Demise of competence or time to charge a premium

I always wonder, “is proliferation of technology going to make us, as humans, more practical and more pragmatic –the way technology is or would increased incidence of technology in everyday life have a opposite impact, making people want to ‘feel more’ and thus trigger a reverse trend of taking us back to what makes us human – feelings and emotions.”

To scale this question into a more selfish space “would proliferation of technology make marketing communication more rational, direct and solution oriented or would it make it more dependent on engaging marketing and branding stories that are not necessarily rational?”

I do not know which way all this would go finally – assuming that it chooses one and not a mix – however it is still worth looking closely at things as they are today. I would like to take my favourite ‘Google vs. Old world advertising companies’ example to discuss this.
This discussion is based on a premise that internet is going to be the lead medium of information and entertainment in the future. Though it is already so in many countries but many countries are still some years away from getting their share of wide data pipes that can carry multimedia into homes without needing a TV to show it.

Given this premise, I see people sitting in front of computers ‘choosing’ information and entertainment that they like. Google is a big player in this world because it has that magic potion which helps it offer the right information to its users - first and fast. (I am talking about their secret algorithms that help them aid the user trawl the net better.)
People are looking for certain things on the net; those things are being thrown up by the results to a search string keyed in by the user. What role does traditional advertising have in this kind of scenario?

Also, if people are not choosing information online, they are creating or choosing entertainment content. In other words the people-internet interface is wiping out the role of traditional broadcast media – both from information and entertainment perspective.
However being an advertiser, this is of lesser consequence to me. What though is definitely of grave consequence to me is the role of advertising in all this. As people choose/create information and entertainment on their own, the classical ‘you gotta watch my soap ad because you are watching this soap’ just does not work.

Today Google, Baidu or Yahoo gets us the information we are looking for and Youtube, Tudou, Facebook, Orkut and many more video based & social networking websites get us the entertainment we like (short, aimless and funny).
In other words Google has the competence (algorithms) to search the right info bits while the competence for creating entertainment content, is getting distributed as people are having fun with their cameras/video cameras - filming, uploading and watching stuff.
That makes me wonder – is advertising not relevant any more? In other words has advertising lost the relevance for its own competence?
This brings us to what is advertising’s competence?

To me, advertising’s core strength is ‘penning compelling and engaging stories’. Is this competence not relevant anymore?
In fact thanks to technology enabled commoditization that we see all around us, compelling stories are needed much more today than they were ever before.

Compelling stories makes us reexamine the point of ‘looking for something on the net’. It is worth asking, what goes on in the minds of the user before he types a particular search string on a search engine?
What makes him look for certain things on the internet? And I am now asking this question more from products and services point of view i.e. why are only certain products or services, looked for more on the net than others? (Hint: Try i Pod vs. I Phone vs. Wii vs. PS3 on Google Trend).

I believe the role of advertising is to create compelling stories, like it has always done in the past. However advertising agencies need to free their stories from any particular format. The stories can be intangible (creative concepts) or tangible (product / service design ideas).
When we develop stories and ideas sans media paradigms – we break new ground.

If we can pull this off successfully then no matter what kind of consumers we meet in the future - rational or emotional or a mix – we would always have them engaged in our stories.
In true spirit of breaking out from the TVC mindset, I would cite the example of great product design making people forget functionality like MacBook Air (it does not even have a built in CD drive and connects to net only wirelessly) and Ikea designs – which are not ‘premium’ and yet almost never seen as ‘cheap’
Also worth mentioning are the Honda Cog, Adidas Air Suspension and even the Renault Sport communication, as examples of rational messages that are beautifully narrated and the Monster.com communication (pelican carrying the kid) as completely emotional messages but once again with a fair dose of outstanding story-telling.

Last but not the least, this new working paradigm also need a new remuneration paradigm. As a service industry, today more than ever, we need to be remunerated for the return on ideas instead of the time spent on getting the idea (time sheets). This, I am certain, can promise far superior margins in our business than what we have ever seen in the past. The additional advantage of this would be more minds working on ideas than what we have today. After all technology has given almost everyone around us the same tools – so what’s stopping us?