I've read and watched some great contributions recently looking forward to 2010 and predicting what the trends will be. A year is a long time in online marketing, so I can see that it's hard to gaze any further into the future. But as the year comes to a close - and the decade too - I've been thinking about what I've witnessed over the last 10 years. It makes me wonder if history might have anything to tell us about what's likely to happen in the 2010s, so I thought I'd get out my crystal ball...

As 2000 turned, I was working as a marketing manager presenting arts festivals in the beautiful city of Bath. Our first venture that year was a literature festival which had a strong online element - we had all sorts of exciting stuff with interactive events and video link-ups to Australia, most of which actually worked! For many of the people we were working with - audiences and writers - this was their first experience with this relatively new-fangled Internet thing. But most of the elements of technology we used - HTML, java, email marketing - would be exactly the ones we’d need if we were running the same event in 2010.

For all the new things we’ve seen in the "noughties" - Google, Facebook, smartphones, Skype, Twitter - online marketing today still has at its core the same technologies that we were using ten years ago. We may well be using them more effectively than we were back then - when there weren’t content management systems for Web sites, and all my email marketing was done in Outlook Express - but the fundamentals are the same.

When I gaze into my crystal ball to 2020, I have to say that the online marketing picture looks pretty recognisable from here. Doubtless there are going to be many new devices with which to consume the multiplicity of communication we’ll be receiving then, but I’d be extremely surprised if the Web and email weren’t still at the core of the marketer’s toolbox in ten years time. I’m sure we’ll be using those tools in many new and exciting ways that we can’t imagine at the moment, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing the online equivalent of flying cars and ubiquitous space travel (or whatever other predictions there have been).

So on New Year’s Eve this year I’m going to put an entry in my calendar for 31 December 2019 and attach a copy of this blog post. I still have backups of my schedule from 10 years ago, so I’m hopeful that this new entry will be there for me to find.

In the meantime, happy holidays and all good wishes for a successful and prosperous 2010!

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About the Author

Kieran Cooper is senior manager of support services for Lyris' international operations. Located in the Lyris UK office, he is responsible for account management, implementation and support.

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