If you’re interested in China and how the digital and social media landscape will evolve globally in the next 15 years then you’ll find this interesting.
I wanted to share the presentation I gave at SXSW this year. I have uploaded it to SlideShare and also embedded the live audio taken at the event.
I’d like to give a special thanks to my colleagues in the Shanghai office for helping me to learn about China and answering all my unusual questions. I hope they feel this presentation represents that I was listening, learning, and have a genuine admiration for their country.
Google officially rolled out its Google Wallet mobile payment system Monday. Is still in its infancy, but the system already shows a lot of promise.
It uses a technology called NFC (Near Field Communication) to securely send your payments digitally.
The only phone in the US that supports NFC is the Google Nexus S, available with t-mobile and Sprint, and there are high hopes that the iPhone 5 will support it too.
Right now, Google Wallet only works with Citi-Mastercards and the Google Prepaid Card. Visa and Google announced a worldwide agreement to support the Visa payWave app, but it will still be up to the financial institutions and banks to add support.
The “tap and pay” method of payment is cool, but the Google Wallet feature that has the most potential is what Google is calling SingleTap. The SingleTap experience means that users can combine their coupons, loyalty cards and payment method all with one tap. It’s an interesting concept … digital save all your credit cards, loyalty cards, and soon tickets, boarding passes, and more.
At first it might be scary to think you will enter all your data into your phone … what if it gets lost? Well, it’s a lot better than if your wallet gets lost … at least your phone has an initial passcode, a second pin number for Google Wallet, and if you’re smart, a remote format feature to securely delete your entire phone’s data should it get stolen.
A big question that many would-be users are sure to have about Google Wallet is “does this mean Google knows what I buy.” The answer, at least right now, is no. Google does record local transactions on your phone, but these transactions are only identified by amount and location and are only viewable to you.
In practice, this means that if I look at my Google Wallet history, I only see a date, an amount and an approximate location. Google says that it is working to roll out a more robust digital receipt system in the future.
American Express, Visa, Paypal, Google, and the major carriers are all racing towards raining the NFC arena. Google was the first to go-to-market, and there’s a recent announcement that American Express, Discover and Visa have all licensed their NFC technologies to Google, the next step is to get the thousands of financial institutions and merchants on-board with an NFC system.
NFC is going to be one of the key technologies of 2012 … with easy communication among phones and cheap RFID tags, we will not only see seamless mobile payments, but also tap to get additional info on any product, posters, magazines, or socially connect to other phones for gaming or networking. NFC’s possibilities are endless – so expect an innovative and fun year to come.
Google+ now finally open to the public “might” make me change my perception. Google+ (plus) launched early July on an invite only basis, which seems to have heavily skewed towards a geeky male US-based audience. At the moment, Google+ really has nothing to offer in the social end … yes, the way you organize friends is better (IMO) than Facebook, and … … … well, that’s it … You might have heard me claim that it will compete against iCloud in the quest to conquer your hard data (photos, videos, music, files) – but that’s another post on its own.
The first Google+ infographic was released an the numbers pretty much confirm it: 26 million users, 100% of which work in software engineering, web development, advertising, or related careers. Should be interesting to watch it shift (or not) now that Google+ is open to the public.
Buzz words come and go faster than bad news, another year went by and now it’s all about Apple iCloud, Google+, mobile payments, cloud computing, NFC, IPTV – everything is moving so fast, it’s exciting, we want to be part of it all – but how to prioritize? what’s sustainable? which ones are trends and which ones are fads? what are the true drivers behind these experiences that will really impact behavior and habits?
If you’d like to learn how to take a step back, re-organize the fast evolving world, and come up with those critical insights that will drive value and allow to predict the outcome – please vote for my session at SXSW 2012. Would appreciate your help and welcome all feedback.
Appreciated, and looking forward to another great year at SXSW.
SapientNitro is going to have great presence again this year, take some time and check out all our proposals.
