by Tim Terman
The brave new world called the Internet seems to reinvent itself every few months. Right now, the hot issues are broad-band access, "cyber-terrorism," and Internet privacy. By early next year, certainly, all this will have changed. No one knows exactly where it's going, but one WVU graduate whose work is part of the information technology surge is anticipating a major new development: "totally integrated," wireless information technology.
That's the insider's view of Ray Gillette, a 1971 WVU graduate in journalism. Since July he has been president of agency operations at the advertising firm DDB's largest office, in Chicago. "DDB" doesn't ring a bell? How about, "You deserve a break today," and, "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there." Or perhaps, "Whassup?" That's the Budweiser account, one of many that reaped $1.5 billion in billings last year for DDB and a string of the advertising industry's most coveted awards.
If any industry has felt the impact of information technology, it's the three-pronged business of advertising, public relations, and marketing. It's as if the ad man's jingle, the billboard, and the infomercial have all been reinvented and linked together in an electronic mélange that zips around the globe in an instant.
"In our business, there are two ways we view information technology," said Gillette. "One, as digital mass communication, and, two, as a way we communicate in our own company." Before his recent promotion, Gillette was DDB's head of integrated marketing, a practice whereby all elements of an organization's communications hum the same tune.
For Gillette and others in his industry, e-mail, the web, and local area networks are well worth their considerable expense because of the efficiency they bring to achieving internal goals and the goals of their clients.
"I can look at a print advertisement that our design team has produced as an attachment to an e-mail," Gillette explained. "When I travel, my laptop keeps me in touch with any of our offices worldwide, anywhere I go, via the Internet. Sure, the capital investment is high, but you need it to communicate, and in the long run the new technologies are less expensive."
Counting the Dollar Signs
Information technology has grown exponentially in recent years.
It doesn't mean much anymore to say that there are millions and
millions of web pages out there and that almost all the words
in the dictionary have been used for domain names (like the "wvu"
in www.wvu.edu).
Perhaps a more significant way to look at the growth of information
technology is by counting the dollar signs. From $54 billion
this year, the value of e-commerce transactions will have vaulted
to $1.4 trillion by 2004. That's according to a June 2000 Business
Week article by Robert D. Hof about how businesses are using
the web to buy and sell from each other (an article found, of
course, through the Lexis-Nexis web database).
Ad agencies like DDB are on the leading edge of the new technology. Gillette explained that on the Internet, a product or service's "brand" can be represented in new ways. Take Pepsi, one of the world's best-known brands. The Internet enables advertising agencies to create "an extension of brand message" for this product.
On its web site, Pepsi offers visitors a way to compile their own music CDs from selections by more than 90 artists: if the visitor has collected enough points by purchasing Pepsi products, they can be redeemed for the customized CD. The message here is that Pepsi must be a cool product, because its web site contains the visitor's favorite music (very cool).
The coolness factor of the Pepsi brand is enhanced on the web site by opinion polls that ask such questions as, "What guy is your dream date? Joshua Jackson, Marc Antony, Kobe Bryant, or Will Smith?" Demographics show that teenage girls consume more Pepsi than a blue whale eats krill.
This is an example of how the web allows an extension of brand message.
For other products, Gillette said, the product is the web. Take OnMoney.com, one of Gillette's projects. It's a site that organizes a user's financial information—credit cards, bank accounts, investments—in one place. It manages bill payments on-line and offers financial education and advice.
"In integrated communications, we no longer look at just TV, just direct mail, or just outdoor and print advertising," Gillette said. "We have to look at all of it together, and the Internet is playing a huge role."
What's next for commerce on the web? "The next big step will be its ability to create a profit," Gillette said. "Many of the big names in dot-commerce still have failed to create a profit."
Building Collaboratories
Gillette's enthusiastic attitude toward the changes being wrought
by information technology is shared by a number of successful
WVU alumni, including a top NASA scientist, a sports marketing
executive, an executive at an Internet marketing company, and
a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
Another WVU graduate who is up to her ears in technology is Emily R. Morey-Holton ('58 BS , '61 MS, '64 PhD). She's chief of the Gravitational Research Branch of the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. She's also involved with the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which is located at NASA Ames but is actually a virtual institute—i.e., no bricks and mortar.
The purpose of the institute, she explained, is to bring together researchers of diverse backgrounds "to solve the mysteries of the universe." Research on the origins of solar systems and life, and the evolution of life beyond the home planet, are being researched by scientists from 11 member institutions. They haven't found the meaning of life—yet.
