CRM and ERP News

Styling itself the 'World's Biggest Creative Department', OpenAd is a relatively minor Slovenian-owned internet business with just thirty-nine staff worldwide. Yet some see it as the shape of things to come - maybe, even, the writing on the wall for traditional ad agencies.

However, OpenAd MD Katarina Skoberne stresses the venture isn't competing with agencies. She insists it simply supplements the use by clients of freelance creatives. "We are not an online ad agency, we are merely a resource of creative material," she says.

Although registered in Switzerland, OpenAd's sales and marketing arm operates out of London while the global support centre is based in Slovenia.

Membership of the exchange is free to the 5,000-plus creatives on OpenAd's register. Explains Skoberne: "Anyone who has registered as a creative supplier - and anyone can - is free to answer the brief, or not, as they choose. Clients pay an initial set membership fee to join OpenAd, then a licence fee for the ideas they use."

"This allows them to post briefs on the site and view existing ideas, paying somewhere between $3000 and $100,000 depending upon the number of pitches they want to hold, the number of categories they want to access and the number of [client] staff who have access."

Among those who have used OpenAd is UK-based charity Comic Relief. Enthuses Amanda Horton-Mastin, new media director: "Make Poverty History was a global campaign and the thing about OpenAd is that it opens the window to global ideas, even for very small clients. It was quick, it was cheap, and the idea we chose was excellent."

Another client is Emap's men's magazine FHM which has used OpenAd three times in the past two years. "We started off with one-off tactical promotions and recently asked for a full-blown branding campaign," says marketing manager Ben Cordle.

"The creative response was fantastic. It gave us access to heavyweight creative talent and saved us thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds on agency overheads."

Thro' WARC

Faith Popcorn a leading future-focused consultancy has some interesting predictions for 2007 on how they see consumers and brands evolve in the next few years. They are talking of a new identity called The New Networked Self. Take a look:

• Identity Flux

Technology has enabled us to experiment with different personalities, leading to a much more fluid sense of who we are. Having tasted the nectar of virtual liberation, we're beginning to reject the singularly defined roles we're expected to play in society.

The Future: Gender-neutrality goes mainstream. People list skills on their business cards rather than title, and dress up in various costumes depending on who they feel like being that day.

• Liquid Brands

Today's consumers are capricious and non-committal. Brands will have to become more liquid to keep up with their constantly moving targets.

The Future: Chameleon-like brands focus less on communicating a static message and more on being the right thing for the right persona at the right time. Constantly morphing retailers carry products until they sell out and never restock.

• Virtual Immortality

Consumers globally are creating fully fleshed out existences in the virtual world-dressing up their avatars, making friends, having affairs and buying property for their pixilated alter-egos. And now that people have multiple lives, who says you can't live forever?

The Future: While some let their avatars drift away to online purgatory, many more leave behind specific instructions on how their virtual selves should proceed. Services offering avatar surrogates flourish, and we bequeath avatars to friends and family in our wills.

• EnvironMENTAL Movement

Like the movement to combat environmental pollution, the next consumer-led reaction will be against the mental pollution caused by marketers. With every corner of the world both real and virtual becoming plastered with marketing messages, bombarded consumers are starting to say they've had enough. The current attack against marketing to kids is just the beginning.

The Future: Companies are expected to reduce the amount of damage they are doing to our minds. Savvy companies sponsor marketing-free white spaces in lieu of polluting the environment with models and logos.

• Product PLACEment

In the globally networked age, consumers are much more concerned about the consequences of consumption. Is my garbage poisoning someone in a developing country? How much fuel was burned in order to get these strawberries to my local supermarket?

The Future: Enviro-biographies are attached to just about everything, letting consumers know the entire life story of a product: where the materials were harvested, where it was constructed, how far it traveled, and where it ended up after being thrown away or recycled.

• Brand-Aides

The government has let us down when it comes to providing the social services we had once expected from it. Brands are stepping in to take over where the government left off. Companies are already finding there's profit to be made from providing affordable healthcare to the masses.

The Future: Socially responsible brands make a buck while providing desperately needed services. Communities are revived by Target daycare, Starbucks learning centers, and Avis transportation services for the elderly.

• Moral Status Anxiety

In today's increasingly philanthropic climate, expect conspicuous self- indulgence to go straight to the social guillotine. The globally conscious consumer regards altruistic activities as a necessary part of self- improvement.

The Future: A person's net worth is no longer measured by dollars earned, but by improvements made. Families compete with each other on how many people they fed while on vacation, and the most envied house on the block is not the biggest, but the most sustainable.

• Oldies but Goodies

Our culture is suffering from an experience deficit. With the availability of online knowledge, we're claiming expertise based only on secondary experience. Now that everyone's a web-educated know-it-all, we're secretly longing for authority figures to guide and assure us with indispensable nuggets of wisdom that could only come from having actually accumulated life experience.

The Future: Respect for elders makes a comeback in the form of Ask Your Grandma hotlines and the proliferation of online video clips by seniors showing us how to tie knots and concoct home remedies.