In an era of targeted marketing, might not the human genome be the best database of all? … The real future of advertising and marketing may rest in the new ecology and the interrelationship between genes and memes … What are the memes that urge us to purchase and consume? How do you splice two or three seemingly disparate memes? What is the appropriate medium to transmit certain memes? VCR? TV? CD? Radio? Do some cultures diffuse advertising memes more efficiently than others? These are the kinds of questions that the meme paradigm will force advertising agencies and their clients to address explicitly. Forget demographics and psychographics. Think memegraphics.
Predictor: Schrage, Michael
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article about advertising in the digital age for Wired magazine, Michael Schrage, an MIT Media Lab fellow and columnist for Adweek magazine, writes: ”In an era of targeted marketing, might not the human genome be the best database of all? … The real future of advertising and marketing may rest in the new ecology and the interrelationship between genes and memes. The ‘meme’ was invented over 15 years ago by Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins as an ingenious way to explain cultural change. Even though the concept of memes represents the boldest and most provocative theory of how new ideas spread, the word has somehow managed to avoid capture by the advertising, media, and marketing communities. That’s too bad: Memetics offers a new paradigm to explain pop culture. Apparently, more agencies are comfortable drawing inspiration from a double martini than a double helix. ‘Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches,’ Dawkins writes in The Selfish Gene. ‘Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain.’ What are the memes that urge us to purchase and consume? How do you splice two or three seemingly disparate memes? What is the appropriate medium to transmit certain memes? VCR? TV? CD? Radio? Do some cultures diffuse advertising memes more efficiently than others? These are the kinds of questions that the meme paradigm will force advertising agencies and their clients to address explicitly. Forget demographics and psychographics. Think memegraphics. Indeed, the future of advertising may draw design inspirations less from the emerging networks of new media technology than from the powerful metaphors of genetic and memetic engineering.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Advertising/PR
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Is Advertising Dead? Adviruses, digimercials and memegraphics: The Future of Advertising is the Future of Media
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.02/advertising_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney