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Trends provide powerful answers to the huge question you’re wrestling with: ‘what will my customers want next?' And if we have one secret, it’s the counter-intuitive insight at the heart of our trend methodology. To anticipate what your customers will want next, don’t simply ask them (faster horses anyone? ;). Don’t feel you have to study them obsessively (who has the time or money to do that these days anyway?). And don’t just crunch their data (no matter how ‘big’ your data, it’s best used for validation and optimization rather than to inspire truly disruptive leaps). Instead, look at the innovations – new products, services, campaigns and more – that consumers are lavishing attention on now. Yes, that’s right. The key to actionable foresight lies in looking at the overwhelming onslaught of innovations that now whiz past our eyes and across our screens every day....
You’re trying to imagine what the agency of the future looks like. You’re thinking about bringing video production in-house. Or merging a tech company with a consulting practice. Or freelancing media and emphasizing content marketing.
I would advise you to stop doing this, because you’ll just go crazy and end up right where you started: focusing on what the agency of the future looks like. As marketing leaders continue to shake their magic eight-ball and arbitrarily guess what the future holds for communications, most of us make the same, frustrating mistake: We focus on the “what.”
The truth is that what the agency of the future looks like doesn’t matter. What you do, regardless of your level of expertise, has completely and forever transformed into a commodity. Don’t believe me? Look around. Consulting firms are building content development powerhouses. Algorithms are writing articles. Enormous freelance communities are a click away. And brands are increasingly looking inward for solutions.
As a partner and strategy director of my own agency, I can tell you this much: What you do is a commodity....
The thing is: We'd never know it anyway.
In a note to clients out Tuesday, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said there's a 20%-50% chance that we're living in the matrix — meaning that the world we experience as "real" is actually just a simulation.
The firm cites comments from Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Nick Bostrom's seminal paper on the issue as the basis for its 20%-50% view.
Here's BAML (emphasis added):
"Many scientists, philosophers, and business leaders believe that there is a 20-50% probability that humans are already living in a computer-simulated virtual world. In April 2016, researchers gathered at the American Museum of Natural History to debate this notion. The argument is that we are already approaching photorealistic 3D simulations that millions of people can simultaneously participate in. It is conceivable that with advancements in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and computing power, members of future civilizations could have decided to run a simulation of their ancestors."
Time recently ran a piece with the headline, “Chat Bots Are Back And They’re About To Take Over.” Really?
Evan Wray: You better believe it! There’s a popular report by Activate stating that mobile messaging apps have been the fastest growing online sector within the social landscape over the past five years, with 2.5 billion registered users today and an additional 1.1 billion new users expected by 2018 — totaling 3.6 billion users.
Couple that with the sophistication of today’s chat bot — or artificial intelligence technology. This is an environment in which audience engagement can flourish — and should not be ignored by marketers. The future mobile experience where commerce, services, and communications are all completed in a contextual intelligent chat thread within messaging apps — instead of through a clunky combination of mobile sites and apps — is becoming closer and closer to a present-day reality.
What will next year bring? I don’t know, but I do have some good guesses on some of the headlines we’ll see next. Here are my top seven...
Over the past 12 months we’ve lost half of our social referral traffic. And we’ve started looking deep within ourselves to figure out how to stay at the top of our game.
Every single day I take notes and write about social media marketing, but I don’t put enough time aside to reflect on how it’s all changing, where it’s heading and what that means for me personally as a marketer and for our whole team at Buffer.
This post is an exploration of social media. A reflection on how it all came to be and a way to formulate some ideas on where it’s all going....
25 disruptive technology trends 2015-2016 according to Brian Solis, digital analyst, anthropologist and futurist.In his work at Altimeter Group, Solis studies the effects of disruptive technology on business and society. Agree or disagree with his list – and it covers a lot of ground – it makes fascinating and enlightening reading....
Every year, Mary Meeker, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, releases her internet trends report full of insight about everything from mobile device usage to internet usage breakdowns to internet usage breakdowns..Meeker unveiled the 2015 report at Recode’s Code conference today.
Highlights include:
- Internet users grew by 8 percent in 2015, down from 10 percent in 2013 and 11 percent in 2012 - Mobile subscriptions grew to 7 billion, with 2.1 billion smartphone subscriptions - New internet users are “likely to onboard” for the first time via a messaging app - 64 percent of people are online in the US using a smartphone, up from just 18 percent in 2009....
Now, Los Angeles-based advertising agency Ignited has considered 100 trend reports and identified 15 key trends for 2015 from the most relevant end-of-year predictions.