As smartphone vendors and mobile operators shift their strategies to incorporate wireless payment technologies into mobile phones, consumers will soon be able to drop their wallet and carry every piece of important payment information on their handset.
NFC is already starting to be built into a range of Android smartphones, RIM and Nokia have committed to the technology and Apple is reportedly adding the contactless technology to its new iOS devices. GPlus has created an infographic detailing how NFC will replace our wallets and shows how companies are set to revolutionise the way we shop.
This infographic is focused mainly in the US, and it should be very interesting to see if Google Wallets would add more credit cards, and what ISIS has really planned as it gains support from all the major carriers.
Security has to evolve, new types of fraud and nfc sniffing will arise, and along with mobile merchant payments – we should keep a close eye on peer to peer money transfer that will enable the second market and shadow economies.
Monday, 20 June. Review for The Re-Calibration of Form and Function Online by AOL, presented by Tim Armstrong, CEO – AOL, and Arianna Huffington – Co-founder, Editor-in-Chief – The Huffington Post.
Huffington Post: Adrianna opened up, she’s extremely charismatic, funny, and overall a great entertainer. Overall she provided a lot more entertainment than good content, but that’s part being up there.
Her big idea: values online should mimic values offline. She gave a brief history of the Internet and claimed it has been very immature, and asked what shou
ld the Internet be when it grows up? All online brand experiences should focus on 4 pillars:
1. Trust: brands need trust 2. Authenticity: is like pornography – you know it when you see it 3. Engagement: around their values, not their products 4. Pursuit of happiness
…. that was it – very enlightening!
AOL: Then Tim took the stage, here comes the good part. Tim shows state of the art research and studies performed on aol.com using eye tracking to fully understand behavior, attention, reactions to visual stimulus, and A/B testing performed by changing key content units on the page. The result, staggering, Tim concludes that the future of the Internet and effective monetization models will consist of migrating from old fashion traditional banners to new improved bigger banners. Yes! By changing the format, adding more richness, better experience, more video, and making it longer, you can effectively increase the noise to effectively disrupt the attention of the web users and make him look at the ad. That Tim described as Ads with human emotion.
Then to try to make this statement a little more appealing, the rephrases it as brands will simply rent 20% of AOL’s portal space, so it’s not technically a banner anymore, it’s a space where they can embed rich content. Much better, phew, I thought the future of the Internet are better banners.
Ok, now finally for some real business value. Studies show that 83% of consumers use fewer than 30 sites a month; they use 20 fixed brands, and 10 rotating brands. I found this insight quite useful, makes you rethink the entire SEO and long-tail strategy. So that’s AOL’s strategy? Let’s acquire all the top brands to make sure we’re always part of the top 20.
Finally some words of wisdom: give creativity a space in the web and stop taking orders from the silicon valley.
Such statement was intended to please a creative audience, but I totally disagree. There is much to learn from the silicon valley, and the future of experiences is a marriage of brands, creativity, and entrepreneurship.
Original Session Description:
Digital media has long been considered a singular experience for consumers and mostly a direct response vehicle for brands. However, as content reclaims its rightful seat at the center of the platform and brands take an increasingly significant role in improving the experience, the industry must change the online environment as we know it. Join Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington as they discuss the shifting intersection of content, creativity, advertising and technology; the increasing importance of context; and ultimately outline what this brave (and brand!) new digital world can, should and will look like.
Monday, 20 June. Review for Beyond the Horizon by PHD, presented by Mark Holden , Global Strategy and Planning Director.
Intro: The session was consistent with the overall 2011 theme of marketing technology – the role of technology impact in advertising, marketing, and customer experience. Mark did a great job describing a bunch of new tech and putting them in perspective of why they matter for the new consumer.
He opened up stating that there are 1.2 billion people in social networks – no surprise, but the next 1 billion will enter through mobile. We all knew how important mobile is, this is just a reassurance.
