We all know the Gartner Hype Cycle. Everything starts with the technology trigger, goes through an hype and come to productivity… shortly spoken. But is this everything?
The “Peak of Inflated Expectations” is the phase we often hate. It’s the time of buzzword-bingo. Most of us want to cut down this phase… but this phase is important to bring the topics to a broader audience. This is the public direction of the visible phase. But in the background of this phase it’s about working on many things to bring the topic to the “Plateau of Productivity”. It’s the phase of the hidden curve which is about setting up technology, teams, structures and much more. Think here about a flattened red curve.
Leaving this hype cycle we need to have a look what else is there.The “Technology Trigger” isn’t falling from sky, so is there something before?
Many years ago I did lead-generation in an agency… 100k new leads each month just for the German market. This was media buying through cost-per-lead (cpl). With this volume I reached the top of what was possible on cpl. I asked myself what else I could to to a) generate more leads and b) raise the lead quality!? There was much more traffic available but just on cpc or cpm.
The answer was buying traffic this kind of traffic and steer the campaigns on my own on two goals… cpl and lead quality.
The only issue was running 40, 50, 60 campaigns the same time, each with around 5-10 visuals… and working together with many publisher, publisher who are not used to optimize cpc and cpm campaigns on cpl.
Doing this optimization by my own was the only solution. I talked with all of the big ad-server provider, with sales, pre-sales and the development teams if they could provide a real-time engine to do so… Always the same answer: We do not have such an real-time interface.
Around 2-3 years later real-time bidding and real-time advertising came up… and the real-time engine was born.
As we see there is a phase before the “Technology Trigger”. This trigger is just the starting point for the visible phase. The phase before is invisible for the broader audience. Both phases have a different state of (in)visibility.
This is the phase of visionary people, lateral thinker and creative mindsets. It starts with a hidden market change which is not clear and more a gut instinct fore some people. They develop their ideas and vision. During this “Peak of Vision” the invisible phase is most visible while later on it will be more and more invisible
The “Peak of Vision” is the starting point where the vision needs to be mapped with customer needs. Being a visionary you will quickly map this, but then you will realize the issues and get disenchanted, disenchanted by the missing possibilities… the missing technology.
Here we go…. now we are at the starting point of the Gartner Hype Cycle!
And after? At the end or some time before it starts again with hidden market changes which adopt on the new directions and possibilities… so the loop is closed.
