After geeking out at over 40 sessions SXSW in Austin Texas, Douglas Nicol, partner at The Works, gives some essential snack sized outtakes on the big themes that are about to impact our world.
Technology fails without human emotional understanding at its core, we are entering the era of empathy.
There is a deep-seated fear amongst real mainstream consumers (as opposed to latte sipping advertising folk) about humans and machines coexisting and co depending. We often anthropomorphise technology, like cars, in order to feel comfortable with a complex and sometimes job threatening machine. This means as AI increasingly permeates our lives we will need AI that has a high EQ not just a high IQ. Emotional AI is the data that describes our mood and emotional state: like your voice or your facial expressions and is tipped to be a $53B industry by 2022. With the proliferation of voice and facial interfaces such as smart speakers and smartphones we will be rich in this data and if used well can make for deeper customer relationships because the machine knows when we are happy, sad or angry.
Removing bias and improving equality will become a business and marketing opportunity
I am not exaggerating in saying that pretty much every SXSW session had a point of view on bias in its every form and what it does to the tech and innovation industries. Melinda Gates highlighted the fact that less than 2% of venture capital funding in the US goes to female entrepreneurs. Her point is that business opportunity cannot just be based on the white male view of the world because we miss out on some of the best innovation opportunities, unless we have different points of view in the room. Another disturbing stat is that only 8% of Silicon Valley employees are black or Hispanic. Expect to hear much more on this because business revenue and profits suffer because of our inherent subconscious bias in everything from leadership through to UX and design.
Conversation marketing is as hot as hell
With the extraordinary advances in Natural Language Processing (our ability to convert human conversations into data that a machine understands) and AI over the last two years, we are starting to see much more accurate voice and chat interactions through virtual private assistants, smart speakers and chatbots. This is opening up an impressive array of use cases in the mainstream. Such as using chatbots with millennials to manage mental health issues; brand concierges that help guide you through your day; providing companionship for the 50% of American women over 50 that live alone. Conversation marketing requires brands to rethink their structures and processes because in this world you are combining utility and added value with customer service and brand experience. It a different world and bloody exciting.
We are at peak content so rethink anything vaguely vanilla
There was recognition that we are running out of hours in each consumers’ day to engage them with content. Apparently, Millennials are now at an average 18 hours’ content consumption per day (hard to believe, but just look around the train or bus each morning and see what’s happening). This means we need to look for new formats and opportunities in the customers’ day where we can steal time back. One speaker, CEO of Giphy, Alex Chung, coined the phrase microcontent as one such opportunity. A GIF search engine, Giphy serves 5B GIFs globally every day, some 8M hours of content, short and super emotional. Naturally he sees the proper commercialisation of GIFs for brands as one way to overcome the problem of content excess.
On yes, did I mention the beginning of the end of the smartphone?
The respected Future Trends Institute launched their exhaustive Tech Trends 2018 report at the conference and they see the convergence of several factors that will lead to the decline of smartphones as the predominant device in our lives. Already sales of new smartphones have peaked and the pace of innovation is slowing. The increasing proficiency of voice and chat interfaces, the increasing accuracy of digital virtual private assistants, the uniqueness of face and voice prints and the scaling of augmented and mixed realities all combine to mean we won’t be rusted on to our phones any more. We will talk and chat and see thing with simpler devices like glasses. Before you dismiss this one, if you had been told 20 years ago that we would all have hand held computers that are also phones in the future, you would have been told you were certifiably mad.
Douglas Nicol is partner at The Works