screened the first of its pay-per-view events - the
Bruno v Tyson fight. Soon, we would be a nation of subscription
consumers with a voracious appetite for off-the-schedule entertainment,
and 10 years on, that shift would be far from complete.

Today: 2006

The galloping pace of digital technology has had gigantic implications
for every branch of media, from the wilting national dailies to the
out-of-home sector; from the giants which emerged from the first dotcom
boom to the challengers who have kicked off the second phase.

Digital escalator panels in the London Underground give some indication
of how far outdoor media has come, radio now has a crop of new digital
channels, while the exploding mobile market means the consumer is now an
achievable moving target.

It's not just SMS marketing anymore - brands are using podcasts,
Bluetooth technology and mobile internet to target customers at every
moment of the day.

"Fragmentation" is the buzzword du jour. Many of the major media names
of 10 years ago are significantly less major now, while some of today's
biggest players were mere twinkles in the industry's eye back in
1996.

"The longer-established brands have had to move across a little bit in
order to make room for some others and the others have come in and
scrabbled among themselves to pick up those pieces," says Richard
Bedwell, consultant at TGI.

A comparison of ITV's daily reach now and 10 years ago, for example,
shows the proportion of the population who watch any of its channels in
a given day has fallen from 68% to 46% since 1996 (source: TGI).

The broadcaster has responded, like every other terrestrial channel, by
launching digital off-shoots.

The bulk of TV viewing has expanded from four terrestrial and just over
a dozen Sky channels in 1996 - the terrestrials did not definitively
pick up their option on digital spectrum until the end of that year - to
several hundred today.

Likewise, other traditional media owners have realised the need to
embrace the new world. Print players nearly all have online properties
and some have even changed their name to reflect the changing emphasis -
Guardian Newspapers is to become Guardian News & Media for example. But
most will admit they have little margin for error at this point, unlike
some of the new media giants.

"A company like Google has so much money and they can afford to make
quite a few mistakes, as can Microsoft," says Jean-Paul Edwards, OMD
Group's head of futures. "Some of the more traditional media owners
can't afford to do that."

"You have to admire Google," agrees Dominic Finney, head of emerging
channels at BLM. "They build things, then they just put it out there and
say 'we don't know how this is going to be helpful, we just think it is
interesting'."

Every single medium can look at the digital future as both an
opportunity and a grave challenge, but no one enjoys an automatic place
in it.

Tomorrow: 2016

The world might not look that different on the surface in 10 years'
time, but the intervening years are likely to see yet another seismic
shift in our media habits.

"The important thing is to avoid the sort of 1950s World-Fair,
men-in-shiny-suits-and-flying-cars sort of crap that you can move to
quite easily when this kind of thing is discussed," says Jon Williams,
creative director and joint managing partner of digital at Wunderman
Troughton Harrison.

The devices themselves cannot get much smaller - televisions will almost
certainly get bigger, with HDTV as standard - but the interaction
between those devices will be the real development.

In a post-analogue world, there are predictions that TV will continue to
dominate entertainment, but through HDTV, on-demand TV, 100-inch home
screens and delivered through a variety of technologies and
transports.

Deloitte's Eye to the Future report adds that 5% of televisions will
have a broadband connection within four years.

However, with strong growth for the internet also forecast, the report
acknowledges that, in some markets, it may even displace TV as the most
popular form of entertainment.

The apparently limitless appeal of mobile phones - and mobile devices in
general - will consolidate their position at the centre of our lives,
even if the extent and variety of usage still lags some way behind
functionality.

Branded devices, increased connectivity and cutting-edge design, matched
with the emergence of new habits - an iPod which makes video calls and
allows blogging and the ability to stockpile thousands of gigabytes of
content in a connected device in your back pocket - will ensure that
mobile lives are ever more active.

Within the next few years alone, 3G penetration will push towards fixed
broadband levels. If mobile hasn't become the marketing channel its
advocates have always promised, something will have gone seriously
wrong, so it seems reasonable to forecast huge growth in
advertiser-funded mobile content, as we Hoover up free music, games and
video through our handsets.

For the daily paid-for press, which in 2006 seems to be struggling to
stem its circulation decline, things look bleak. News-seekers look set
to continue their migration online, unless publishers can come up with a
brainwave.

