A question in my mind in 2006 was, how do I assist smaller companies in marketing and branding online in the face of the dynamics of the internet? Looking around me I saw problems left and right. It was increasingly difficult (if not impossible) for a smaller company to achieve any level of recognition online, and even more difficult if you don’t have a creative angle, or some edgy message. The fact that most of those smaller companies were likely to be forever adrift in vast seas of online information seemed untenable.
Companies who cannot achieve some level of Internet /famedom/ must compete at a level often tilted unfairly in an opponent’s direction. You might wonder why I say ‘opponent’. It is because; online a company is in competition with every other company website out there. There are always a finite number of individuals (browsers) to go around on the web any given time, any given day and plenty of savvy, deep-pocketed competition for their attention.
Not every company can have a blockbuster website. For the hundreds of millions of websites, there are a select few who have ever achieved a phenomenal degree of marketing and/or branding success online. _Not all companies have the innovative or creative power to be able to capture a current wave of marketing ingenuity deployed by some smalltime producers and designers, regardless of excellent viral campaign techniques._
If we presume the average company (who does not have some kind of cool viral message or product) must use standard advertising, then we are facing a predicament in regards to marketing options. I realized that a significant condensation of the distribution channels for advertising was already in motion. Advertising options were and are becoming more and more consolidated by the day, as the major search portals and software publishers are snatching up the channels of distribution and merging. The reality is, powerful distribution channels are now operating more like a /digital cartel/, controlling huge portions of internet-user traffic through mega-search engines.
So, back to the 2006 question, how do I assist my customers (many smaller companies) in marketing and branding online, considering the stacked deck against their unique digital splash being heard at all?
Supporters of cartel economics like to claim that cartels protect weaker participating companies, and to an extent do away with limitations on trade resulting from high cost of entry across borders, distribute risks and profits fairly equitably, stabilize markets, reduce costs, and thereby protect consumers from wild marketplace fluctuations and chaos.
In the digital realm, cartel economies are actually a benefit to very few players across the board, and most especially an economic conundrum for the web-publishers/companies who have few choices of channels through which to market themselves broadly.
One could consider the current state of affairs on the Internet as a near monopolization of online advertising by very few organizations, who effectively function like many cartels. I have been working on the Internet for many years now and I have experienced in many variations and iterations of the technology. I’ve seen companies come and go, and watched online empires built. However, the ‘playing field’ on the Internet is no longer a level field at all.
The big search engines somehow have convinced the small web-publisher that they need them, that in order for the consumer to find them, the search engine must index a publisher’s site. I had to ask, is there another way?
The reality that search engines are capitalizing upon the hard work of everyone else is excused as a necessary evil of a new information medium. Mega-search engines take everyone’s content. They also take the web-publishers products, and they manipulate the web-publishers and their ‘wee-folk’ visitors. Essentially, web-publishers and the wee-folk serve unpaid, feeding the several-headed online-beast of the search engine & consolidated ad channel cartel, which keeps just getting fatter and fatter, and harder to move out of the way.
On one hand, this great beast operates like a kindly innkeeper, by endearing itself to everyone. It points the wee-folk towards village specialty-shops. But on the other hand (for the small publisher, webmaster, and/or business owner) the beast always entices the wee-folk already in the village, to leave, and points them onto other villages, with other small shops. The beast degrades the value of a small publisher/company brand by never promising to send the wee-folk back to the little village again. The beast in fact, supplies a map of a maze of little villages to the wee-folk, with so many road signs and detours along the way the wee-folk may be forever unable to find that lovely village again they once visited.
A magic sword that could smite the mighty beast as it lay in its lair seemed like a fairy tale for publishers and smaller companies. Would anyone ever be able to pull the sword from the stone and help the little village shopkeepers and the wee-folk both? I kept thinking, “Is it possible to slay the several-headed search-engine beast?”
In actuality, the search engines are nothing without the publishers who they index. It is not the search engine, but the publisher who the consumer is looking to reach. The search engines truly have no content, many of them have begun to collect information, but you will notice that not a single thing they offer is their original work. No video, notebooks, no articles, none of the things that search engines index are actually created by them.