"I manage a group of scientists who are developing new technologies in biology, nanotechnology (biosensors), and potential countermeasures for humans in space," Morey-Holton said. "Working for NASA, I am surrounded by all types of exciting technology developments ranging from software to hardware of all kinds—not just computers, but also animal habitats for space."
Morey-Holton, who was the first female to be awarded a WVU doctorate in pharmacology, said she believes the era of the individual scientist who works on his ideas alone, sequestered in a lab, is over. Increasingly, scientists are using information technology that includes "collaboratories": virtual labs linking researchers around the globe via broadband networks such as the Next-Generation Internet (to which WVU has a high-speed connection). The NASA Astrobiology Institute is one of these collaboratories.
"Scientific teams, connected by the Internet and spread around the globe, are today's norm—or at least tomorrow's norm," Morey-Holton said. "It will be interesting to watch what happens."
Thanks largely to the new information technology, scientific discoveries large and small are happening at a quickened pace, she said. "Things happen so quickly that you blink your eyes and some other group has passed you by." she said.
"Data and techniques and even unique pieces of equipment can be shared over the Internet," she said. "Each scientist brings a unique perspective to a team, but a team simultaneously researching many parts of the whole can make more rapid progress. Many of the individuals in my branch are members of more than one extramural research team as well as teams within the branch."
And it's not just the electronic gathering of teams of scientists that is adding to the pace of scientific discovery. Research processes that often required days to complete are now done quickly by high-tech machines, automating research so that an investigator can do other things.
"Most labs today are far more automated in terms of chemical procedures, data input, and data analysis than when I was in grad school," Morey-Holton said. "I think that in the future fewer investigators will have their own labs. Lab space will be generally shared, with a lot of shared equipment. Some institutions are already moving that way."
On-Line Communities
The Internet lets us meet people we would never have known about
otherwise. It keeps us in touch in ways that telephones can't.
And, as Gillette pointed out, it's good for consumers because
it brings commerce into their homes in a way that wasn't possible
before, with nifty on-line catalogs and other information-rich
content.
"The down side of all this is that there is less personal contact," Gillette said. "There are communities on web sites and in computer exchanges, but it's not a personal community. You can hide behind your computer screen."
Although he could do much of his work via computer connections with his employees, efficiently and quickly—from almost anywhere—Gillette wants to be in the same room with others. "I'd miss their passion for the creation, and they couldn't pick up on my body language. It's just not as good as personal contact. There's a great upside to information technology. But it can be abused, and you need to know its limitations."
"Web communications can be deceiving." Morey-Holton said. "I love the commercial that shows the old guy communicating with the young gal over the net, and each has their own idea what the other looks like.
"People may become addicted to the computer and spend more time with it than with humans. Thus, written communication skills may improve, but oral skills and face-to-face communication—body language skills—may decrease."
Information Overload?
Bray Cary (BS '70, MS '71) is the vice president of broadcasting
and technology for NASCAR. He is proud that the NASCAR web site
is the third most popular sports web site in the country—behind
ESPN and CNN. "Our goal is to make it the number one site
over the next two years, and we think we can do this with the
fan base and the new technology we will be introducing,"
he said. Cary, who joined NASCAR in 1998, said his goal is to
offer a "full multimedia spectrum" on the site.
"What we're trying to figure out is how to do this," he said. It's not the technology side of the equation that's provoking the question. Cary's concern is how to manage the convergence of media—television, radio, print, and the Internet—in a way that enhances the visitor's experience.
"The big change that's coming is the amount of data and information available to the public," Cary said. "How can you turn that into an entertaining experience, not an overload experience?
"A movie director filters information and delivers an orderly, concise story with a beginning and end to the viewer," Cary said.
"The Internet makes everything available and could make it a real mess. That's what's really going on: deciding how it's all going to be filtered and organized. Or, do consumers do it in their homes?" The Internet is building an on-line community of NASCAR fans, and Cary isn't at all disturbed about whether people are losing the human touch.
"First of all, you are enabling communication to take place on a worldwide basis much more easily than before, and creating communities that have great diversity that couldn't even exist before. If you are a NASCAR fan, or a WVU fan, you can join a group that has common interest," he said. "From a communications angle, I like the jar to be half full, not half empty.