Next he explained that what drives technology is us, individuals, humanity. Technology is a human invention to solve human problems, being driven strictly by human needs. Therefore, technology is a consequence of human needs and desires – and what is driving humans? What drives humanity is need for abundance: we want everything, everyone, everywhere – and we won’t stop until we get it.
Following the intro, Mark jumped into multiple categories of technical innovations, grouped by infrastructure, interface, and internet.
Infrastructure: Fibre to the home will bring wired gigabit connections to every household. Similarly, 4g , lte, wimax will massively improve wireless connectivity. With ubiquitous broadband connectivity, there will be no more distinction between media types: HD video will download just as fast as 3d world games, music, or photos.
Connectivity combined with the growing cloud capabilities, will delegate storage and processing to the cloud, focusing devices back to graphic processing, graphic hardware acceleration, and sensors.
Interface: Oled and ultrahd will allow video 16 times better than HDTV to be displayed in a thin-almost-invisible flexible layer. Price is still prohibitive, but in the upcoming years this technology will allow video to be embedded pretty much anywhere.
Connected TVs will totally chance the dynamics of what is TV today. Addressable content – meaning it can be targeted and personalized -, a mix of current TV broadcast with the marvels of the Internet: everything is tracked, served dynamically, everyone can be a media company, publishers have direct access to the consumer.
The top experiences enabled by such mix will be embedded content, clickable content, video hot-spotting, and the already coined t-commerce for Television Commerce.
The first noticeable change will be linear TV with dynamic targeted ads, targeting the household by programs watched, demographics, or if the TV provider is also the ISP, perhaps bundle behavioral data into web usage, or if the TV is part of a gaming platform, them also get gaming and social behavioral data. Ultimately, content providers will sit in a world of data that will be used to personalize the TV watching experience.
We did not get into greater debates of what will happen to the 30-second stop, what would happen to advertising dollars, what would be the media and business model of the future.
Lastly Mark mentioned a bunch of interface techs, but didn’t get into detail for any of them: oled, graphene, audio spotlight, voice recognition, virtual personal assistants, markless AR, NFC, e-coupling. Out of these techs, you will probably see tons of buzz around AR and NFC in 2012.
Internet: This section talked about the socialization of the web and predicted that search will move from links to likes. The reasoning behind this assertion is that search will eventually become semantic, and will try to provide relevant personalized results as opposed to generic results. Tying search into the social graph and prioritizing results based on conversations, likes by social circles – or similarly +1 by Google Circles, part of their new highly popular Google+.
Additionally, the web is finally slowly moving from a massively unstructured pile of data to better organized self-descriptive objects, thanks to Facebook’s Open Graph efforts and now Google, Yahoo, and Bing’s schema.org efforts. Pages in the web will have additional metadata explaining the context behind them, as well as defining relations to other content. This will slowly have a big impact in SEO.
Other topics covered vertical search, social commerce, and gamification.
Following connectivity, the discussion naturally moved to mobile connectivity. We will rely on smart phones for what is now called real time living or just-in-time living. Every piece of information we need is always available at our fingertips, and we make real time decision, moving from from preset preplanned activities into real time experiences. And because we are making this real-time decisions, brands cannot just preplan a journey for us, they have to also adapt and engage in real-time experiences, reacting to every trigger and response.
Media agency 2016: So what does this all mean for the advertising industry? What does the media agency look like in 2016? The industry will shift from analog, dated, simple holding of a bunch of media properties to being a creative-technology led industry. Agencies will have to understand the power of technology in driving human experiences, and be able to creative and enhance these experiences. Media will be just data, and the largest agencies are already starting to invest in AMP: Audience Management Platforms.
Audience Management Platforms: Now I’ve heard multiple names for these platforms, such as CEP: Customer Experience Platform, MMP: Marketing Management Platform. Ultimately, it’s a data mart / data wharehousing platform that aggregates 360 customer data across every channel, and provides a layer of intelligence that drives personalized experiences. Content delivery, web sites, mobile apps, and media buying are nothing but layers of experience, that should be all centrally controlled by a single governing platform. This platform can hook into other contextual brokers, but I won’t get into too much detail right now. Back to Mark, he also sees this platform managing RTB: Real-Time Bidding and creative optimization; mainly meaning that it will control the time, content, and context where media is delivered.
