5G, 6G, 9G, 10G, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Someone just sent me an article about 10G and how it will change everything forever:

Last year I wrote about the stupid obsession with more and more G's for Marketing Week but stopped short at 9G. Now reality has overtaken satire....here is an excerpt from last year's column. More relevant now than then.

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For the last few weeks I have been dividing my time between professorial duties, writing the odd column and creating a new technological infrastructure that I am tentatively calling 9G. I admit that, at first, I intended to christen my new technology a 6G system but then I read about the recent advances in Beijing where scientists have revealed they were already working on a "6G" system and decided to be even more agile and disruptive.

Even then, I was halfway through writing 7G on the side of my new prototype (shown above in exclusive early test photos) when it suddenly dawned on me that this was exactly what the Chinese were expecting me to do. With a Machiavellian swipe of my Sharpie I changed the 7 to a 9 and stood back to enjoy my handiwork.

“Ritson, you marvellous bastard,” I said to myself with an evil chuckle, “you’ve cracked it.”

I want to use this column to announce that I am officially working on a 9G communications technology that will change everything, completely, forever. Its new components and incredible new speeds mean that it will be at least 30% better than whatever the Chinese come up with and even more superior to the crappy, old-fashioned 5G stuff they were talking about in Cannes last year.

9G is going to fix space travel, healthcare, parking meters and match all the socks in your top drawer. Seamlessly. It will enable buildings to communicate with cars, cats to chat with dogs and – the killer – people to talk to other people almost as if they were in the same room as each other.

Critics might scoff and point out that my new 9G system is nothing more than a second-hand modem bought on eBay, wrapped in tin foil and connected to the old microwave that we kept in the garage. I would expect nothing less from those Luddites living with the ancient, traditional media systems of 5G. You won’t scoff when my device finally becomes operational.

I cannot comment at this stage when that will be, or on any of the secret technology that enables my 9G system to supersede everything before it. But as a marketer I can promise you that this is the future tech you have been looking for, to talk about in your next keynote/article/podcast.

The next time anyone mentions 5G, snort in their general direction and then, with a dismissive tone, drop the immortal, argument-winning words: “What about Ritson and 9G?” Game over.

And, to be fair, is my new invention really so stupid? No one in marketing actually knows what 5G is or how it works or what difference it will make to society, business or anything else. I freely admit that my device is a massive load of bollocks but so is 99% of the discussion about 5G that is currently going on among marketers.

What’s more, these bullshit discussions get completely in the way of the actual, very real challenges of marketing that no one seems interested in concentrating on. Bollocks to 5G. Let’s talk about customers, about brands, about effectiveness. About real marketing rather than bullshit tech.

You can draw a thick, brown bullshitty line from 3D printing to artificial intelligence, to virtual reality, to blockchain, to 5G, to 9G and whatever inane techno-porn that will arrive next to distract marketers from their true challenge.

The only value that 5G offers – like millennials and agility and the walking, super yacht-renting anachronism who is Gary Vaynerchuk – is as a bullshit magnet that attracts and identifies those who do not understand marketing but masquerade as experts among us nonetheless.