"I don't see a world where people are locked up in their homes never seeing people," Cary said. "You could have made that kind of argument when the phone was invented.
"Is it worth it to have color TV, DVD, cable? The answers to that are clear. And to me, there isn't any other field I'd rather be working in. The communication revolution we are in now will shape the world to come. It's challenging and exciting."
Charting the Digital Waters
There has been a lot of talk about whether the web is, in fact,
the electronic "Big Brother" first envisioned in George
Orwell's novel 1984. One point of view is that we're all just
"consumers" and "market segments," with our
personal information up for grabs by the highest dot-com bidder.
Lynne Bolen, a 1985 WVU graduate in business and economics, is a vice president at Cyber Dialogue, a New York City company that provides data warehousing, web traffic reporting, and advanced analytical tools and services that enable companies "to build valuable relationships with their on-line customers."
In other words, the people at Cyber Dialogue find ways to find out about us.
Of course there are two views on this. One perspective calls it snooping. The other says that businesses want to know about consumer preferences so that they can customize shopping experiences and interactions with a company. One method being used to track such preferences is the "cookie." You may already have many of these in your computer.
Are cookies good for you, or bad? The answer is "yes."
Bolen said there are some companies that don't respect the privacy of their relationships with customers, and these predate the Internet. "The Internet, however, has exponentially speeded up the time in which marketers can obtain information, thus heightening concerns over when and how personal information is utilized," she said.
Bolen pointed to ToySmart, a company that attempted to sell its customer lists when it went bankrupt —after promising to protect their privacy. Although the Federal Trade Commission and other regulators were hands-off at first when the issue of Internet privacy debuted, Bolen said such blatant disregard for privacy is causing the FTC to step in. "Our position is simply that the long-term gain of lasting relationships with valuable customers is worth much more than the revenue generated from selling customer lists."
She noted that browser companies are developing additions to software that will notify consumers when their behavior is being tracked or connected to other personal data. "All these demonstrate that the industry plus the government are headed in support of protecting consumer privacy," she said.
But, according to Bolen, cookies are getting a bad rap: "While they often receive bad press, most of the time cookies are a good thing for consumers. They allow on-line marketers to provide more relevant messages and offers to web site visitors, plus, they help marketers improve web site navigation and content. Unfortunately, because privacy on the web is such a hot topic at the moment, we are much more likely to hear reports on the abuse of cookies than we are of their virtues."
The biggest problem, Bolen said, comes from companies who use cookies to track activity across multiple sites on the web. This information can then be purchased by third-party sources who can send unwanted solicitations to consumers. Regarding individual web sites, however, "the majority of consumers are willing to give away personal information in exchange for a more personalized site experience," she said.
"In the end, I do not think consumers or legislators will ever be comfortable with third-party marketers being able to buy information about everything a consumer does while on the web. This is the area where either the industry will quickly have to regulate itself or the government will step in."
Facilitating Public Policy
Other than a statute regulating the collection of information
from children on the web—the Children's On-line Privacy
Protection Act—Congress has passed no Internet privacy bills.
Should there be government regulation of the Internet? That's a question that provokes a scowl from Terry Wimmer, the Shott Professor of Journalism at WVU. Wimmer led a team at the Orange County (Calif.) Register that won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, and he believes firmly in the First Amendment right to free press.
"Government infringement on the Internet is a box we don't want to open," he said. "The nightmare horrors of the past five years—that my credit card number would be stolen, for example—haven't happened. There are always great fears of technology, but frankly, it's not a time to be afraid. It's a time to embrace it and run with it."
Indeed, the Internet could streamline the management of government and public affairs. Although there have been outcries from the citizenry when public records have been made available on the Internet, Wimmer believes that such documents should be there. They are open to any member of the public who wishes to visit a courthouse and make a request for the paper. Why shouldn't obtaining a public record be made more convenient on the Internet?
The press has a heavy responsibility that goes along with its freedom to examine and publish information from public records. It's the mandate of the press to help citizens understand issues, to become involved in solving problems, and even to become a facilitator of conflict resolution.
What? The objective reporter as a conflict mediator? Sure, said Wimmer, whose doctoral dissertation is titled "Facilitative Journalism."
"It's burrowing into the community, engaging the community, whether it be geographic or a community of interest, and putting the on-line newspaper in front of the digital train," he said.