With this shift in the media business model, we can predict that media futures exchange will become a very interesting area really soon.
Social: Mark predicts that in a few years the social media practice will be mature and in high demand, that people good at social will be superstars. I must say that people good at understanding human behavior are already superstars, and social is just the nature of humanity, and has always been part of connections planning. The discipline is simply evolving due to evolution of technology, but the roots have not changed.
Evolution of the Agency: Perhaps not so much evolution, but given that marketing is now getting the feedback loop and connected back into the brand essence, agencies will take the role of NPD: new product development.
Conclusion: At the very end of this long tech talk, Mark showed a phenomenal closing video! Very emotional, good sound and music, experiential. I will post the video as soon as I get a copy and clearance.
The session was pretty inspiring and reassured the critical role of a marketing technologist / creative technologist in the agency and client organizations.
Original Session Description:
Over the last five years the industry has seen the most dramatic changes to the world of communications. The social media revolution has fundamentally changed the fabric of society. Right now, one in every two people within the developed world is connected-up through social networks. This is resulting in to a quickening in the speed at which information, and therefore influence, is moving. More than this, PHD believes that this is changing the actual physics of how marketing works. And this rate of change is accelerating. Looking ahead this change will be driven by such things as demographic, attitudinal and psychographic shifts, and media-ownership regulation. But the biggest driver of change will of course be technology. Technology will not just be a driver of change it will be the driver of change. Technological advancements that are now on the horizon will enable the development of new marketing communications platforms through which to engage with people. New possibilities will emerge through the coming together of such as technologies as smart TVs, markerless augmented reality, enhanced voice-recognition, transparent OLED screens, haptic feedback, gesture input and NFC.
In this session PHD will explore the incredible technology that is on the horizon and project ahead on what the exciting possibilities are for marketing and advertising.
A couple fun and digestible bits of digital content were shared with me today. Infographics and well edited videos seem to be used increasingly as a great form of self promotion but at the end of a day I’m a sucker for well presented stats and figures.
Check out the video below which reflects the latest update to the ‘Social Media Revolution’ series.
The visual above, created by Go-Globe.com, reflects the following:
After my World After Advertising keynote, I had a great interview by Horizon which came out in a print edition back in March 2011. I took me some time to get in translated, but it was totally worth the wait — they did a great job capturing SapientNitro’s thinking on marketing, media, and technology.
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SapientNitro mastermind Rob Gonda talks about marketing in the digital age and the declining importance of mass media By Santiago Campillo-Lundbeck
At the World After Advertising conference in Düsseldorf, Rob Gonda tried to shock the public by saying that traditional advertising is dead. In an interview, though, Gonda, who is SapientNitro’s Global Head of Creative Technology, gave us a more complex picture of the communication revolution sparked off by the internet and how marketing has to respond.
Horizon: Your job is to find opportunities worldwide for SapientNitro to creatively use technology in marketing. Why has technology become a strategic issue in digital marketing all of a sudden?
RG: People’s relationship with technology is the critical issue. Technology changes our habits and so it’s only logical that technology also changes the way we see brands. Technology puts new filters between customers and brands.
Horizon: What’s new about that? A TV commercial is also, in essence, a filter between consumers and companies.
RG: The difference is that digital technology has a much greater impact on the brand experience than traditional marketing ever could have had. Nowadays, the bulk of interactions with my bank are actually with an ATM or online banking. In the U.S., only four percent of all customers aged between 15 and 50 know any of their bank’s employees by name. And without a personal bank advisor, mainly what’s left to shape brand awareness is the bank’s technological interfaces.
Horizon: Aren’t you just adding new meaning to simple customer service features? Brand awareness has always been one of the core tasks of advertising.
