I feel betrayed. Here we are in 2020, and I still don't have my flying car.
Years of Jetsons reruns somehow gave me an overblown expectation of what "future" transportation might offer. But even as I write this, self-driving cars continue to undergo thousands of miles of controlled driving tests, with computer brains that can learn how to cope with countless real-life traffic predicaments. Driverless cars have been a staple of science fiction stories for decades, so there's one example of a prediction that may actually come true when/if all the bugs are worked out.
Even when the futurists get it right, they may have wait a long time for their dreams to come true. For instance, you might understandably assume that some genius recently dreamed up the whole remote home automation thing. But just the other day I saw a clip from a Bell Laboratories promotional film about technologies for operating your oven or air conditioner via telephone. The date of the film? 1962.
Think about how today's technology has altered the marketing landscape in ways few businesses might have predicted. 20 years ago, YouTube and Twitter didn't exist. When Facebook first launched, it was just a way for Harvard students to interact online. Go back to the late 1990s, and you'd be hard pressed to find any blogs online, or anyone who knew what the word meant. Dial it back a few more years, and you've arrived at a world without a Word Wide Web. How did companies market themselves without these channels? The same way they always have, and always will -- by creating and distributing compelling content.
I sometimes wonder what kinds of writing services I'll be offering a few years from now. Will I still be writing blog articles and web page content for businesses, or will new developments make these strategies obsolete? Will I be writing content that gets beamed directly into people's brains? Will I be creating billboards that appear magically in the sky to anyone wearing the appropriate technology? Will I be putting scripted words into the mouths of holographic spokespeople who approach potential customers in the street? I can't possibly say -- and frankly, it doesn't matter.
There will always be a great new marketing method on the horizon, but we can't plan our marketing approaches around something that doesn't exist yet. All we can do is make intelligent use of the tools we have right now. Many business owners say, "We need to be on Facebook," or "We need to be on Twitter," but being is not doing. What matters is the message you deliver, not the delivery method.
Yes, you need to get your message out there via the tools your target audience relies on every day. But even as those tools change and evolve, the objective remains the same -- to motivate your audience to buy. That's why I'll always have work as marketing content writer, no matter what the future of marketing holds.
Let's face it -- even the flying car dealers of the future will need to get the word out!