"Upon sifting through all of these trends, we narrowed it down to the ones that we think will have the biggest impact on our business in the near future," says Frank Striefler, SVP planning & strategy, Ignited....
In the future, you'll be able to stand in front of a bathroom mirror that tells you how terribly you slept, while holding a toothbrush that teaches you how to brush your teeth properly. You will send out messages about how self-righteous you think this toothbrush is to your friends and family — using your mind.
That's the future, at least according to participants in Ericsson ConsumerLab's 10 Hot Consumer Trends 2015 report, which is based on conclusions from the company's global research program that "statistically represent the views of 85 million frequent internet users."
The report gauged consumer interest, as well as expectations, in areas like connectivity, sharing property and domestic robots...
The experience of our primary mobile screen being a bank of app icons that lead to independent destinations is dying. And that changes everything.
How we experience content via connected devices – laptops, phones, tablets, wearables – is undergoing a dramatic change. The idea of an app as an independent destination is becoming less important, and the idea of an app as a publishing tool, with related notifications that contain content and actions, is becoming more important. This will change what we design, and change our product strategy
.NO MORE SCREENS FULL OF APP ICONS
This is such a paradigm shift it requires plenty of explaining. Whilst it may not transpire exactly as I’m about to describe, there is no doubt what we have today — screens of apps — is going to dramatically change. Bear with me as I run through the context....
In the words of Aldous Huxley: “There is only one corner of the universe that you are certain of improving and that is your own self.” Wearables are THE tool for self-improvement....
...During this early experimentation in the wearable space (so early the word itself hadn’t yet been coined), we experienced first-hand the challenge of creating a compelling wearable that turns analog, human-derived signals into meaningful digital data — a deeply intricate exercise, which, turns out, requires a lot more than mere conviction.
That prototype never made it to market.
We have since then continued to chip away at our ignorance. Fast-forward six years — two and a half years after founding OMsignal, with a small but multidisciplinary team of medical and bio-engineering scientists, hardware and software engineers, product design specialists as well as smart-textile engineers and fashion artisans — we now know a great deal more about what it takes to develop the science, technology, and user experience required for a fully integrated consumer wearable product..
IBM's predictions all involve big data and using computing to glean intelligence from vast systems. We discuss them with IBM's research boss....
In a nutshell, IBM says: – The classroom will learn you. – Buying local will beat online. – Doctors will use your DNA to keep you well. – A digital guardian will protect you online. – The city will help you live in it.
Meyerson said that this year’s ideas are based on the fact that everything will learn. Machines will learn about us, reason, and engage in a much more natural and personalized way. The innovations are being enabled by cloud computing, big data analytics, and adaptive learning technologies. IBM believes the technologies will be developed with the appropriate safeguards for privacy and security, but each of these predictions raises privacy and security issues...
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In the age of hyper-digital transformation, nine additional, incremental digital technologies join the eight from the previous age. These nine start with a relatively low level of importance today but increase by an average of 145% among digital leaders by the year 2020. These nine additional digital technologies reach the threshold of having an “important to very important” business impact among at least one-fourth of digital leaders: Telepresence (Skype, Google Hangouts, etc.) (49%) Digital currency (49%) Artificial intelligence (46%) Robotic process automation (software) (41%) Sharing economy platforms like Uber (39%) Nanotechnologies (35%) Robots (hardware) (33% Telematics (29%r) Wearables (28%) When combined, these seventeen digital technologies increase their business impact among digital leaders by an average of 112% between 2016 and 2020. The predicted business impact of these digital technologies mean that the business and IT organizations you operate today will need to look very different by 2020 in order to keep up and compete successfully....
Futurist and business consultant Amy Webb says that by asking the right questions, just about anyone can do what she does: separate real trends from hype and glean the paths that technologies will take. In her recently released book, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, Webb shares some of her methods for analyzing the impact of innovations. She spoke to MIT Technology Review’s executive editor, Brian Bergstein, in an interview that Insider Premium subscribers can listen to here. Highlights condensed for clarity follow.
Nearly 250 years later, in a world defined by technological change, we see the same fears and concerns. As of September 2015, Amazon had 30,000 Kiva robots automating its warehouses, increasing efficiency and reducing the need for pick-and-pack labor. And at the same time, demand for software developers continues to rise, as Marc Andreessen’s famous 2011 statement that “software is eating the world” becomes ever more true.