RG: That’s not going far enough. Brand loyalty is largely built on the real experiences the consumer has with the brand. And there is often a huge gap between how the company sees itself and the real picture, given the digital options that are theoretically available. 80 percent of all CEOs believe that their brand provides a superior user experience. Yet only 8 percent of customers agree, on average.
Horizon: Is that proof that traditional advertising as we know it is officially on its deathbed?
RG: No, advertising will not die, but it does have to change. Brand building is just as important as it was before. But you can’t just shout out your messages any more. Brands have to become part of their users’ way of life or build loyalty by being useful.
Horizon: That sounds like a good idea. But how would it work in practice?
RG: As we have been saying for years, the important thing is to give the right message to the right people at the right time. A marketer can use digital touchpoints such as smartphones to provide consumers with customized messages right when they need them. For example, if my cell phone knows from my social community that my wife’s birthday is coming up, it could display coupons for flower shops nearby. That type of marketing works because it is useful.
Horizon: That type of marketing also reaches deep into the private lives of consumers.
RG: For it to work, consumers will need to see the benefits it offers. A personalized financial management service increases in value for the consumer with the more personal financial data they disclose. The more data that is available, the more relevant the recommendations will be. Marketing needs to succeed in showing that, then acceptance will grow.
Horizon: Currently, old and new media are waging a battle on which is more valuable for brand building. What advantages do old media still have, in your view?
RG: I think this is an increasingly irrelevant debate because the digital and physical touchpoints are getting progressively closer. For example, if a store window displays QR codes that refer to information online, is that a digital or a physical touchpoint? The real challenge today will be to develop a marketing platform that integrates analog-physical touchpoints and digital touchpoints. The digital formats will be the ones driving innovation though; there is a budget of 50 billion dollars available for digital advertising. And that is the goal that media marketers should be concentrating on. So it is “business as usual” for the advertising industry, just with different advertising media? Digitization will inevitably change the advertising industry. The future will be a lot less about mass media. Wide-reach media are no longer the only media with a communication value, they are just a part of the context needed in the digital world to really make a marketing message relevant. They are shifting from an anchor position to just being another link in the chain of the brand building process.
Horizon: What does that mean, in real terms, for those involved?
RG: The advertising environments of the mass media are increasingly becoming a bulk commodity and they will be treated that way as time goes on. Traditional media will be facing changes too. Newspapers will need to find new business models and television will have to develop into an addressable media.
Horizon: Marketers are confronted with new communication platforms every year. What else do we need to get ready for?
RG: We are currently in a phase in which marketing technology, the Mobile Web and cloud computing are becoming relevant to the mass media. 2015 will see the beginning of the Semantic Web, with the Internet of Things starting by 2020 at the latest. And the range of exciting new options is much wider than that. The video-game controller Windows Kinect presents completely new intuitive possibilities for users to move around in a story. This is already causing a revolution in the user’s gaming experience, so you can imagine the impact it could have on marketing.
Google Inc. is preparing to unveil today a new online music service similar to a service recently launched by Amazon.com Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, a move that escalates the battle to create the next generation of Internet businesses for storing and listening to music.
Google, like Amazon, hasn’t secured licenses from the four major recorded-music companies, according to these people, and is likely to include a system that functions much like a remote hard drive. Users of the service are expected to be able to listen to songs they have uploaded to the service in a so-called streaming mode but won’t be able to download the files themselves.
It’s funny how Google follows every amazon stop … Amazon Elastic Computing (EC2) -> Google App Engine … Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) -> Google Storage for Developers … Amazon Cloud Drive / Player -> Google Cloud Drive / Player …
With Google’s amazing track record (of zero) of building friendly services and applications, I don’t expect their music locker to really take off … especially again if it’s based on Google Storage for Developers, which is not being used by any developer.
Google, do you want to really get anywhere with this? Buy Orb, scale it, embed it seamlessly into your cloud, and offer up the first cloud based full media center.