The new media is digital, worldwide, and, most important to facilitative journalism, interactive. If newspapers don't take advantage of Internet's interactivity, Yahoo! and America Online will—and already do, Wimmer noted. And they will leave newspapers behind in a cloud of digital dust.
"To be more effective journalists, we have to dig deeper and find out what and where the people are, we have to understand the community and bring the stakeholders together," he said.
On the web, that's possible because journalists can provide links to background information and poll their readers. They can provide contact information for readers who want to communicate with reporters or sources mentioned in news stories.
It's a classic communication model—sender, channel, receiver, feedback—with the emphasis on feedback. "Print newspapers are the ones that have the contacts, the information, and the ability to do this," Wimmer said. "But I don't read paper newspapers any more. I get my news on-line."
Among the best interactive newspapers in Wimmer's opinion are the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the (Portland) Oregonian. At the bottom of his list are Newsday and the New York Daily News.
Ray Gillette
After graduating from WVU in 1971, Gillette started his advertising
career in 1974 with McDonald and Little Advertising in Atlanta.
He also served as a lieutenant in the army. He joined DDB in
1978 as an account executive and was soon promoted to account
supervisor. In 1994 he was named managing partner, and in 1995
he became president of Integrated Services and Beyond DDB, which
has offices in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco,
and Seattle. He is a board member of Spike DDB, the company's
urban marketing agency partnership with filmmaker Spike Lee.
He became president of agency operations at DDB Chicago in July.
He lives in Winnetka, Illinois, with his wife, Susan, and two
daughters.
Bray Cary
Cary is vice president of broadcasting and technology for the
National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR). He received
a journalism degree in 1970 and a master's degree in public administration
in 1971, both from WVU. Cary spent several years in collegiate
athletics working for the Sunbelt Conference, developing and
operating the conference's television network. In 1984 he began
his own company, Creative Sports, which became the largest syndicator
of college football and basketball before being sold to ESPN
in 1994. Cary then became a consultant, negotiating college and
motor sports on behalf of ESPN and ABC before joining NASCAR
in 1998. He and his wife, Dianne, live in Charlotte, N.C. A 1971
WVU graduate, she is a member of the Visiting Committee of the
College of Creative Arts.
Emily R. Morey-Holton
Morey-Holton earned her bachelor's and master's degrees and a
pharmacology doctorate at WVU in 1958, 1961, and 1964. She then
conducted research and taught at the University of Pittsburgh
and Indiana University medical schools. In 1968 she joined NASA
at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, where she was the only
biologist among the aerospace engineers and launch personnel.
She moved to the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field,
Calif., in 1973, where today she is chief of the Gravitational
Research Branch. Morey-Holton teaches at Stanford, the University
of California at San Francisco, and the University of the Pacific.
In 1984 she became a charter member of the American Society for
Gravitational and Space Biology, serving as its president from
1993 to 1994. She lectures internationally at panel discussions,
symposia, and workshops.
Terry Wimmer
Wimmer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the Shott Professor
of Journalism at WVU. He received his bachelor's degree in journalism
from WVU in 1976 and earned a Ph.D. in journalism this year from
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Freedom
Forum fellow. As a WVU student, Wimmer was managing editor of
the Daily Athenaeum and president of the student chapter of the
Society of Professional Journalists. He became a reporter at
the Charleston Gazette in 1976, where he rose to assistant city
editor in 1980 and executive sports editor in 1984. Wimmer joined
the Orange County Register in Santa Ana, Calif., in 1986 as the
assigning editor. Coverage directed by Wimmer of a scandal at
the University of California, Irvine, won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize
for investigative journalism. He also created a new weekly section
for the paper on computer technology and designed content strategies
for the paper's on-line site.
Lynne Bolen
Bolen, a vice president at the Internet marketing research firm
Cyber Dialogue, received a bachelor's degree in economics from
WVU in 1985. She joined Cyber Dialogue in January 2000 to direct
client interaction and implementation of the company's "enterprise
customer relationship management" (eCRM) services and products.
Prior to joining Cyber Dialogue, she worked at Digitas (formerly
Bronnercom), where she was a vice president and director of database
marketing services for the AT&T and American Electric Power
accounts. She also headed the company's primary and secondary
research functions. Before her tenure at Digitas, she held positions
with a number of companies, including McDonald's Corp., The Signature
Group, Sears Catalog, and Discover Card Services. She has an
M.B.A. from the University of South Carolina.
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