Over the next decade, we’ll see this pattern play out once more in the nascent Internet of Things (IoT). With an industry defined by “bringing physical things online,” many IoT business models are predicated on improving efficiency by eliminating labor. We see companies connecting garbage cans to the internet to improve the efficiency of deploying waste collectors — which means we’ll need fewer waste collectors. Drones are dramatically reducing the time it takes to survey a plot of land — which means we’ll need fewer surveyors. Every industry that involves electronics or equipment can expect to be disrupted in this way over the next 10 years.
So the same question that was asked in the late 1700s remains: Will this new technology eliminate jobs? No....
We’re at a critical time for the digital economy. Digital is no longer the shiny front end of the organization – it’s integrated into every aspect of today’s companies. As digital technologies continue to transform the economy, many leaders are struggling to set a digital strategy, shift organizational structures, and remove the barriers that are keeping them from maximizing the potential impact of new digital technologies. Every year, Russell Reynolds Associates surveys more than 2,000 C-level executives on the impact, structure, barriers, and enablers of digital technologies across 15 industries. The barometer below shows the percentage of executives surveyed who responded that their business would be moderately or massively disrupted by digital in the next 12 months, broken down by industry....
Disruption is all around us.
Mobile is overtaking desktop, social is beating search, on-demand is undercutting TV, messaging apps are challenging email, and everything around us is becoming connected. These shifts in trends can rattle our businesses, our portfolios, and even our lives. But they don’t have to…
The well informed and well prepared don’t view innovation as a threat; they see it as an opportunity....
It’s clear the shopping scene is rapidly evolving with advents in technology and changing consumer behaviors, so it’s no surprise that new players in the retail game are aiming to spice things up. In PSFK Labs’ ongoing research, we’ve discovered startups that aren’t just doing something cool, but completely innovating the shopper experience and raising the bar for consumer expectation of service. Existing companies—from global retailers to growing brands—can aim to mimic these new offerings and practices.
Below is an excerpt from the Future of Retail 2016, where PSFK Labs has identified five key players redefining the retail landscape....
Ever since the commercial Internet emerged, content has been at the center. Bill Gates, quite famously, declared that content is king and called it the “killer app” of the Internet age. Inspired, media executives and internet entrepreneurs alike sought to marry content and distribution to create the perfect business model.
The problem is, as I’ve noted before, that content is crap. Nobody walks out of a great movie and says, “Wow! That was some great content.” Nobody listens to content on their way to work in the morning. We never call anything we like “content,” the term is a mere fantasy in the minds of business planners.
That, in essence, is why despite the predictions of digital pundits, the TV industry has continued to prosper. Through a series of disruptions—cable, DVD and now streaming video—programing has continued to evolve. Now, with the cable business model starting to unravel, we can expect an explosion of creative energy that will usher in a new golden age of TV....
With the iPad, the notion of technology getting out of the way meant designing a computer so easy to use that the apps took center stage. But the result was in some sense counterproductive; we've become so sucked into our phones and tablets that technology is actually getting in the way of the real world.
It's not going to be like that forever. In talking to leaders from some of the most innovative companies in consumer electronics, it's clear that the next five years will represent an attempt to bring us back to reality. This may seem paradoxical, but a proliferation of wearable devices, smart-home gizmos, smart cameras, and augmented-reality systems will exist largely to save us from our screens....
As 2015 begins, there are two cultural zeniths that will be peaking: privacy and turning off. This is a very small look at why these peaks matter. The meaning has to do with limits of human nature. How will we maintain a private life and peace of mind when everything is public, and nothing has an off switch?
What do we expect will happen in one thousand years time? Or one million years? Or even one billion? As our amazing timeline shows, there may be trouble ahead.
Via Ana Cristina Pratas
They don't look like Guardians Of The Galaxy-style superheroes.
... The porter's lodge is like an airlock, apparently sealed from the tribulations of everyday life. But inside the college, pacing the flagstones of what is called – all modesty aside – Great Court, are four men who do not take it for granted that those undergraduates actually have a future. They are the four founders of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), and they are in the business of "horizon scanning". Together, they are on alert for what they sometimes call "low-probability-but-high-consequence events", and sometimes – when they forget to be reassuring – "catastrophe"....
Moving into 2014, there are companies and emerging sectors that we as marketers should keep our eyes on. While some already boast tens or even hundreds of billion-dollar market caps, they continue to innovate in unexpected ways.
Conversely, where others are unproven, they still warrant attention for the uncharted territories they ambitiously explore. All, however, are bold market disruptors paving roads for marketers and agencies to follow and learn from as we look to bring some of 2014’s promises to life....
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