Unfortunately, the consumer has rarely caught on to this. The mysticism and magic of the Internet, like slight of hand, has confounded many people. Think of the Great Wizard of Oz and how enamored the wee-folk of Oz were of his powers until Toto pulled back the curtain.
Some think that the whole web is some kind of big shopping mall and you can float from place to place with a simple click of the mouse, like Dorothy did with a click of her shoes. Don’t laugh, but some people even believe that the ‘online shopping mall’ goes by the name of the search engine. Without search engines, many individuals believe they would never find the information they are looking for. Lack of sophistication on the side consumers has made a few mega-search engines extremely wealthy.
I remember the time when there was nothing but a hyperlink. Search engines were programs that looked for pattern matches in files. The concept of indexing those files birthed the modern search engine. The advent of digital plagiarism, easy, passive and highly profitable for search engines, was accepted by publishers willing to take it, as long as somehow consumers might locate publishers and view their information content or buy their products and services. This seemed a small price to pay for traffic and for customers, and there was no viable alternative, no promise a visitor would ever return, or that new visitors would be guaranteed by the search engine, to be returned to Kansas, and back to publisher’s website. Dorothy had her ruby slippers as a promise, Merlin had the secret of the sword in the stone as a promise, and web-publishers have had nothing as a promise.
The wee-folk no longer need to know a brand but only the effect or outcome of what they desire; the search engine does the rest of the work. It pushes the individual far away from a branded source. The wee folk become sheep following a search engine shepherd. What it all comes down to, who gets the profit? Who deserves the profit? In the Internet world or real world, where information should be free, or should it?
Obviously there’s a cost of producing a newspaper, writing articles and creating content. In this case we see the conundrum of content publishers, how they value themselves, and how willing they are to pay for placement. A premium search engine placement is a calculated advertising risk; in hope that when the consumer searches on terms that the ad or link placement will be noticed. No guarantee, no promise.
The interesting thing is that most people don’t understand how a search engine really works, and if they did they would understand that it’s only a matter of time until the search engines no longer exist but for the time being it’s a necessary evil. A search engine is a tool not a destination, and should be thought of as such.
Any group of smart individuals with enough computers and a fat fiber optic pipe to the Web can create a search engine. Now imagine having a fiber-optic connection to your home and a desktop computer, with the equivalent processing power and storage space of all the search engines data farms. You essentially could do away with the search engine, given enough processing, disk space, and connectivity to the Web.
If we were to look at Moore’s Law, and correlate that to the processing power of a search engine data farm, we would realize that in less than 20 years everyone would have a computer just as powerful. Of course storage follows a similar trend, and now with dense wave division multiplexing the bandwidth is increasing. It is only a matter of time until the personal computer can index the entire web.
Some people may call this heresy, especially those that work for the big search engines. They want you to believe that being the consumer and publisher that we need them, but we must tithe the gods of search for without them we are nothing. Unfortunately, there are other ways of dating access to data and finding information. The anomaly of viral marketing, the power of brand recognition, and ingenuity of the traditional marketer cannot be overshadowed by any search engine forever.
So back to the question, how do I assist smaller companies in marketing and branding online in face of the cartels who promise them absolutely nothing? I decided to try to pull the sword from the stone and take aim at the beast cartel. I dreamed about it, breathed it, imagined it and then envisioned it. Based on my vision, I have built a technology known as fleeQ.
With the invention and application of this technology, I have pulled the sword from the stone. It is time to slay the beast. However, innovation can take its toll. Even with the most creative team, and greatest resources, many large organizations do fail. We have a plan. Getting beyond the simple and the mundane to develop and build an entirely new way of delivering advertisements online, we have found that publishers and advertisers both seek a new and or alternative method. We fulfill needs that have been waiting for solutions.
It is our task at adUup to deliver such solutions. The first embodiment of this has manifested in the form of fleeQ. An entirely new search advertising network based upon the principles of my patent “an alternative method for displaying requested URIs”. Many people who have heard, and watched this technology in application, have said this new methodology turns the Internet advertising system inside out and backwards.
Who says internet fairy tales can’t happen?