Magazines have more value as a stand-alone product, but failing to
create online communities of interest, incorporating networking and UGC
as well as branded and editorial content, could sound the death knell
for all but the most innovative brands.

The cost of bandwidth is likely to plummet, flooding the fixed and
mobile internet with vast amounts of video-on-demand. "Snack-sized"
games and short videos will be our content of choice.

With content-on-demand as standard, the boundaries between tomorrow's
two main advertising channels - TV and online - will be well and truly
blurred. "The online world will be a lot bigger than it is now, and the
issue of whether online ad spend will be bigger than TV is a question of
how you define TV and how you define online," says OMD's Edwards.

IPTV will have spread from the territory of early adopters into the
average living room, and while it may not presage as much self-scheduled
viewing as it could, viewers will be unconsciously scheduling their own
advertising by virtue of their taste in programmes.

"Think of the number of times you watch a programme and you come to the
ad break and say 'what on earth?'," says Charlie Horrell, chief
executive of IPTV specialist Packet Vision. "IPTV will mean advertisers
can deliver to specific households, based on their viewing habits."

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

- There will be 300 million 3G handsets at large in the world by 2010,
against 490 million fixed broadband connections (Deloitte Eye to the
Future report)

- In the UK, the number of homes with a broadband connection is expected
to rise to between 15 million and 20 million homes by 2016 (BBC Future
report)

- Post digital switchover, homes will have digital television by then,
and up to 85% will also have access to video-on-demand (nVision Changing
Lives/BBC Future Report)

- The cost of an hour of high-definition video sent over the internet is
predicted to drop from the current £6 in 2006 to less than 0.6p by
2016 (OMD's Jean-Paul Edwards)

- Nine million cars will have broadband access (Deloitte Eye to the
Future report)

KEY PLAYERS

As Rupert Murdoch sagely put it in his address to the Worshipful Company
of Stationers and Newspaper Makers earlier this year: "We probably
haven't heard the name of what will be the world's largest company in
2020." The quote encapsulates two key things: the potential of one good
idea to transform this embryonic digital world and Murdoch's own belief
that the stratospheric rise of new media companies such as Google and
Yahoo! is unlikely to be either a false dawn or an isolated
occurrence.

If even Murdoch doesn't know where our thought leadership will come from
in 10 years' time, it would be folly to predict future key players, but
the decisive growth of certain trailblazers in recent times would appear
to guarantee their seat at the top table for a while yet.

Google is the obvious example as the uncontested leader in search, the
area which promises to account for the larger part of digital
advertising revenue for many years to come.

Yahoo!'s re-emergence in the past year with its eBay deal and social
search offering demonstrates that it is never wise to count out a major
player with money in the bank.

Likewise, if BT can pull off its transformation from dry old telecoms
giant to IPTV provider, it will be set for the future in a way its
triple-and quad-play rivals can only envy.

AGENCIES HAVE CHANGED TOO

In 1996, the full-service agency was still a relatively recent
memory.

Today, there are the occasional calls for some sort of return to those
times, along with considered responses such as that of OMD UK strategic
development director Neil Hurman who, at this year's Media 360
conference, called the idea "bollocks".

Certainly, media agencies are bulging out in all directions these days.
Some, such as PHD and Rocket, are cuddling up against ad agency
creatives; others, most notably Naked, can spin off strategic cells to
move into impeccably modern, cross-disciplinary joint ventures.

In some quarters, the growing importance of strategy is seen as a
precipitation of still another split - this time between planning and
buying. In others, the major issue is felt to be the importance of
engaging with new technologies. Any and all of these could be the major
debating points of the next decade and chances are that all of them will
have their time in the sun.

Where the digital question is concerned, some believe the critical point
by which agencies needed to signal their intent has long since passed.
"As an agency, you need to be restructuring," says Dominic Finney at
BLM. "You need to have set up an exceptionally robust digital department
at least six years ago. You need to be changing your culture internally
with your comms planners at least four years ago."

Which, if correct, means the only agencies which will make it through to
2016 intact will probably be those which saw its challenges coming
almost as far back as 1996.